The four grand operas composed for Paris by the German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) set a style that dominated the French lyric theater and exerted a powerful influence on opera production throughout Europe for a generation afterward.

Giacomo Meyerbeer began life as Jakob Liebmann Beer, later adding Meyer, the name of his maternal grandfather, and changing Jakob to Giacomo on taking up residence in Italy. Born in Berlin into a cultured Jewish family, he studied piano with Muzio Clementi and was quickly recognized as a prodigy on that instrument. He also studied music theory and composition, first with Carl Friedrich Zelter, then with the Berlin opera director Bernard Anselm Weber, and finally with the Abbé Vogler, one of the most eminent German theorists of the time. By his early 20s Meyerbeer was a sensational pianist, but his chief aim was to be a composer.

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