A Novel written by who is an opera based on in four acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann, that is a mainstay of the repertory during its history have included the following works which have each been performed more than 1,000 times by the company?
Werther Werther is an opera ("drame lyrique") in four acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann (who used the pseudonym Henri Grémont). It is loosely based on the German epistolary novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which was based both on fact and on Goethe's own early life. Earlier examples of operas using the story were made by Kreutzer (1792) and Pucitta (1802).
Les brigands Les brigands ("The Bandits") is an opéra bouffe, or operetta, by Jacques Offenbach to a French libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Meilhac and Halévy's libretto lampoons both serious (Schiller's play set to music by Verdi) and light theatre ("Fra Diavolo" and "Les diamants de la couronne" by Auber). The plot is cheerfully amoral in its presentation of theft as a basic principle of society rather than as an aberration. As Falsacappa, the brigand chieftain, notes: "Everybody steals according to their position in society". The piece premiered in Paris in 1869 and has received periodic revivals in France and elsewhere, both in French and in translation.