As with his one-act opera Le devin du village (1752), Rousseau modelled the production on the Parisian 'Théâtre de la foire'.
Without Rousseau's consent, affirmed by the uniqueness of the premiere and the truth of the statue's first interpreter, the play remained in the repertory of the Comédie-Française for about five years in his own 1775 version.
In Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera Pigmalion (1748), from which Rousseau worked hard to differ, the main character is always fixated on the image of the unfaithful lover, drawing on a long tradition of portraying Pygmalion as a misogynist.
1762 also saw the composition of the libretto for Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice, premiered later that year, in which Orpheus gives his dead wife Eurydice life through song, instead of losing faith in the gods.
Even so, Orfeo and Pygmalion both demonstrate the 1760s theme of an apparent failure by overturning an artist's success, which arose again around the time of Beethoven and then held sway until the First World War (it can also be seen in Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra).