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Meyerbeer Studies: A Series of Lectures, Essays, and Articles on the Life and Work of Giacomo Meyerbeer.

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Meyerbeer Studies: A Series of Lectures, Essays, and Articles on the Life and Work of Giacomo Meyerbeer. By Robert Ignatius Letellier. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. [238 p. ISBN 0-8386-4063-X. $47.50.] Illustrations, index.

Meyerbeer Studies consists of ten chapters reprinted from such sources as articles in the Opera Quarterly, reviews, and texts presented on the Internet. The book opens with a study of what Robert Letellier calls "Music's Great Enigma," and subtitled "Giacomo Meyerbeer: Neglected Master of Grand Opera" that reads very much like a general introduction to the composer which collapses into little more than single-paragraph notes on such astonishingly wide-ranging issues as "vocalism" (p. 29), "melody" (p. 33), and "harmony" (pp. 33-34). Letellier begins with two intriguing assessments of Meyerbeer: brutally negative in the case of Hubert Parry in 1893 and a resounding positive from Paul Bekker in 1926 (pp. 19-20). As is so often the case in this collection of essays, all sorts of historical subtleties are side-stepped. Was the quotation from Parry really his from 1893 (The Art of Music [London: Kegan, Paul, 1893]) or from H. C. Colles's revision of the book in 1930 (The Evolution of the Art of Music [New York: D. Appleton,...

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