Giacomo Meyerbeer

Born Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer to a wealthy Jewish family on 5 September 1791, he started as a pianist before turning to opera and spending years studying in Italy. His 1824 opera Il crociato in Egitto gave him a Europe-wide reputation, but Robert le diable in 1831 made him a celebrity and defined grand opera's "decisive character." Les Huguenots (1836) and Le prophète (1849) marked his peak; L'Africaine appeared only after his death on 2 May 1864. Simultaneously he served as Prussian Court Kapellmeister from 1832 and General Music Director from 1843, shaping opera across Germany and enabling the first production of Wagner's Rienzi. Wagner's later critical assaults and Nazi suppression buried his works through most of the twentieth century, but the twenty-first has begun pulling his grand operas back onto European stages.