La dame blanche

La dame blanche (The White Lady) is an opéra comique in three acts by the French composer François-Adrien Boieldieu. The libretto was written by Eugène Scribe and is based on episodes from no less than five works of the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, including his novels The Monastery, Guy Mannering, and The Abbot. The opera has typical elements of the Romantic in its Gothic mode, including an exotic Scottish locale, a lost heir, a mysterious castle, a hidden fortune, and a ghost, in this case benevolent. The work was one of the first attempts to introduce the fantastic into opera and is a model for works such as Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable and Charles Gounod's Faust. The opera's musical style also heavily influenced later operas like Lucia di Lammermoor, I puritani and La jolie fille de Perth.

Performance history

La dame blanche was first performed on 10 December 1825 by the Opéra-Comique at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris. It was a major success and became a standby of the 19th century operatic repertory in France and Germany. By 1862, the Opéra-Comique had given more than 1,000 performances of La dame blanche.

Dame Blanche

Dame Blanche (French for White Lady) may refer to:

Wine grape varieties

See also

Dame blanche (dessert)

Dame blanche (French, "white lady") is the name used in Belgium and the Netherlands for a sweet dessert consisting of vanilla ice cream with whipped cream, and warm molten chocolate. In Germany, the same type of dessert is known as a Coupe Dänemark. The dessert is similar to the American sundae.

References

Dame Blanche (resistance)

La Dame Blanche ("The White Lady") was a codename for an underground intelligence network which operated in German-occupied Belgium during World War I. It took its name from a German legend which stated that the fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty would be announced by the appearance of a woman wearing white.

Network

The Dame Blanche network was founded in 1916 by Walthère Dewé, an engineer in Brussels in a telegraph and telephone company. The decision resulted from the arrest and execution of Dewé's cousin, Dieudonné Lambrecht, who had himself founded an intelligence network codenamed Lambrecht. In order to save the group, Dewé took control and developed it under the name Dame Blanche. The network was known for its high female membership; women may have made up as much as 30 percent of its total personnel. It supplied as much as 75% of the intelligence collected from occupied Belgium and northern France. By the end of the war, its 1,300 agents covered all of occupied Belgium, northern France and, through a collaboration with Louise de Bettignies' network, occupied Luxembourg.