About the work
A three-act Posse with songs by Johann Nestroy, premiered on 4 May 1850 at Vienna's Carltheater. Nestroy borrowed a motif from Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer's play "Gasthaus-Abentheuer" and had the playbill state explicitly that it was not a parody of Meyerbeer's opera Le Prophète.
Plot
A country inn is thrown into turmoil because a theatre troupe is to perform Meyerbeer's opera Le Prophète there. A former lover seeks out the innkeeper, a disguised girl pursues a singer, and a con man poses as a police commissioner — briefly being mistaken for the composer Meyerbeer himself — before the real swindler is exposed.
Cultural significance
The premiere was a flop and the play saw only four performances; the Wiener Theaterzeitung found it had "no plot, no life, no wit." Only later commentators such as Otto Forst de Battaglia recognized value in its satire of the contemporary Meyerbeer craze and provincial theatre.