If the musical night sky could be said to be littered with the glittering trails of falling stars, perhaps no single composer has fallen quite so far and so fast as Jacob Liebmann Beer (1791-1864), or Giacomo Meyerbeer as he came to be known.

The darling of the Paris Opéra for 25 years as a result of the enduring success of Robert le Diable with its infamous ballet in which a graveyard full of deceased nuns rise up to cavort in the moonlight, the German-born Meyerbeer went on to dominate the French opera scene with a string of romantic and historical blockbusters such as L’Africaine (where the heroine expires from the scent of a deadly tropical tree), Les Huguenots (in which the three principals are simultaneously shot by a chorus of murderers), and Le Prophète (where the final scene calls for the entire cast to be blown up with gunpowder!).

Within a decade of his demise, however, Meyerbeer began to suffer an almost total eclipse, a victim of his over-the-top plots, the new music of Wagner and his followers, and, some would suggest, prey to the nasty brand of anti-Semitism that came to a head in the...