Robert le diable (Robert the Devil) is an opera in five acts composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer between 1827 and 1831, to a libretto written by Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne. Robert le diable is regarded as one of the first grand operas at the Paris Opéra. It has only a superficial connection to the medieval legend of Robert the Devil. The opera was immediately successful from its first night on 21 November 1831 at the Opéra; the dramatic music, harmony and orchestration, its melodramatic plot, its star singers and its sensational stage effects compelled Frédéric Chopin, who was in the audience, to say, "If ever magnificence was seen in the theatre, I doubt that it reached the level of splendour shown in Robert...It is a masterpiece...Meyerbeer has made himself immortal". Robert initiated the European fame of its composer, consolidated the fame of its librettist, Scribe, and launched the reputation of the new director of the Opéra, Louis-Désiré Véron, as a purveyor of a new genre of opera. It also had influence on development of the ballet, and was frequently mentioned and discussed in contemporary French literature. Robert continued as a favourite in opera houses all over the world throughout the nineteenth century. After a period of neglect, it began to be revived towards the end of the twentieth century. Background Giacomo Meyerbeer's early studies had been in Germany, but from 1816 to 1825 he worked in Italy. There he studied opera, then dominated by Gioachino Rossini, and wrote his own Italian operas, which were moderately successful and also had some performances in other European countries. The success of Il crociato in Egitto (1824) throughout Europe, including at Paris in 1825, persuaded Meyerbeer, who was already thirty-three years old, to fulfil at last his ambition to base himself in Paris and to seek a suitable libretto for an opera to be launched there. Meyerbeer first mentions Robert le diable in his diaries in February 1827. The Journal de Paris announced on 19 April 1827 that the libretto of Scribe and Delavigne had been passed by the censor and that 'the music is to be entrusted to a composer, M. Meyer-Beer, who, having acquired a brilliant reputation in Germany and Italy, is extending it to our country, where several of his works have been already successfully represented.' The libretto was fabricated on the basis of old legends about Duke Robert the Magnificent