About the work
Opéra comique by Aimé Maillart to a libretto by Eugène Cormon and Lockroy, adapting George Sand's story 'La petite Fadette' and transplanting it to the era of the Camisard wars under Louis XIV. After several theatre directors had turned the work down, Léon Carvalho accepted it sight unseen; it premiered on 19 September 1856 at the Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris.
Plot
In the Savoyard mountain village of Prodains in 1704, a troop of dragoons searches for hidden Huguenots. The tomboyish Rose Friquet carelessly gives away the village women's hiding place but later helps the farmhand Sylvain save the refugees, exposing an attempted infidelity with the bell of a forest chapel before marrying Sylvain herself.
Cultural significance
The work became one of the biggest box-office successes of 19th-century French opéra comique, reaching 153 performances at the Théâtre-Lyrique by 1863 and 377 at the Opéra-Comique by 1917, and spread rapidly across Europe and the Americas as far as Mauritius; in German translation, under the title 'Das Glöckchen des Eremiten', it also entered the repertoire of German theatres such as Gera and Chemnitz.