Augustin Eugène Scribe (; 24 December 179120 February 1861) was a French dramatist and librettist. He is known for writing "well-made plays" ("pièces bien faites"), a mainstay of popular theatre for over 100 years, and as the librettist of many of the most successful grand operas and opéras-comiques.
Born to a middle-class Parisian family, Scribe was intended for a legal career, but was drawn to the theatre, and began writing plays while still in his teens. His early years as a playwright were unsuccessful, but from 1815 onwards he prospered. Writing, usually with one or more collaborators, he produced several hundred stage works. He wrote to entertain the public rather than educate it. Many of his plays were written in a formulaic manner which aimed at neatness of plot and focus on dramatic incident rather than naturalism, depth of characterisation or intellectual substance. For this he was much criticised by intellectuals, but the "well-made play" remained established in the theatre in France and elsewhere long after his death.
In 1813 Scribe wrote his first opera libretto. From 1822 until his death he was closely associated with the composer Daniel Auber for whom he wrote or co-wrote 39 librettos, among them that for the first French grand opera, La Muette de Portici (1828). His second most frequent musical partner was Giacomo Meyerbeer, who took grand opera further and made it a dominant feature of French musical life. Among the other composers with whom Scribe worked were Adolphe Adam, Adrien Boieldieu, Gaetano Donizetti, Fromental Halévy, Jacques Offenbach and Giuseppe Verdi.
Scribe's librettos are still performed in opera houses around the world, and although few of his non-musical plays have been revived frequently in the 20th or 21st centuries, his influence on subsequent generations of playwrights in France and elsewhere was profound and lasting.
Life and career Early years Scribe was born in Paris on 24 December 1791, at the family house in the Rue Saint-Denis near Les Halles. His father, a silk merchant, died while the boy was an infant, but left his widow comfortably off. Scribe was educated at the prestigious Collège Sainte-Barbe, where he was an outstanding pupil, winning the college's top prize in his final year and being ceremonially crowned with a laurel wreath at the Académie Française.Koon and Switzer, p. 11 His mother intended him to pursue a career in the legal profession, and sent him to study with Louis-Ferdinand Bonnet, a leading Parisian lawyer.Larousse, p. 423
Although he was conscientious in his studies, Scribe's ambition was to write for the theatre, and when his mother died in 1807 he turned from the law, and together with his former classmate Germain Delavigne he set his sights on a theatrical career.Koon and Switzer, pp. 12–13 His first piece, a one-act vaudeville , was produced anonymously at the Théâtre des Variétés in January 1810 and was a failure. Numerous other plays, written in collaboration with Delavigne and others, followed; but for the next five years Scribe earned little from the theatre and was reliant on his inheritance.Larousse, p. 424 He had modest successes with Les Derviches (1811) and L'Auberge, (1812), both written with Delavigne for the Théâtre du Vaudeville. In 1813 he wrote the first of three melodramas, of which the third, , did reasonably well at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. In the same year he wrote his first opera libretto, for Luc Guénée's opéra comique .Schneider, Herbert. "Scribe, (Auguste) Eugène", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2001
Scribe's first substantial success came in 1815, with the comedy Une Nuit de la garde nationale (A Night at the National Guard), a collaboration with his friend Charles Delestre-Poirson. Over the next five years Scribe built a position as a dramatist, writing under his own name or pseudonyms, usually in collaboration with others. In 1820 Delestre-Poirson established the Théâtre du Gymnase, and opened on 23 December with Le Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle by Scribe and two friends who had also abandoned law for the theatre, Baron Anne-Honoré-Joseph Duveyrier, who wrote under the pen name Mélesville, and Charles Moreau. Delestre-Poirson gave Scribe a remunerative contract that made him, in effect, the theatre's resident playwright, with the Gymnase having first call on his services.Koon and Switzer, p. 17
1820s Between 1820 and 1830 Scribe wrote more than a hundred plays for the Gymnase, and librettos and plays for the Comédie-Française, the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique and seven other theatres.Koon and Switzer, pp. 17–18 In 1822 he began a collaboration with the composer Daniel Auber that lasted for 41 years and produced 39 operas.Hueffer et al, pp. 253–254 Auber's biographer Robert Letellier writes that the names of Scribe and Auber became as linked in French minds as those of Gilbert and Sullivan later were in British ones.Letellier, p. 5 The partners' first collaboration was , a three-act opéra comique, with a plot that Scribe, in collaboration with Mélesville, derived from Walter Scott's historical romance Kenilworth. As with his plays, Scribe customarily wrote his librettos in collaboration with other writers. For Auber he worked with, among others, X. B. Saintine, E.-J.-E. Mazères and Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges as well as Mélesville and Delavigne.Malherbe, pp. 42, 47 and 51 Letellier writes that "part of Scribe's genius lay in his careful selection of his collaborators". A story grew that Scribe would hire one man to write the narrative, a different one for the dialogue, a third for the jokes, a fourth for the lyrics, and so on. The story was apocryphal, but literary collaboration was a French tradition in which Scribe was thoroughly at home:
During his career Scribe worked with more than 60 co-authors, in addition to writing more than 130 stage works on his own. He wrote or co-wrote librettos for 48 composers. During the 1820s Scribe collaborated with Adrien Boieldieu on La Dame blanche (1825), a Romantic opera based on stories by Walter Scott. Scribe's libretto was one of the first to introduce the supernatural into an operatic plot. The piece was enormously popular, and reached its thousandth performance at the Opéra-Comique shortly after Scribe's death.Forbes, Elizabeth. "Dame blanche, La", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2002. Retrieved 7 June 2021 In 1827 Scribe wrote the scenario for La Somnambule, a ballet with music by Ferdinand Hérold, for the Paris Opéra. It was a landmark – the first time the Opéra had presented a ballet with a scenario by a leading dramatist. Until then the storyline and staging of a ballet had been left to the in-house chef de danse.Conway (2021), p. 61 This was the precursor of the fusion of opera and ballet in the first French grand opera, given the following year – La Muette de Portici, with music by Auber and libretto by Scribe and Delavigne.
