[In the essay below, Heinsheimer surveys Scribe's work as a librettist, commenting on his prodigious output and his unparalleled success.]

A Dutch inn, villagers dancing, soldiers drinking, wandering Anabaptists preaching revolt, an army camp in Westphalia, skating on a frozen lake, a maiden jumping into a river to save her honor, a coronation in a German cathedral, a dungeon, a bacchanale, finally a fire and an all-consuming explosion—operatically most effective, historically most incorrect. (The real prophet, unromantically named Jan Beuckelszoon, was captured and executed.) All this was the stuff that made Augustin Eugène Scribe the most successful, most influential, most significant, most powerful and probably the richest fashioner of opera librettos of his time.

He was also the most prolific. Le Prophète was the fifty-first work with a Scribe (or at least partially Scribe) libretto to be performed at the Opéra or the Opéra Comique since 1823, when at age twenty-four he had switched from writing vaudevilles to trying his hand at opera. In his first year of association with the musical theater, his name appeared on the playbill of three operas at the Comique—Auber's Leicester, ou le Chateau de Kenilworth, based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott, his La Neige, ou Le Nouvel Eginard, originally written for Boieldieu, and a one-act opera, Le Valet de Chambre by Michele Carafa, an Italian who had been an officer in Napoleon's army, became a full-time composer after Waterloo and wrote—Sic transit gloria mundi—two dozen operas.

Among the works Scribe helped to create between 1823 and 1849, the year of Le Prophète, were twenty-seven operas with music by Auber, including La Muette de Portici (1828), one of the great opera successes of all time; a second superhit, La Dame Blanche (1825), with Boieldieu; three operas for Meyerbeer, beginning with Robert le Diable (1831) and including Les Huguenots (1836) and L'Africaine, composed much later and produced only in 1861, after both composer and author were dead. The list further includes Rossini's Comte Ory (1828), one of the last works of the semi-retired composer, and La Juive plus several other works by Halévy, among them a full-length ballet based on the story of Manon Lescaut—the first time (1830) that Manon appeared on the opera stage. Scribe used the subject again twenty-five years later for an opera for Auber, long before Massenet. There were two works by Donizetti, one by Cherubini and a large number of operas whose composers have disappeared behind the spiderweb of time. In one single year (1839) there were seven Scribe premieres in Paris.

Scribe died in 1861 at the age of seventy in a cab on the way to visit a friend, to the stunned consternation of the cabbie, who "drove home in all haste" to deliver what was left of his famous customer to an equally stunned household at Scribe's sumptuous town house at 12 Rue Pigalle. In the twelve years left to him after Le Prophète, the pace and density of success had slackened. He had written a farce dealing with a dog by the name of Barkouf for Jacques Offenbach, which helped to fulfill Offenbach's lifelong desire to have one of his works performed at the Opéra Comique but accomplished little else (I860). He also added Charles Gounod to the catalog of famous composers competing to work with him.

The story of La Nonne Sanglante (The Bleeding Nun) sheds light on the mores of the libretto business in Scribe's time. The work was originally written for Halévy, who refused to set it. Then Meyerbeer got hold of it, but Scribe, knowing how long the composer took to finish a score, is reported to have remarked, "I am growing old, and I should like to see a performance of my work." Berlioz, who was next in line, even wrote some music and hoped for a production in 1849, but he made little progress, and Scribe asked him to relinquish the work. The script was then offered to Félicien David, who declined, finding the time fixed by the management of the Opéra too short. Albert Grisar, a prolific opera composer, was approached, even Verdi. They all found the tale, based on The Monk by M. S. Lewis, repellent. After it had been peddled for four years, Gounod agreed to write the music, and the work was brought out at the Opéra on October 18,1854, with a result that fully justified the judgment of the earlier candidates.

Berlioz in his Memoirs recalls the incident: "When on my return to Paris I met Scribe, he seemed a trifle abashed at having accepted my proposition and taken back his poem on La Nonne. 'But,' he said to me, 'you know how it is, the priest has to make a living from the altar.' Poor man! He really could not wait; he has only two or three hundred thousand francs income, a town house, three houses in the country, etc." On the door of one of these country houses, incidentally, his palatial domain of Sericourt (Seine-et-Marne), the multi-millionaire Scribe had mockingly and revealingly affixed this distich:

Le théâtre a payé cet asile champêtre,
Vous qui passez, merci, je vous le dois peut-être.

