L'étoile du nord is an opéra comique in three acts by Giacomo Meyerbeer. The French-language libretto was by Eugène Scribe. The work had its first performance at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, on 16 February 1854.
Finale of act 2
Giacomo Meyerbeer, portrayed in 1847
Charles-Amable Battaille as Peters Michaeloff
Stage design for act 1 by Charles Cambon
Giacomo Meyerbeer was a German opera composer, "the most frequently performed opera composer during the nineteenth century, linking Mozart and Wagner". With his 1831 opera Robert le diable and its successors, he gave the genre of grand opera 'decisive character'. Meyerbeer's grand opera style was achieved by his merging of German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition. These were employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic libretti created by Eugène Scribe and were enhanced by the up-to-date theatre technology of the Paris Opéra. They set a standard which helped to maintain Paris as the opera capital of the nineteenth century.
The young Jacob Beer, portrait by Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1803)
Amalie Beer, Meyerbeer's mother, painting by Carl Kretschmar [de], c. 1803
Gioachino Rossini in 1820