Eugène Scribe in the context of Daniel Auber

A wide range of movements existed in the theatrical culture of Europe and the United States in the 19th century. In the West, they include Romanticism, melodrama, the well-made plays of Scribe and Sardou, the farces of Feydeau, the problem plays of Naturalism and Realism, Wagner's operatic Gesamtkunstwerk, Gilbert and Sullivan's plays and operas, Wilde's drawing-room comedies, Symbolism, and proto-Expressionism in the late works of August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.

The well-made play (French: la pièce bien faite, pronounced [pjɛs bjɛ̃ fɛt]) is a dramatic genre from nineteenth-century theatre, developed by the French dramatist Eugène Scribe. It is characterised by concise plotting, compelling narrative and a largely standardised structure, with little emphasis on characterisation and intellectual ideas.

Scribe, a prolific playwright, wrote several hundred plays between 1815 and 1861, usually in collaboration with co-authors. His plays, breaking free from the old neoclassical style of drama seen at the Comédie Française, appealed to the theatre-going middle classes. The "well-made" form was adopted by other French and foreign playwrights and remained a key feature of the theatre well into the 20th century.

Victorien Sardou (/sɑːrˈduː/ sar-DOO, French: [viktɔʁjɛ̃ saʁdu]; 5 September 1831 – 8 November 1908) was a French dramatist. He is best remembered today for his development, along with Eugène Scribe, of the well-made play. He also wrote several plays that were made into popular 19th-century operas such as La Tosca (1887) on which Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca (1900) is based, and Fédora (1882) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1893) that provided the subjects for the lyrical dramas Fedora (1898) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1915) by Umberto Giordano. His play Gismonda, from 1894, was also adapted into an opera of the same name by Henry Février.

Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer; 5 September 1791 – 2 May 1864) 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 that helped to maintain Paris as the opera capital of the nineteenth century.

Born to a wealthy Jewish family, Meyerbeer began his musical career as a pianist but soon decided to devote himself to opera, spending several years in Italy studying and composing. His 1824 opera Il crociato in Egitto was the first to bring him a Europe-wide reputation, but it was Robert le diable (1831) which raised his status to great celebrity. His public career, lasting from then until his death, during which he remained a dominating figure in the world of opera, was summarized by his contemporary Hector Berlioz, who claimed that he 'has not only the luck to be talented, but the talent to be lucky.' He was at his peak with his operas Les Huguenots (1836) and Le prophète (1849); his last opera (L'Africaine) was performed posthumously. His operas made him the most frequently performed composer at the world's leading opera houses in the nineteenth century.

Robert le diable (Robert the Devil) is an opera in five acts composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer between 1827 and 1831, to a libretto written in French by Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne. Robert le diable is regarded as one of the first grand operas at the Paris Opéra. It has only a superficial connection to the medieval legend of Robert the Devil.

The opera was immediately successful from its first night on 21 November 1831 at the Opéra; the dramatic music, harmony and orchestration, its melodramatic plot, its star singers and its sensational stage effects compelled Frédéric Chopin, who was in the audience, to say, "If ever magnificence was seen in the theatre, I doubt that it reached the level of splendour shown in Robert...It is a masterpiece...Meyerbeer has made himself immortal". Robert initiated the European fame of its composer, consolidated the fame of its librettist Scribe, and launched the reputation of the new director of the Opéra, Louis-Désiré Véron, as a purveyor of a new genre of opera. It also had influence on development of the ballet, and was frequently mentioned and discussed in contemporary French literature.

Les Huguenots (French pronunciation: [le ˈyg(ə)no]) 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.

Le prophète (The Prophet) is a grand opera in five acts by Giacomo Meyerbeer, which was premiered in Paris on 16 April 1849. The French-language libretto was by Eugène Scribe and Émile Deschamps, after passages from the Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations by Voltaire. The plot is based on the life of John of Leiden, Anabaptist leader and self-proclaimed "King of Münster" in the 16th century.

L'Africaine (The African Woman) is an 1837 five-act French grand opéra by Giacomo Meyerbeer, with a libretto by Eugène Scribe. By 1852, the plot had been revised to depict fictional events in the life of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, adopting his Gallicized name as its working title, Vasco de Gama. The full score was copied the day before Meyerbeer died in 1864.

