Zaïre (play)

It was a great success with the Paris audiences and marked a turning away from tragedies caused by a fatal flaw in the protagonist's character to ones based on pathos.

The historical characters alluded to, members of the Lusignan and Châtillon families, were related to events of the Crusades but not alive at the time of Louis IX.

[2] Although some Anglophone writers, most notably Aaron Hill and Thomas Lounsbury, have tended to emphasise the plot similarities between Zaïre and Shakespeare's Othello,[3][4] the resemblance is only superficial.

Voltaire's play tells the story of Zaïre (Zara), a Christian slave who had been captured as a baby when Cesarea was sacked by the Muslim armies.

Orosmane, already suspicious that Zaïre has asked him to delay their wedding, intercepts a letter from Nérestan with instructions for meeting him and the priest for her baptism.

[8]Disappointed with the relative failure of his tragedy, Eriphyle, in March 1732, Voltaire began writing Zaïre in response to critics who had reproached him for not having love stories as the centrepieces of his plays.

[5] He completed Zaïre in three weeks,[9] and it premiered on 13 August 1732 performed by the Comédie française at the Théâtre de la rue des Fossés Saint-Germain.

The original actors in the play were Quinault-Dufresne as Orosmane, Charles-François Grandval as Nérestan, Pierre-Claude Sarrazin as Lusignan, and Jeanne-Catherine Gaussin as Zaïre.

Its reception on the opening night was mixed, but once Voltaire made slight revisions to the play and the cast settled into their roles, it became a great success and was performed 31 times that year alone.

[3] Famous English actresses who have played the title role include Susannah Maria Cibber, who made her stage debut in the 1736 Drury Lane production, Sarah Siddons, and Elizabeth Younge.

[14] One of the earliest operatic adaptations was Peter Winter's Zaire which premiered in 1805 at The King's Theatre in London with the famous Italian contralto, Giuseppina Grassini, in the title role.

[16] Johann Andreas Schachtner's libretto for Mozart's unfinished opera Zaïde, was directly based on a 1778 singspiel, The Seraglio, or The Unexpected Reunion of Father, Daughter and Son in Slavery.