In 1828 Scribe collaborated with Gioachino Rossini on Le Comte Ory, an unusual undertaking as the words for about half the numbers had to be written to fit existing music, repurposed by Rossini from Il viaggio a Reims, a pièce d'occasion composed three years earlier.Osborne, p. 18 The opera was a success, and was seen in London within six months of the Paris premiere, and in New York in 1831.Gossett & Brauner, p. 347
1830s In the 1830s Scribe's works were twice adapted by others for new operas that became well known. His scenario for La Somnambule was used by Felice Romani as the basis of Vincenzo Bellini's 1831 opera La sonnambula; his libretto for Auber's Le Philtre (1831) was adapted by Romani for Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore (1832). The Opéra-Comique commissioned a grand opera, Robert le diable, from Scribe, Delavigne and Giacomo Meyerbeer. For reasons of musical politics the work was premiered by the Paris Opéra, at the Salle Le Peletier in 1831, after extensive re-writing. Within three years it reached 100 performances on the stage of the Opéra, and by 1835 it had been seen at 77 houses in ten different countries.Huebner, Steven. "Robert le diable", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2002. Retrieved 7 June 2021
For the non-musical theatre, Scribe wrote Bertrand et Raton ou l'art de conspirer (The School for Politicians, 1830) a "serious" five-act comedy for the Comedie-Française. This began a series of historical or political comedies, which, as Pierre Larousse comments, have little to do with real politics and history, but which became the models of a new genre.Larousse, p. 424 The series continued with L'Ambitieux (1834), La Camaraderie (1836), Les Indépendants (1837), La Calomnie (1840) and Le Verre d'eau (1840), all comedies in five acts, developing a more or less original theme. In 1836 Scribe was elected to the Académie Française, and in 1839, at the age of 48 he married. His wife, whom he had known for several years, was the widow of a wine merchant. She worried about his tendency to overwork, and attempted, with only limited success, to get him to slow down.Koon and Switzer, pp. 25–28 His working habits varied little throughout his life. He began work at five in the morning during the summer and at six in the winter, writing until noon. He spent the rest of the day planning new work, attending rehearsals of his plays or operas, and in the evening visiting friends or going to the theatre.Letellier, p. 10
During the 1830s Scribe introduced social questions into his plays, although never losing sight of his principal purpose, which was to entertain. By this point in his career he had honed his skills as a dramatist and developed what became known as the "well-made play" – la pièce bien faite – characterised by concise plotting, compelling narrative and a largely standardised structure, with little emphasis on characterisation and intellectual ideas. In the words of one literary critic:
One of Scribe's key devices was the quiproquo, in which two or more characters interpret a word, a situation or a person's identity in different ways, all the time assuming that their interpretations are the same."quiproquo" , Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. Retrieved 5 June 2021 This important feature of Scribe's "well-made plays" was raised to its greatest heights by Georges Feydeau later in the 19th century.Gidel, pp. 57, 66, 89, 113 and 188
Scribe's earnings from his plays and librettos were considerable and he amassed a large fortune. He was a good businessman: commenting on a dispute over payment with Léon Pillet, the director of the Opéra, in 1841, he said he wanted to be paid for his librettos "according to what they bring in, that is to say, a great deal. The present director only wants to pay for them according to what they are worth, that is to say, very little".Quoted in Roberts, p. 211 He bought a mansion in the fashionable Rue Olivier-Saint-Georges and two country houses. He was unobtrusively generous to deserving causes; among his benefactions was a fund for impoverished musicians and theatre people, into which he paid 13,000 francs (roughly €125,000 in 2015 values) a year.
Later years