In the musical and literary salon of Amalie Beer, daughter of the banker Liebmann Meyer Wulff, known as the “Croesus of Berlin”, the family’s most famous son, Giacomo Meyerbeer (Jakob Meyer Beer) took his first steps as a child prodigy. He made his first public appearance as a pianist at the age of eleven, and developed his passion for the theatre in his parents’ box at the Berlin Hofoper.

He had his first success with Il Crociato in Egitto (The Crusader in Egypt): the work was performed in more than 30 theatres, most importantly in Paris – the city that was a magnet for artists of all kinds and where Meyerbeer devoted his energies from then on. It was there that with works such as Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, and L’Africaine, the 1830s were the heyday not only of his career, but of French opera as a whole. Many of the works were however also performed immediately in European capitals such as London and Berlin. Heinrich Heine, who, like Ludwig Börne, had found himself in exile in Paris since the beginning of the 1830s, summed it up in a letter to the composer in 1842: “The whole history of music has in fact revolved around your name for ten years.”

Together with clarinetist Alexander Bader and scholars of the Orchestra Academy, Götz Teutsch invites you to the Paris of Giacomo Meyerbeer in his Philharmonic Salon. Udo Samel reads, among others, from texts by Heinrich Heine and Robert Schumann as well as Richard Wagner, who languished in poverty in Paris in 1840/1841, driven by envy and resentment towards his then disparately more successful colleague, Meyerbeer.