The vanishing of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s once inescapable grand opera “Les Huguenots” is a mystery of musical history—almost a crime in need of solving. A panoramic tragedy of religious violence, “Huguenots” had its première at the Opéra de Paris, in 1836, and received well over a thousand performances there in the century that followed. Berlioz, Verdi, and Liszt hailed the opera as a masterpiece. Heinrich Heine, not given to fulsome praise, compared it to a “Gothic cathedral, whose slender columns and colossal dome seem to have been raised by the bold hand of a giant.” By the middle of the twentieth century, though, “Huguenots” had all but disappeared. The same fate befell the remainder of Meyerbeer’s output and dozens of other works in the grand-opera genre. Most of them are destined to remain historical curiosities, but “Huguenots” requires no special pleading. It is a juggernaut of musical-dramatic invention, and its climactic scenes, depicting the massacre of thousands of Huguenot Protestants by Catholic forces on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, can still inspire terror. A new production of “Huguenots” at the Opéra—the first in eighty-two years—has affirmed the work’s elemental power.

The putative crime has a prime suspect: Richard Wagner. The self-styled artist of the future launched his career with Meyerbeer’s assistance. In the early eighteen-forties, Wagner was full of praise for his mentor: “Meyerbeer wrote world history, a history of hearts and feelings; he destroyed the shackles of national prejudice.” Indeed, Meyerbeer was one of music’s great cosmopolitans: a German Jew who honed his art in Italy before making his name in France. By 1850, though, anti-Semitism and nationalism had infected Wagner’s world view. His notorious essay “Judaism in Music,” which alleges the existence of a telltale Jewish voice and style, piles scorn on an unnamed but easily recognizable operatic entertainer of high Parisian fame. Wagner also condemned Meyerbeer for producing “effects without causes”—a dubious accusation from a composer who has an earth goddess rise on a stage elevator to spout exposition.

Yet Wagner should not be given sole blame for Meyerbeer’s eclipse. “Huguenots,” “Robert le Diable,” “Le Prophète,” and other Meyerbeer blockbusters retained their popularity even at the zenith of Wagnermania, around the turn of the last century. The eventual decline of grand opera affected Jewish and Gentile composers alike: Rossini’s almighty “Guillaume Tell” also dropped from sight. The main problem is that grand opera is a stylistic world unto itself, demanding lavish resources and idiosyncratic vocal styles. (The writing for tenors is especially taxing: singers must hit stratospherically high notes without resorting to belting.) Above all, it demands patience from the audience, as it sprawls across an evening-devouring structure of five acts. Meyerbeer worked on a huge canvas, giving the impression that history itself was invading the stage. We tend to describe such immensities of scale as Wagnerian, but that would be an insult to Meyerbeer’s originality. Better to irritate Wagner’s ghost by describing the “Ring” as Meyerbeeresque.

“Les Huguenots” begins with a brief, remarkable overture that signals the breadth of Meyerbeer’s vision: a series of variations on Martin Luther’s hymn “Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”). Although Meyerbeer’s sympathies lie with the Protestant side of the conflict, he suggests that the Protestants are not just victims. The hymn is first heard in a quietly solemn guise—scoring that Wagner imitated in his “Tannhäuser” overture—but takes on an aggressive, belligerent tone. Even before the voices enter, Meyerbeer has evoked religion’s fraught grip on the human psyche.

The libretto of “Huguenots,” by Eugène Scribe, is a crafty exercise in intensification. The first two acts set up romantic intrigue involving members of Huguenot and Catholic clans. A festive atmosphere prevails as we meet the young Huguenot nobleman Raoul; the Catholic potentate Comte de Saint-Bris; Saint-Bris’s daughter Valentine; and Marguerite de Valois, the sister of King Charles IX. Marguerite, in an effort to resolve Catholic-Huguenot tensions, has decreed that Raoul should marry Valentine. This matchmaking seems wise, as Raoul is already in love with Valentine, but a misunderstanding causes him to refuse the offer. Saint-Bris takes offense and swears vengeance. In the early scenes, Meyerbeer maximizes the local color and the popular flavor that bourgeois audiences expected from grand opera. But he is also reeling us in, showing the extent to which social divisions are rooted in everyday life. The crucial turn comes at the beginning of Act III, when Huguenots drinking in a tavern taunt their Catholic counterparts. The political begins to overtake the personal.