François-Joseph Fétis's published edition, L'Africaine, premiered in 1865 at the Paris Opéra and was long performed. Since 2013, some productions and recordings have applied revisions, including the title Vasco de Gama, based on Meyerbeer's manuscript, from which Casa Ricordi published a critical edition in 2018.

Le comte Ory (Count Ory) is a comic opera written by Gioachino Rossini in 1828. Some of the music originates from his opera Il viaggio a Reims written three years earlier for the coronation of Charles X. The French libretto was by Eugène Scribe and Charles-Gaspard Delestre-Poirson adapted from a comedy they had first written in 1817.

The work is ostensibly a comic opera in that the story is humorous, even farcical. However, it was devised for the Opéra rather than for the Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique and there are structural inconsistencies with the contemporary opéra comique genre: whereas the latter consists of relatively short lyrical numbers and spoken dialogue, Le comte Ory consists of "highly developed, even massive musical forms linked by accompanied recitative". Although the opera contains some of Rossini's most colorful orchestral writing, the quaint, brief overture is oddly restrained and unassuming, ending with a whisper of pizzicato strings.

Un ballo in maschera ('A Masked Ball') is an 1859 opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The text, by Antonio Somma, was based on Eugène Scribe's libretto for Daniel Auber's 1833 five act opera, Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué.

The plot concerns the assassination in 1792 of King Gustav III of Sweden who was shot, as the result of a political conspiracy, while attending a masked ball, dying of his wounds thirteen days later.

L'elisir d'amore (pronounced [leliˈzir daˈmoːre]; The Elixir of Love) is a melodramma giocoso (comic melodrama, opera buffa) in two acts by the Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. Felice Romani wrote the Italian libretto, after Eugène Scribe's libretto for Daniel Auber's Le philtre (1831). The opera premiered on 12 May 1832 at the Teatro della Canobbiana in Milan and has remained continually in the international opera repertory.

Le chalet (French pronunciation: [lə ʃalɛ]) is an opéra comique in one act by Adolphe Adam to a French libretto by Eugène Scribe and Mélesville after the singspiel Jery und Bätely by Goethe. The score re-uses material from Adam's Prix de Rome cantata Ariane a Naxos (1825). The text for the singspiel had previously been set to music by Peter Winter, 1790, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, 1801, and Conradin Kreutzer, 1810, and was done later by Donizetti, 1836, Julius Rietz, 1841, Heinrich Stihl, 1867, and Ingeborg Bronsart, 1873.

La dame blanche (French pronunciation: [la dam blɑ̃ʃ], The White Lady) is an opéra comique in three acts by the French composer François-Adrien Boieldieu. The libretto was written by Eugène Scribe and is based on episodes from no fewer than five works of the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, including his novels Guy Mannering (1815), The Monastery (1820), and The Abbot (1820). The opera has typical elements of the Romantic in its Gothic mode, including an exotic Scottish locale, a lost heir, a mysterious castle, a hidden fortune, and a ghost, in this case benevolent. The work was one of the first attempts to introduce the fantastic into opera and is a model for works such as Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831) and Charles Gounod's Faust (1859). The opera's musical style also heavily influenced later operas like Lucia di Lammermoor, I puritani and La jolie fille de Perth.

Le domino noir (The Black Domino) is an opéra comique by the French composer Daniel Auber, first performed on 2 December 1837 by the Opéra-Comique at the Salle de la Bourse in Paris. The libretto to the three-act piece is by Auber's usual collaborator, Eugène Scribe. It was one of Auber's most successful works, clocking up 1,207 performances by 1909. It received its UK premiere in 1838 and appeared in the USA the following year. Some of Auber's music has a Spanish flavour to reflect its setting.

In 1869, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky provided recitatives to replace the spoken dialogue for a proposed production of Le domino noir by an Italian opera company visiting Russia. No performances are believed to have taken place, but four of Tchaikovsky's recitatives were included in Richard Bonynge's recording of the opera.

La muette de Portici (The Mute Girl of Portici, or The Dumb Girl of Portici), also called Masaniello (Italian pronunciation: [mazaˈnjɛllo]) in some versions, is an opera in five acts by Daniel Auber, with a libretto by Germain Delavigne, revised by Eugène Scribe.

The work has an important place in music history as the earliest French grand opera. It is also known for its alleged role in the Belgian Revolution of 1830.