Biography

Pierre-Louis Moline (c. 1740 – 20 March 1820) was a prolific French dramatist, poet and librettist. His play La Réunion du six août was one of the longest-running patriotic pieces during the time of the French Revolution with 52 performances at the Paris Opéra. He also wrote the epitaph for the tomb of Jean-Paul Marat. However, he is best remembered today for having adapted Calzabigi's libretto for Gluck's Orphée et Euridice (a reworked version of his Orfeo ed Euridice). Moline was born in Montpellier and studied art at the University of Avignon. He then went to Paris, where he studied law. He was accepted as a lawyer to the French parliament, but devoted most of his time to literary pursuits. Two of his librettos for the Paris Opera were highly successful: his adaptation of Calzabigi for Gluck's Orphée et Euridice (1774) and Jean-Frédéric Edelmann's Ariane dans l'isle de Naxos (1782). Moline also collaborated with Gluck on his 1775 revision of L'arbre enchanté, a one-act opéra comique, which had premiered in Vienna at the Schönbrunn Palace in 1759.During the French Revolution he served as a secretary-clerk to the National Convention and wrote several patriotic theatrical pieces, including his most famous work of this type, La Réunion du six août. Moline died in Paris, leaving no known heirs.

Julian Rushton, writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, says of Moline: "With deplorable fecundity, he contributed to every fashionable stage genre, including tragedy, comedy of manners, bourgeois drama and Revolutionary sans-culottide."