Robert the Devil: Medieval Legend, Gothic Opera

Robert the Devil is a supernatural medieval legend that inspired a 19th-century French opera, which incorporates key elements from a seminal Gothic novel.  The opera and legend are substantially different but both interesting.

We begin with Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1831 opera, Robert le diable, which gained notoriety for a ballet sequence in Act III, which portrays an attempted seduction of the hero, Robert, Duke of Normandy, by the ghosts of corrupted nuns, freshly risen from their crypts. The scene is not found in the original legend, but as we learn, was borrowed from a particularly sensationalistic early Gothic novel,The Monk, written by Matthew Gregory Lewis in 1764.   We also learn that Meyerbeer’s chief librettist, Eugène Scribe later went on to crib another storyline from Lewis’ The Monk for the 1854 opera by composer Charles Gounod, La nonne sanglante (“the bloody nun”).

Rendering of cloister set for Paris Opera premiere.

Along the way, we learn how Robert le diable helped save the financially imperiled Paris Opera after its royal subsidy had been withdrawn following the July Revolution of 1830.  Along with public curiosity about the scandalous ballet, ticket sales owed much to the 19th-century equivalent of special effects — flashy and innovative stagecraft (new gaslight design, trapdoors, floating will-o-the-wisps, etc.) and a spectacular set replicating a ruined gothic monastery. Hans Christian Andersen, George Sand and Frédéric Chopin lavishly praised the production. Honoré de Balzac and Alexander Dumas worked mentions of the opera into their novels. Edgar Degas painted not one but two renderings of the Ballet of the Nuns.

Edgar Degas’ rendering of the “Ballet of the Nins”

The opera also gave birth to a new style of ballet, one linked to Romanticism’s interest in the supernatural: ballet blanc, “white ballet” named for the innovative long, flowing skirts that lent themselves to wafting movements suggestive of misty wisps moving in the darkness. The opera’s 1847  London premiere was attended by Queen Victoria and featured superstar soprano Jenny Lind as Robert’s sister.  Traffic came to a standstill as unruly spectators mobbed the streets hoping for  glimpse of either celebrity.

The second half of our episode tells the original story of Robert the Devil.  It first appeared around 1250, sketched out in short form by the Dominican monk, Étienne de Bourbon, in a collection of exempla, or moral tales intended to be used by priests in their homilies.