It would be in vain to look in Herold’s score for an echo of the passion and variety of Mozart, but much of the music of ‘Zampa’ is picturesque and effective.  Herold’s tunes sound very conventional after Weber, but there is a good deal of skill in the way they are presented.  His orchestration is of course closely modelled on that of his German prototype, and if it is impossible to say much for his originality, we can at any rate admire his taste in choosing a model.

‘Le Pre aux Clercs’ is more popular at the present moment than ‘Zampa,’ though it is far inferior in musical interest.  If ‘Zampa’ showed the influence of Weber, ‘Le Pre aux Clercs’ is redolent of Rossini.  The overture, with its hollow ring of gaiety, strikes the note of Italianism which echoes throughout the opera.  The plot is full of intrigues and conspiracies, and is decidedly confusing.  Mergy, a young Bernese gentleman, aspires to the hand of Isabelle, who is one of the Queen of Navarre’s maids of honour.  The Queen favours their love, but the King wishes Isabelle to marry Comminges, a favourite of his own.  The young couple gain their point, and are married secretly in the chapel of the Pre aux Clercs, but only at the expense of as much plotting and as many disguises as would furnish the stock-in-trade of half-a-dozen detective romances.

French music, as has often been pointed out, owes much to foreign influence, but very few of the strangers to whom the doors of Parisian opera-houses were opened left a deeper impression upon the music of their adopted country than Meyerbeer (1791-1864).  Giacomo Meyerbeer, to give him the name by which he is now best known, underwent the same influence as Herold.  As a youth he was intimate with Weber, and his first visit to Italy introduced him to Rossini, whose brilliant style he imitated successfully in a series of Italian works which are now completely forgotten.  From Italy Meyerbeer came to Paris, and there identified himself with the French school so fully that he is now regarded with complete propriety as a French composer pure and simple.  Meyerbeer’s music is thoroughly eclectic in type.  He was a careful student of contemporary music, and the various phases through which he passed during the different stages of his career left their impress upon his style.  It says much for the power of his individuality that he was able to weld such different elements into something approaching an harmonious whole.  Had he done more than he did, he would have been a genius; as it is, he remains a man of exceptional talent, whose influence on the history of modern music is still important, though his own compositions are now slightly superannuated.  ‘Robert le Diable,’ the first work of his third or French period, was produced in 1831.  The libretto, which, like those of all the composer’s French operas, was by Eugene Scribe, is a strange tissue of absurdities, though from the merely scenic point of view it may be thought fairly effective.