Les Huguenots is an opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer and is one of the most popular and spectacular examples of grand opera. In five acts, to a libretto by Eugène Scribe and Émile Deschamps, it premiered in Paris on 29 February 1836.
Set design by Philippe Chaperon for Act 1 of the 1897 production at the Palais Garnier
Giacomo Meyerbeer, portrayed in 1839
Pol Plançon as the Comte de St. Bris in 1894 at the Metropolitan Opera house
Prosper Dérivis as Nevers
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.
Giacomo Meyerbeer, engraving from a photograph by Pierre Petit (1865)
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