“The stage represents Isabelle’s bedroom.  As is usual with stage bedrooms, Isabelle’s bower is about the size of an average cathedral.  It is very sparsely furnished, but near the footlights is a large gilt couch, on which Isabelle is lying fast asleep.  Robert enters on tip-toe very very gently, so as not to disturb his beloved, and sings in a voice that you could hear two miles off, ‘Isa-belle!’ dropping a full octave on the last note.  Isabelle half awakes, and murmurs, ’I do believe I heard something.  I feel so nervous!’ Robert advances a yard, and sings again, if anything rather louder, ‘Isa-belle!’ Isabelle says:  ’Really, my nerves do play me such tricks!  I can’t help fancying that there is some one in the room, and I am so terribly afraid of burglars.  Perhaps it is only a mouse.’  Robert advances right up to Isabelle’s bed, and shouts for the third time in a voice that makes the chandelier ring again, ‘Isa-belle!’ Isabelle says, ’I don’t think that I can have imagined that.  There really is some one in the room.  I’m terribly frightened, and don’t quite know what to do,’ so she gets out of bed, and anxiously scans the stalls and boxes over the footlights for signs of an intruder.  Finding no one there but the audience, she then searches the gallery fruitlessly, and getting a sudden inspiration, she looks behind her, and, to her immense astonishment, finds her lover standing within a foot of her.”  This, as told with Levasseur’s inimitable drollery, was excruciatingly funny.

Robert is an expensive opera to put on, for, owing to hideous jealousies at the Paris Opera, Meyerbeer was compelled to write two prima-donna parts which afforded the rival ladies exactly equal opportunities.  In the same way Halevy, the composer of La Juive, had to re-arrange and transpose his score, for Adolphe Nourrit, the great Paris tenor, in 1835, when the opera was first produced, was jealous of the splendid part the bass had been given, the tenor’s role being quite insignificant.  So it came about that La Juive is the only opera in which the grey-bearded old father is played by the principal tenor, whilst the lover is the light tenor.  Mehul’s Biblical Joseph and his Brethren is the one opera in which there are no female characters, though “Benjamin” is played by the leading soprano.  In both the Prophete and Favorita the contralto plays the principal part, the soprano having a very subsidiary role.  Meyerbeer wrote the part of the Prophet himself specially for Roger, the great tenor, and that of “Fides” for Mme. Viardot.  By the way, the famous skating scene in the Prophete was part of the original production in Paris of 1849, and yet we think roller-skating an invention of yesterday.