Critics wedded to the strict German school of music never forgave Meyerbeer for his dereliction from the spirit and influences of his nation, and the prominence which he gave to melodramatic effects and spectacular show in his operas.  Not without some show of reason, they cite this fact as proof of poverty of musical invention.  Mendelssohn, who was habitually generous in his judgment, wrote to the poet Immermann from Paris of “Robert le Diable”:  “The subject is of the romantic order; i.e., the devil appears in it (which suffices the Parisians for romance and imagination).  Nevertheless, it is very bad, and, were it not for two brilliant seduction scenes, there would, not even be effect....  The opera does not please me; it is devoid of sentiment and feeling....  People admire the music, but where there is no warmth and truth, I can not even form a standard of criticism.”

Schlueter, the historian of music, speaks even more bitterly of Meyerbeer’s irreverence and theatric sensationalism:  “‘Les Huguenots’ and the far weaker production ‘Le Prophete’ are, we think, all the more reprehensible (nowadays especially, when too much stress is laid on the subject of a work, and consequently on the libretto of an opera), because the Jew has in these pieces ruthlessly dragged before the footlights two of the darkest pictures in the annals of Catholicism, nor has he scrupled to bring high mass and chorale on the boards.”

Wagner, the last of the great German composers, can not find words too scathing and bitter to mark his condemnation of Meyerbeer.  Perhaps his extreme aversion finds its psychological reason in the circumstance that his own early efforts were in the sphere of Meyerbeer and Hale-vy, and from his present point of view he looks back with disgust on what he regards as the sins of his youth.  The fairest of the German estimates of the composer, who not only cast aside the national spirit and methods, but offended his countrymen by devoting himself to the French stage, is that of Vischer, an eminent writer on aasthetics:  “Notwithstanding the composer’s remarkable talent for musical drama, his operas contain sometimes too much, sometimes too little—­too much in the subject-matter, external adornment, and effective ’situations’—­too little in the absence of poetry, ideality, and sentiment (which are essential to a work of art), as well as in the unnatural and constrained combinations of the plot.”

But despite the fact that Meyerbeer’s operas contain such strange scenes as phantom nuns dancing, girls bathing, sunrise, skating, gunpowder explosions, a king playing the flute, and the prima donna leading a goat, dramatic music owes to him new accents of genuine pathos and an addition to its resources of rendering passionate emotions.  Through much that is merely showy and meretricious there come frequent bursts of genuine musical power and energy, which give him a high and unmistakable rank, though he has had less permanent influence in molding and directing the development of musical art than any other composer who has had so large a place in the annals of his time.