Having been catapulted to pan-European fame by the success of his Robert le diable in 1831, Meyerbeer was already a household name when he completed his second work for the Paris Opéra, Les Huguenots. If Robert marked Meyerbeer's triumphant entrance onto the European music scene, the success of Les Huguenots after its premiere at the Opéra on February 29, 1836, simply confirmed that he had his finger on the pulse of the musical times.

Despite its positive popular reception, Les Huguenots did not fare consistently well in the contemporary press. Les Huguenots received mixed or negative reviews from virtually every Parisian music critic and from some writers and musicians from outside France. Some critics panned Eugène Scribe's libretto; Henri Blaze de Bury and Robert Schumann were outraged by what they saw as Scribe's profanation of the serious religious subject matter of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre with his inclusion of the love story between Raoul and Valentine as the opera's centerpiece. Hector Berlioz, however, praised the libretto's dramatic seriousness (with the exception of Act Two). Other critics addressed Meyerbeer's music. Castil-Blaze objected to Meyerbeer's distortion of the French language in his musical setting of the text and his inability to develop themes. Although not particularly impressed by Meyerbeer's melodic gift, Berlioz applauded his orchestration, citing five examples from Les Huguenots in his Grand traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration.

The opera begins with a high woodwind chorale rendition of Martin Luther's hymn Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott. This tune returns throughout the opera: near the end of Act One, when the pious Marcel sings it while the Duke of Nevers interjects to lure Raoul to drink, when Marcel brings the tune back again in Act Three, and in Act Five when an offstage chorus of women sings a chorale-style harmonization of the melody, punctuated by commentary from Marcel. Orchestrational novelties and text painting highlight Meyerbeer's score. The Act One drinking song ("Bonheur de la table") is laced with cymbals and piccolo that, perhaps through their Janissary associations, conjure images of spirited hedonism. A cadenza for solo viole d'amour announces Raoul's romance in Act One ("Non loin des vieilles tours") and underscores the intimacy of his declaration of love as it accompanies him throughout, allowing only occasional interjections from the orchestra. In Marguerite's Act Two aria ("O beau pays de la Touraine"), the strings of the orchestra, with rolling arpeggios, become the "gentle stream," and the flutes chirp like the warblers and ring-doves of which she sings. And although a far cry from the extravagance Bizet would later conjure in his portrayal of the gypsy Carmen, the tambourine and triangle evoke the ethos of Romany in the otherwise staid Act Three gypsy dance. The virtuosic vocal flourishes and cadenzas, notably for Urbain's first entrance—a typical ternary (ABA) form air—in Act One, and for Marguerite's Act Two scene, are features without which no French grand opera would be complete.

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