fresh ideas, its stagecraft and original instrumentation. He added that although its immediate successors showed the composer's industry and fertility, operas like Le premier venu (1818), Les Troqueurs (1819), L' Amour platonique (1819), and L'Auteur mort et vivant (1820) had "librettos that were neither interesting nor adapted for music" . Le Muletier (1823), however, is "full of life and colour, and assured his reputation". Choquet adds that after the success of the lively Le Muletier it is puzzling that a man of Hérold's literary tastes and culture should have chosen to set dramas "so tame and uninteresting as L'asthenie (1823), and Le Lapin blanc (1825)": he concludes that Hérold's urge to compose led him to accept any libretto offered to him. By the time of the comedy Marie (1826) Hérold was incorporating elements of both Rossini's and Beethoven's musical language. In Betzwieser's view Marie represents "a crucial turning point in Herold's writing", and the poet Gérard de Nerval described the work as the "golden link" between Hérold's early operas and the later masterpieces Zampa and Le Pré aux clercs. For Zampa, a variant of the Don Juan story – with a female statue rather than a male one bringing nemesis to the antihero – Hérold wrote an overture that contains five different themes related to the action and score of the opera. In the three acts of Zampa Herold, in Betzwieser's view, shows particular skill in differentiating between the traditional numbers of opéra comique, "from the solo numbers (ballade, barcarole, chanson etc.), used to illustrate the various characters, to the large-scale finales, notable for their skilful variation and the building of a dramatic climax". Berlioz found things to praise in Zampa but thought Hérold lacked a style of his own, yet was neither Italian, nor French, nor German: "His music strongly resembles those industrial products made in Paris according to processes invented elsewhere and slightly modified; it is Parisian music", which, Berlioz thought, was why the Parisian middle classes loved it. But Betzwieser observes that Zampa'''s Romantic features made it highly successful outside France, and writing in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians the British critic Elizabeth Forbes commented in 1992, "All the music is perfectly suited to its subject, while the portions devoted to Zampa and the statue are highly dramatic as well as melodious". Forbes writes that Le Pré aux clerks is acknowledged by composers and musicians as