Giacomo Meyerbeer - Early Years

Early Years

Meyerbeer's birthname was Jacob Liebmann Beer; he was born in Tasdorf (now a part of Rüdersdorf), near Berlin, then the capital of Prussia, to a Jewish family. His father was the enormously wealthy financier Judah Herz Beer (1769–1825) and his mother, Amalia (Malka) Wulff (1767–1854), to whom he was particularly devoted, also came from the moneyed elite. Their other children included the astronomer Wilhelm Beer and the poet Michael Beer. He was to adopt the surname Meyerbeer on the death of his grandfather Liebmann Meyer Wulff (1811) and the first name Giacomo during his period of study in Italy, around 1817.

Judah Beer was a leader of the Berlin Jewish community and maintained a private synagogue in his house which leaned towards reformist views. Jacob Beer wrote an early cantata for performance at this synagogue. Both Judah Herz Beer and his wife were close to the Prussian court; when Amalia was awarded in 1816 the Order of Louise, she was given, by Royal dispensation, not the traditional Cross but a portrait bust of the Queen. The Beer children were provided with a fine education; their tutors included two of the leaders of the enlightened Jewish intelligentsia, the author Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn and Edmund Kley, (later a reform movement rabbi in Hamburg) to whom they remained attached into their maturity. The brothers the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the politician Wilhelm von Humboldt were close friends of the family circle.

Beer's first keyboard instructor was Franz Lauska, a pupil of Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and a favoured teacher at the Berlin court. Beer also became one of Muzio Clementi's pupils while Clementi was in Berlin. The boy made his public debut in 1801 playing Mozart's D minor Piano Concerto in Berlin. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported: 'The amazing keyboard playing of young Bär (a Jewish lad of 9), who carried off the difficult passages and other solo parts with aplomb, and has fine powers of rendition even more rarely found in one of his age, made the concert even more interesting'.

Beer, as he still was, studied with Antonio Salieri and the German master and friend of Goethe, Carl Friedrich Zelter. Louis Spohr organised a concert for Beer at Berlin in 1804 and continued his acquaintance with the lad later in Vienna and Rome. A portrait of Jacob commissioned by the family at this time shows him 'confidently facing the viewer, his hair romantically dishevelled...his left hand rests on the keyboard, and his right hand grasps a musical manuscript...plac its subject in the tradition of the young Mozart'. Beer's first stage work, the ballet Der Fischer und das Milkmädchen (The Fisher and the Milkmaid) was produced in March 1810 at the Court Opera in Berlin. His formal training with the Abbé Vogler at Darmstadt between 1810 and 1812 was however of crucial importance; at around this time he begins to sign himself 'Meyer Beer'. Here, with his fellow students (who included Carl Maria von Weber), he learnt not only the craft of composition but also the business of music (organising concerts and dealing with publishers). Forming a close friendship with Weber and other pupils, Meyerbeer established a Harmonische Verein (Musical Union) whose members undertook to support each other with favourable press criticism and networking. On 12 February 1813 Beer received the first of the string of honours he was to accumulate throughout his life when he was appointed 'Court Composer' by Grand Duke Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt.

Throughout his early career, although determined to become a musician, Beer found it difficult to decide between playing and composition. Certainly other professionals in the decade 1810–1820, including Moscheles, considered him amongst the greatest virtuosi of his period. He wrote during this period numerous piano pieces, including a concerto and set of variations for piano and orchestra, but these have been lost. To this period also belongs a Clarinet Quintet written for the virtuoso Heinrich Baermann (1784–1847) who remained a close friend of the composer.