Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of the most important and influential opera composers of the nineteenth century, enjoyed a fame during his lifetime hardly rivalled by any of his contemporaries. This ten volume set provides in one collection all the operatic texts set by Meyerbeer in his career. The texts offer the most complete versions available. Each libretto is translated into modern English by Richard Arsenty; and each work is introduced by Robert Letellier. In this comprehensive edition of Meyerbeer's libretti, the original text and its translation are placed on facing pages for ease of use. The ninth volume presents the first of Meyerbeer's opéras comiques. For L'Étoile du Nord (1854), Scribe rewrote the text of Meyerbeer's occasional piece for Berlin, Ein Feldlager in Schlesien, based on the capture of Frederick the Great by the Croats. Now Scribe successfully wove fact and fiction into a romantic story which relates to its predecessor only in certain respects. The libretto followed a typical pattern in which four traditions about Tsar Peter the Great were interwoven, despite spatial and temporal differences: his sojourns incognito as a shipwright in Saardam and Deptford (1697-98), the rebellion of the Strelitzy (1698), his courting and marriage to the Lithuanian peasant girl Catherine (1712), who later became the Empress Catherine I (1725). There is the same determining polarity between pastoral and the military worlds as in the earlier opera. True order and enlightened rule come through the proper integration of these two worlds, a process which takes place through patterns of loss and rescue, isolation and integration, disguise and true identity. The basic situation of Feldlager is also reflected musically in L'Étoile du Nord: the unpretentious first and third acts reflect the gemütliche world of the Singspiel, while the grandiose Camp Scene in act 2 requires vast choral and orchestral forces and concerted forms of the grand tradition. In spite of the difficulties of the growing political crisis between France and Russia, soon to explode in the Crimean War, and Meyerbeer's personal anxiety over his mother's health, the première of L'Étoile du Nord on 16 February 1854 was another triumph for composer and librettist. Within a year the opera had been given 100 times in Paris. Within four years it was seen in over 60 European cities, and was spreading all over the world.