Les Huguenots was not an opera pieced together out of others, but it did not reach the public as the author wrote it.  At the beginning of the first act there was a game of cup and ball on which the author had set his heart.  But the balls had to strike at the exact moment indicated in the score and the players never succeeded in accomplishing that.  The passage had to be suppressed but it is preserved in the library at the Opera.  They also had to suppress the part of Catherine de Medici who should preside at the conference where the massacre of St. Bartholomew was planned.  Her part was merged with that of St. Pris.  They also suppressed the first scene in the last act, where Raoul, disheveled and covered with blood, interrupted the ball and upset the merriment by announcing the massacre to the astonished dancers.

But it is a question whether we should believe the legend that the great duet, the climax of the whole work, was improvised during the rehearsals at the request of Norritt and Madame Falcon.  It is hard to believe that.  The work, as is well known, was taken from Merimee’s Chronique du regne de Charles IX.  This scene is in the romance and it is almost impossible that Meyerbeer had no idea of putting it into his opera.  More probably the people at the theatre wanted the act to end with the blessing of the daggers, and the author with his duet in his portfolio only had to take it out to satisfy his interpreters.  A beautiful scene like this with its sweep and pleasing innovation is not written hastily.  This duet should be heard when the author’s intentions and the nuances which make a part of the idea are respected and not replaced by inventions in bad taste which they dare to call traditions.  The real traditions have been lost and this admirable scene has lost its beauty.

The manner in which the duet ends has not been noted sufficiently.  Raoul’s phrase, God guard our days.  God of our refuge! remains in suspense and the orchestra brings it to an end, the first example of a practice used frequently in modern works.

We do not know how Meyerbeer got his idea of putting the schismatic John Huss on the stage under the name of John of Leyden.  Whether this idea was original with him or was suggested by Scribe, who made a fantastic person out of John, we do not know.  We only know that the role of the prophet’s mother was originally intended for Madame Stoltz, but she had left the Opera.  Meyerbeer heard Madame Pauline Viardot at Vienna and found in her his ideal, so he created the redoubtable role of Fides for her.  The part of Jean was given to the tenor Roger, the star of the Opera-Comique, and he played and sang it well.  Levasseur, the Marcel of Les Huguenots and the Bertram of Robert, played the part of Zacharie.