Le prophète

Le prophète (The Prophet) is an opera in five acts by Giacomo Meyerbeer. The French-language libretto was by Eugène Scribe.

The opera was first performed by the Paris Opera at the Salle Le Peletier on 16 April 1849. The production featured costumes by Paul Lormier and sets by Charles-Antoine Cambon and Joseph Thierry (Acts I and IV), Charles Séchan (Acts II and V), and Édouard Desplechin (Act III). It involved the first use ever on stage of Léon Foucault and Jules Duboscq's electric arc light (régulateur à arc électrique), imitating the effect of sunlight.

The creators of the three main roles were Jeanne-Anaïs Castellan as Berthe, Pauline Viardot as Fidès, and Gustave-Hippolyte Roger as Jean. The second city to hear it was London, at Covent Garden on 24 July of the same year. It was given all over Germany in 1850, as well as in Vienna, Lisbon, Antwerp, New Orleans, Budapest, Brussels, Prague and Basel. Its tremendous success continued throughout the 19th and into the early 20th century.

Since the Second World War notable productions have included: Zurich in 1962, Deutsche Opera Berlin in 1966 (both starring Sandra Warfield and James McCracken) and the Metropolitan Opera in 1977 with Marilyn Horne as Fidès, directed by John Dexter. At the Vienna State Opera in 1998 the opera was given in a production by Hans Neuenfels with Plácido Domingo and Agnes Baltsa in the leading roles. In October 2015 a new production directed by Tobias Kratzer opened at the Karlsruhe Opera with Ewa Wolak as Fidès and Marc Heller as Jean.

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