Eugène Scribe
Eugène Scribe (1791–1861) was a French dramatist and librettist whose prolific plays and opera texts helped shape nineteenth-century European theater.
Well-made play: A dramatic form built around tightly arranged exposition, concealed information, reversals, and a climactic resolution. Scribe’s tightly plotted comedies helped establish this influential dramatic formula.
La Muette de Portici: Daniel Auber’s 1828 opera, with a libretto by Scribe and Germain Delavigne, about a revolt in Naples. Its Paris premiere helped make Scribe’s operatic work prominent and became associated with political unrest.
Daniel Auber: A French composer of operas and opéra-comiques, active in the first half of the nineteenth century. Auber and Scribe collaborated on successful works including La Muette de Portici and Fra Diavolo.
Théâtre de la Renaissance: A Paris theater founded in 1838 to present new French drama and musical theater. Scribe’s works belonged to the commercial theatrical culture that this Paris venue served.
Victor Hugo: A French Romantic writer whose plays challenged classical theatrical conventions and social hierarchies. Hugo’s Romantic drama pursued a different theatrical ideal from Scribe’s commercially effective plotting.
Vaudeville: A French theatrical genre combining spoken dialogue with songs set to familiar tunes. Many of Scribe’s early successes used this popular form before his international reputation grew.
La Juive: Fromental Halévy’s 1835 grand opera, with a libretto by Scribe, set amid religious conflict in fifteenth-century Constance. This major French opera shows Scribe shaping a large-scale historical drama for the stage.
Giacomo Meyerbeer: A German-born composer whose grand operas became central to nineteenth-century European musical theater. Scribe supplied librettos for several of Meyerbeer’s most influential French operas.
Grand opera: A nineteenth-century operatic genre marked by large casts, elaborate staging, historical subjects, and spectacle. Scribe’s librettos helped supply the plot structures and historical conflicts of French grand opera.
Romantic drama: A theatrical movement that favored emotional intensity, historical settings, and departures from classical rules. Its expressive ambitions provide a counterpoint to the mechanics associated with Scribe’s well-made plays.