(For this retreat far from the town the stage has paid.
Thanks, passerby! Perhaps I owe it to your aid.)

In the dozen years after Le Prophète, his last big, undisputed triumph, Scribe's superficial treatment of people and events, the bending of history to achieve theatrical effects, the papier-mâché people he created—all this became more and more noticeable as Violetta, Rigoletto, Berlioz' Dido, Gounod's Marguerite and me Wagnerian mythic figures began to appear. "A brisk, animated style, neither forceful nor correct, no development of the characters, but also a savoir-faire till then unexampled in the building up of a plot and bringing about the dénouement," such were the defects and merits recognized by his own contemporaries.

"His style," said one of them, "is simply the jargon of his period, that of the Restauration. He became a tragic and lyric poet without becoming a great versifier and without ceasing to be a vaudevillist, a chansonnier, even when he took up lofty subjects manifestly beyond the powers of his Muse." When he was made a member of the Académie Française in 1836, an honor to which a genius like Balzac aspired in vain all his life, the man who delivered the eulogy, with whatever is the French equivalent for tongue-in-cheek, said, "The secret of your prosperity is opportunely to have seized the spirit of the age and to have written the kind of play that suits it best and bears the greatest resemblance to it."

His qualities, both pro and con, came strikingly to the fore-front during his one and only collaboration with Verdi, Les Vêpres Siciliennes for the Paris Exhibition of 1855. Years later, there was a typical Scribian postlude to the brief encounter. Verdi learned that the Vêpres libretto was not even an original effort: it was a rehash, with change of scenery, of Donizetti's Duc d'Albe, written fifteen years earlier.

After the July revolution of 1830 had toppled the last Bourbon and put the bourgeois king "Louis Philippe Egalité" on a deglamorized throne, Louis Véron, a physician and successful newspaper publisher, was appointed to head the Paris Opera. "I hesitated for nearly a fortnight," Véron wrote in his memoirs, "but after reflecting I said to myself: the bourgeoisie will want to enjoy its newly won dominating status. It will want to amuse itself. And the Opéra will become the focal point for its amusement. It will become what Versailles had been for the old regime."

Véron did not carry out the six years of his contract but retired from the Opéra after five years a lifelong millionaire—a fact difficult to believe in our days of subsidies and donations never quite catching up with opera deficits. The doctor who had so perceptively taken the pulse of the time owed much of his good fortune to Scribe's instinct for the public taste. In 1825 Scribe had sensed the romantic appeal of fog-shrouded castles and armored nobility, making a libretto from two novels by Sir Walter Scott. The result was La Dame Blanche, score by Boieldieu, which at once began a victory procession around the world and within less than thirty-five years had its thousandth performance in Paris.

Three years later, with the stirring of unrest that soon was to lead to the revolution of 1830, La Muette de Portici (music by Auber) again fitted the moment. The opera was based on a historical event, the revolution in Naples against the Spanish occupation in 1647. Again Scribe adjusted history: at the end of the opera the mute heroine (a dancing role) casts herself into the sea during an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, an event that in reality had taken place sixteen years earlier. First performed in 1828, La Muette was appropriately on the program of the Opéra on Friday, July 23, 1830, the day before the fighting broke out. The opera reopened the house three weeks later after the revolution. A performance in Brussels the same month touched off a public uprising that resulted in Belgium's breaking away from Dutch rule. So Scribe not only re-wrote history, he made it.

As for Véron, no sooner had been taken over the management (and the box office) of the Opéra than Scribe, in 1831, was ready with Robert le Diable, the first French opera written by Meyerbeer and a spectacular, long-lasting success. It was followed by Auber's Philtre, likewise successful but—again the strange mores of the libretto community—pushed off the boards when, only one year later (1832), Donizetti's Elisir d'Amore was produced in Milan, its text by Felice Romani based on the same Scribe libretto. Véron produced four additional operas by Auber and Scribe, among them Gustave III, ou le Bal Masqué, which twenty-six years later in a humanized dramatization by Antonio Somma became Verdi's Ballo in Maschera.