“Huguenots” is stocked with showpiece arias for the leads, but it becomes increasingly evident that individuals are helpless against the larger social energies that ensnare them. Meyerbeer represents those binding forces with a complex network of recurring melodic shapes, harmonic relationships, rhythmic patterns, and instrumental timbres—a system that helped inspire Wagner’s use of leitmotifs. The most obvious such motif is “Ein Feste Burg,” which appears at intervals throughout the opera. A subtler figure, associated with Catholic ritual, is a harmonic progression that combines a tonic chord with a triad on the flattened sixth degree: say, A-flat major against E major. This is first heard in Act III, during a hymn to the Virgin Mary, and it gleams celestially in the high winds. Later, in Act IV, it glowers in a menacing lower register as Saint-Bris and other nobles plot the massacre—a famous scene called “Conspiracy and Blessing of the Daggers.” As the Meyerbeer scholar Robert Letellier observes, blessing has been “reversed to its dark side of malediction.” Similarly, courtly dotted rhythms acquire a hammering, murderous drive.

Act IV of “Huguenots” struck awe into Wagner and Verdi alike, expanding their sense of what opera could achieve. The Blessing of the Daggers, with its cold brass choirs, its shrieking winds, and its bloodthirsty choral chants, has a demonic glamour. No less stupendous is the love scene that follows. Raoul, having overheard the conspirators, is torn between the call of duty and his undying passion for Valentine. The lovers sing an ecstatically oblivious G-flat-major duet, which forecasts Act II of “Tristan und Isolde,” not to mention the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony. Meyerbeer’s ramming together of otherworldly bliss and genocidal rage is uncanny in effect. One begins to wonder how the opera became so popular in the first place: its vision of the human animal is, in the end, spectacularly bleak.

Meyerbeer’s operas have been experiencing a gradual comeback in Europe, but they are still rarely staged in America. The Metropolitan Opera has ignored the composer since the late nineteen-seventies, when it revived “Le Prophète.” Incredibly, “Huguenots” has not been seen at the Met since 1915, though Bard College, in upstate New York, presented a very creditable production, by Thaddeus Strassberger, in 2009. The opera’s belated return to Paris was generally triumphant, even if the staging, by Andreas Kriegenburg, had a detached, abstracted air. The action is set in a curious temporal nowhere that mixes historical costumes—ruffs, breeches, and the like—with futuristic bone-white spaces and antiseptic chambers. What’s missing is the gritty scenic detail that would correspond to Meyerbeer’s fugues of sectarian fury.

Finding the right cast proved a challenge. Diana Damrau, a Meyerbeer specialist, was to have sung the coloratura part of Marguerite, but she cancelled in August, for health reasons. Lisette Oropesa was a splendid substitute, combining absolute technical assurance with a deft actorly portrayal of a naïve, self-involved royal. The fiendishly difficult role of Raoul, meanwhile, was slated for the tenor Bryan Hymel, but he withdrew less than two weeks before opening night. The Berlin-based tenor Yosep Kang saved the day with a brave, resourceful performance. Not all of his high C-flats, Cs, and D-flats landed on target, but his tone had the right lightness and brightness for grand opera—a slender but cutting blade. Paul Gay, as Saint-Bris, presided with chilling conviction over the Blessing of the Daggers. Ermonela Jaho was an urgent, rich-hued Valentine; Karine Deshayes expertly carried off the bel-canto fireworks of the page Urbain; Nicolas Testé caught the gruff heartiness of the Huguenot stalwart Marcel. The chorus of the Opéra de Paris, which has found new life under the direction of José Luis Basso, had no fear of Meyerbeer’s perilously rapid-moving lines. Michele Mariotti, in the pit, gave forward drive and interpretive shape to a long evening—around five hours, even with cuts.

As for the pitiless ending, in which Raoul and Valentine die at the Huguenots’ side, Kriegenburg directed with restraint, avoiding the temptation to drench the stage with blood and populate it with Fascistic thugs. (Saint-Bris and his conspirators did, however, don Nazi-like armbands.) The superimposition of different periods resembled a photograph with a double or triple exposure: all at once, we could see terrors of the deep past, the recent past, and the probable future. No consoling visions of reconciliation floated up from the final ensemble; instead, as guards gunned down Huguenots in rows, the chorus chanted, “Let us exterminate the impious race.” There is no evidence that Meyerbeer saw the massacre of the Huguenots as an allegory of anti-Semitic violence; there is also no reason to reject such a reading out of hand. The composer was acute on the subject of racial hatred. In August, 1839, he warned Heine that, despite signs of progress, the animus against Jews was unlikely to subside in the coming years. The same month, he met Richard Wagner. ♦