Pity the Meyerbeer enthusiast. The slow struggle to rehabilitate the once mighty and internationally beloved composer is far from complete. Recent years have seen a surge in scholarship-including a number of book-length studies, the publication of his diaries, and, importantly, essays that interrogate the origins of the enduring prejudices against Meyerbeer. 1 Despite these efforts, performances of his operas are still rare, only limited audio and video recordings are available, and, even if

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... ent scholarship has been kinder, the choice of Meyerbeer as a subject for inquiry still raises eyebrows. At the center of any effort to recover or reconsider Meyerbeer lies the issue of the materials and the machines he used to produce his famous "effects." His perceived focus on matter rather than spirit provoked Wagner's highly quotable declaration that Meyerbeer offered "effects without causes"-a phrase first applied to the moment in Meyerbeer's Le Prophète (1849) when, after the reformer protagonist and his allies resolve to storm the city of Münster, a fog dissolves to reveal the city in the distance. This dramatic and crowd-pleasing "effect" (in a work full of such moments) presumably lacked a "cause," in that it did not complete either a musical or psychological development. Along similar lines, Wagner presented Meyerbeer's music as lacking the "inwardness" of great music; the religious enlightenment eventually sought in Bayreuth in Wagner's time was contrasted to the commercial entertainment and cheap thrills delivered by Meyerbeer's performances in Paris. Wagner's works were celebrated for their depth, unity, and spirit, while Meyerbeer's were disparaged as shallow and mechanical. As Tom Kaufman has argued, the critical vocabulary that Wagner and his followers established in their attacks on Meyerbeer helped shape the standards by which the greatness of operatic works was evaluated, to the continued detriment of Meyerbeer's reputation. 2 Rather than trying to argue that Meyerbeer lives up to the criteria of Wagnerian transcendence, recent scholarship has begun to embrace Meyerbeer's oq.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from 2 emily i. dolan and john tresch at University of Pennsylvania Library on May 4, 2011 oq.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from Yet even if the pageants of Meyerbeer shared techniques and spectacular intentions with those of Monteverdi two centuries earlier, and even if both made prominent use of heavy machinery to produce ethereal effects, it would be historically naïve to say that the two composers were doing the same thing-or, more specifically, that their "opera machines" were the same. Among the innumerable differences between these cultural moments, three were decisive and concerned the meaning of the machine by the 1830s: the rise and spread of mechanical philosophy, the romantic critique of mechanism, and the spread of industrial machinery. This essay concentrates on Robert le Diable (1831), Meyerbeer's first grand opera, and the discussion of it found in Balzac's beautifully complicated short story "Gambara" (1837). 8 Scholars usually present Balzac as an innovator in the domain of realist fiction, yet his work abounds in visionary and speculative themes. Tales such as "Gambara," "The Unknown Masterpiece," and Lost Illusions also reveal a fascination with the relationship between specific artistic techniques-or technologies-and their "spiritual" effects. Balzac's megalomaniacal attention to the entire chain of artistic production, distribution, and reception, and to the role played by technology as a mediation between spirit and matter, made him a particularly insightful commentator on Meyerbeer's machines. Just as Lost Illusions depicts literature as a coordinated system incorporating paper, press, ink, composition, genre conventions, advertising, critics, booksellers, and readers and writers, so does "Gambara" show the Parisian opera as an assemblage of diverse human and non-human actors-what Balzac's contemporaries the Saint-Simonians, founders of a religion of technology, might have called an "organized machine." 9 As a production, Robert le Diable demonstrated the technical and aesthetic capacities of Parisian grand opera in ways with which its successors, including Wagner, were forced to reckon; Meyerbeer mastered the entire ensemble of techniques and effects that made up the "opera machine." Our analysis seeks both to continue on the path laid out by Newark and Smart and to complicate it: rather than celebrate Meyerbeer's abandonment of the supersensory realm, we explore the metaphysical complexities that underwrote his marvelous technologies and their critical reception. To do so we must tease out the conflicted relationships between ideas and sense, organisms and machines, and spirit and matter presented by the philosophers, critics, composers, and novelists of Meyerbeer's day -many of whom took Parisian opera as the focus of their reflections. From this perspective, Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable can be recognized as centrally concerned with technology and its alternately diabolical and divine potentials. One critic, for example, upon hearing the pipe organ in the opera's final act-the first such use of an instrument previously associated with the Mass-described the effect as "a sublime invasion in the domain of the opera"; in his words we might hear either meyerbeer, balzac, and the opera machine emily i. dolan and john tresch at University of Pennsylvania Library on May 4, 2011 oq.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from