In spite of Auber’s personal and professional success (not only was he considered one of the greatest operatic composers of his day, but also he succeeded Gossec in the Académie (1835), was director of the Conservatory of Music (1842), and imperial _maître de chapelle_ to Napoleon III), he was essentially modest. With more confidence in himself than Meyerbeer he was quite as unpretentious as the latter. Though by no means ungrateful to the artists who contributed to the success of his works he would say: ‘I don’t cuddle them and put them in cotton-wool, like Meyerbeer. It is perfectly logical that he should do so. The Nourrits, the Levasseurs, the Viardot-Garcias, and the Rogers are not picked up at street corners; but bring me the first urchin you meet who has a decent voice and a fair amount of intelligence and in six months he’ll sing the most difficult part I ever wrote, with the exception of that of Masaniello. My operas are a kind of warming-pan for great singers. There is something in being a good warming-pan.’
Hérold’s most distinctive comic operas are _Marie_ and _Le Muletier_ (1848). The last-named is a setting of a rather spicy libretto by Paul de Kock, the novelist whose field was that of ‘middle class Parisian life, of _guingettes_ and _cabarets_ and equivocal adventures,’ and was highly successful. It seems a far cry from an operetta of this style to the romanticism of the _drame lyrique_. But if an occasional score harked back as regards vulgarity of subject to the equivocal popular couplets which the Comtesse du Barry had Larrivée sing for the entertainment of the sexagenarian Louis XV at Luciennes some sixty years before, it only serves to emphasize by contrast the trend in the direction of a finer expression of sentiment. Halévy’s masterpiece in comic opera is _L’Éclair_ (1835). A curiosity of musical literature, it is written for two tenors and two sopranos, without a chorus; ‘and displays in a favorable light the composer’s mastery of the most refined effects of instrumentation and vocalization.’ Wagner, while living in greatly reduced circumstances in Paris, had been glad to arrange a piano score and various quartets for strings of Halévy’s _Guitarrero_ (1841).