Few premieres have made a greater splash in the musical world than that of Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable on November 21, 1831, at the Paris Opéra. Meyerbeer had already composed a number of successful Italian operas during his nine-year stay in Italy (1816-1824). The positive reception of one of them, Il crociato in Egitto, after its first performance in Paris at the Théâtre-Italien (1825), had made Meyerbeer famous throughout Europe. But by all contemporary accounts, the première of Robert le diable was nothing short of sensational. Meyerbeer replaced Rossini as the leading opera composer of Europe. F.J. Fétis, in his Revue musicale (1831), called Robert a "masterpiece," and in 1841 Wagner wrote in the Dresdener Abendzeitung that the opera was "deathless." In an article for the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (1835), Berlioz singled out Meyerbeer's orchestration as a laudable quality of Robert le diable, and included excerpts from the opera as examples of good orchestration in his Grand traité d'instrumentaiton et d'orchestration (1855). In 1852, however, Berlioz would condemn Meyerbeer's opera to the realm of "very dull French opera" in his Soirées d'orchestre.

Perhaps some of the contemporary popular fascination with Robert le diable was aroused by the theme of damnation that is the centerpiece of Eugène Scribe's libretto and to which Meyerbeer gives musical voice. Meyerbeer frequently reinforces the demonic character of Bertram, the devil and the father of Robert, through his orchestration. In the Act One recitative between Bertram and Robert ("Courage ta nouvelle conquête"), Bertram's statements alternate with octave passages scored for double bass, horns, bassoons, and clarinets. In Act Three, Bertram is accompanied by the murky combination of bassoon, bass trombone, ophycleide, and pizzicato double basses as he tells Robert of the magical branch on the tomb of Santa Rosalia ("Dans ce lieu qu'on ne saurait franchir"). Meyerbeer also musically reinforces the dramatic action. In Act One, tremolos and trills in the strings and brief scalar flourishes in the flute and oboe musically depict Robert rolling the dice in his infernal game of chance. In Act Two, a trumpet call-to-arms and Isabelle's arpeggiated vocal line suggest impending battle ("La trompette guerrière vient de retenir"). In Act Four, Meyerbeer accompanies Robert's breaking of the magical branch with the otherworldly sound of the tam-tam. All of Meyerbeer's orchestrational and dramatic felicities are wrapped up at the end of each act by a grand chorus, the final act ending in a chorus of general thanksgiving for Robert's allegiance to the forces of good.

© All Music Guide