There was also Ali Baba et les Quarante Voleurs, the only collaboration of Scribe with Cherubini and the seventy-three-year-old composer's last opera. Then in 1835 came another huge success, with music by Halévy—La Juive. Véron produced these lavishly, without consideration for expense, but—oh, happy times of a vanished past!—got all his money back many times over. No small wonder he reflected on Scribe in his memoirs in a vein very different from that of other contemporaries:

It is supposed that nothing is easier to write than an opera libretto—a grave error. A five-act opera cannot survive without a highly dramatic plot, one that engages the passions of the human heart, and has a strong historical interest. This plot must also be comprehensible to the eye alone, like a ballet, and the chorus must play an important part in the action. Each act must offer contrasts of décor, of costume and especially of dramatic situation. I do not hesitate to state that of all dramatic writers M. Scribe is the one who best understands opera. He excels in the choice of subjects, in creating interesting situations for musical treatment according to the genius of the composer.

The Oeuvres Compltes d'Eugène Scribe de l'Academie Française consist of seventy-six volumes, of which twenty-six were needed to accommodate the librettos. Of these only a few are based on existing plays or novels; in addition to Scott and the Abbé Prevost, whom he discovered as a candidate for operatic glory, Scribe used Shakespeare, Racine and a few others, but the bulk of his work is original. How was such an enormous output possible? Through extraordinary working methods. While many of Scribe's librettos carry only his own name, particularly the big works for Meyerbeer, Halévy and Auber, many show an additional acknowledgment in small, elegant print, "en société avec. … "

Wagner had been an eager beseecher of the man who had the keys to all the Parisian opera houses in his pocket. He had ardently hoped Scribe would write a libretto from his own elaborate scenario to The Flying Dutchman, one that would open at least one door. After Scribe refused, Wagner referred to "the Scribe factory." The Dictionnaire des Contemporains describes it:

M. Scribe was obliged to establish a veritable atelier, where a host of ordinary and extraordinary collaborators contributed several items—one perhaps the idea, a second the plot, a third the dialogue, a fourth couplets. Scribe himself, endowed for his task with an incredible aptitude and perseverance, supervised and directed everything. Sometimes he would furnish the sketch, or he would revise and polish the work or remodel it in part. Finally he signed it with his name, but always placed on the playbill and in the published libretto the name of his chief collaborator beside his own.

The eulogist at the Académie summed it all up rather nicely: "Without your collaborators you perhaps would not have written all your plays, but without you they would not have succeeded."

There were many workers in the factory—men like Dupin, Brazier, Varner, Carmouche, Bayard, Xavier and Vernon de Saint-Georges, who, sans Scribe, wrote the libretto for Donizetti's Fille du Régiment, and others. Their leader was Scribe's old companion Germain Delavigne, with whom he had already shared his first flop, a play they collaborated on in 1810 when Scribe was nineteen years old, and whose name appears on the texts of many operas, beginning with Le Maçon in 1825 (music by Auber) and ending with the ill-fated Nonne Sanglante of 1854.

The second prominent member of the club was Honoré Mélesville, coauthor of Scribe's first operatic attempts of 1823—Auber's Leicester and the Carafa one-acter—and continuing through 1839. Most of the members of the société were also active independently. Mélesville wrote the libretto for Hérold's Zampa, which had its first performance at the Comique in 1831. That year also saw the first arrival of Bellini's Somnambula in March, Le Philtre in June, Robert le Diable in November and Norma in December. What fabulous times!

Today, like so many libretto writers, Scribe resides sadly in the twilight zone of opera history, in whose arid soil posthumous laurel grows sparsely. The public knows a little about Schikaneder, Da Ponte, Hofmannsthal—but who wrote Tosca, Fidelio, Carmen, La Traviata, Die Fleder-maus? The author of Le Prophète is known best, if not only, by the street alongside the Paris opera house, called Rue Scribe since 1864, three years after his death. And even this recognition is caused less by opera associations (shared by neighboring streets named for Gluck, Meyer-beer, Auber and Halévy) than by the fact that No. 12 houses the American Express office. Scribe probably did not expect more. For his tomb he prepared an epitaph that spells out the fulfilments as well as the self-imposed limitations of his aspirations:

Vivant, j'eus des amis, quelque gloire, un peu d'or.
Ci-git qui fut heureux, et qui l'est plus encore.

(While living I had friends, gold, glory, if you will.
Here lies one who was happy, and now is happier
  still.)