The necessity of utilizing pre-existing fragments explains some of the incoherence of this incomprehensible piece.  It also explains the creation of Bertram, half man, half devil, who was invented as a substitute for Mephistopheles.  The fruit of the Tree of Human Knowledge became the Rameau Veneree in the third act, and the beautiful religious scene in the fifth act, which has no relation to the action, is a transposition of the Easter scene.

So Scribe should not be blamed for making a poor piece when he had so many difficulties to contend with.  He must have lost his head a little for Robert’s mother was called Berthe in the first act and Rosalie in the third.  However, the answer might be that she changed her name when she became religious.

Later, Scribe was put to another no less difficult test with L’Etoile du Nord.  When Meyerbeer was the conductor at the Berlin Opera, he wrote on command Le Camp de Silesie with Frederick the Great as the hero and Jenny Lind as the musical star.  As we know, Frederick was a musician, for he both composed music and played the flute, while Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, was a great singer.  A contest between the nightingale and the flute was sure to follow or theatrical instinct is a vain phrase.  But in the piece Scribe created, Peter the Great took Frederick the Great’s place and to give a motive for the grace notes in the last act it was necessary for the terrible Tsar, a half savage barbarian, to learn to play the flute.

It is not worth while telling how the Tsar took lessons on the flute from a young pastry cook who came on the stage with a basket of cakes on his head; how the cook later became a lord, and many other details of this absurd play.  It is permitted to be absurd on the stage, if it is done so that the absurdity is forgotten.  But in this instance it was impossible to forget the absurdities.  The extravagance of the libretto led the musician into many unfortunate things.  This extremely interesting score is very uneven, but there are a thousand details worth the attention of the professional musician.  Beauty even appears in the score at moments, and there are charming and picturesque bits, as well as puerilities and shocking vulgarities.

Public curiosity was aroused for a long time by clever advance notices and had reached a high pitch when L’Etoile du Nord appeared.  The work was carried by the exceptional talents of Bataille and Caroline Duprez and was enormously successful at the start, but this success has grown steadily less.  Faure and Madame Patti gave some fine performances in London.  We shall probably never see their equal again, and it is not desirable that we should either from the standpoint of art or of the author.