Adolphe Philippe d'Ennery or Dennery (17 June 1811 – 25 January 1899) was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 Jewish

Judaism

Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...

 dramatist and novelist.

Born in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, his real surname was Philippe. He obtained his first success in collaboration with Charles Desnoyer in Émile, ou le fils d'un pair de France (1831), a drama

Drama

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...

 which was the first of a series of some two hundred pieces written alone or in collaboration with other dramatists. Among the best of them may be mentioned Gaspard Hauser (1838) with Anicet Bourgeois; Les Bohémiens de Paris (1842) with Eugène Grange; with Mallian, Marie-Jeanne, ou la femme du peuple (1845), in which Madame Dorval obtained a great success; La Case d'Oncle Tom (1853); and Les Deux Orphelines (1875), perhaps his best piece, with Eugène Cormon

Eugène Cormon

Pierre-Etienne Piestre, known as Eugène Cormon , was a French dramatist and librettist. He used his mother’s name, Cormon, during his career....

. The story was adapted in 1921 by D.W. Griffith as the film Orphans of the Storm

Orphans Of The Storm

Orphans of the Storm is a drama film by D. W. Griffith set in late 18th century France, before and during the French Revolution.This was the last Griffith film to feature Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and is often considered Griffith's last major commercial success, after boxoffice hits such as Birth...

.

He wrote the libretto

Libretto

A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...

 for Gounod

Charles Gounod

Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...

's Le tribut de Zamora

Le tribut de Zamora

Le tribut de Zamora is an opera in four acts by Charles Gounod, his last work for the stage. The libretto by Adolphe d'Ennery was offered to Gounod after negotiations with Verdi stalled, and involves a young couple on their wedding day, a forced tribute of twenty virgins, a slave auction at which...

(1881); with Louis Gallet

Louis Gallet

Louis Gallet was an inexhaustible French writer of operatic libretti, plays, romances, memoirs, pamphlets, and innumerable articles, who is remembered above all for his adaptations of fiction—and Scripture— to provide librettos of cantatas and opera, notably by composers Georges...

 and Édouard Blau

Édouard Blau

Édouard Blau, born Blois 30 May 1836, died Paris, 7 January 1906) was a French dramatist and opera librettist. He was a cousin of Alfred Blau, another librettist of the same period....

 he composed the libretto to Massenet

Jules Massenet

Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era. Soon after his death, Massenet's style went out of fashion, and many of his operas...

's Le Cid

Le Cid (opera)

Le Cid is an opera in four acts and ten tableaux by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Louis Gallet, Édouard Blau and Adolphe d'Ennery. It is based on the play of the same name by Pierre Corneille....

(1885); and, again in collaboration with Cormon, the librettos of Auber's opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

s, Le premier jour de bonheur

Le premier jour de bonheur

Le premier jour de bonheur is an opera or opéra comique in 3 acts by composer Daniel Auber. The French language libretto by Adolphe d'Ennery and Eugène Cormon is based on Joseph François Souque's Le chevalier de Canolle...

(1868) and Reve d'amour (1869). Other opera librettos include La rose de Terone (1840), Si j'étais roi

Si j'étais roi

Si j'étais roi is an opéra-comique in three acts by Adolphe Adam. The libretto was written by Adolphe d'Ennery and Jules-Henri Brésil...

(1852), Le muletier de Tolède (1854) (on which Michael Balfe

Michael William Balfe

Michael William Balfe was an Irish composer, best-remembered for his opera The Bohemian Girl.After a short career as a violinist, Balfe pursued an operatic singing career, while he began to compose. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he composed 38 operas, almost 250 songs and other works...

's The Rose of Castille

The Rose of Castille

The Rose of Castille is an opera in three acts, with music by Michael William Balfe to an English-language libretto by Augustus Glossop Harris and Edmund Falconer, after the libretto by Adolphe d'Ennery and Clairville for Adolphe Adam's Le muletier de Tolède...

(1857) was based), and À Clichy (1854) by Adolphe Adam

Adolphe Adam

Adolphe Charles Adam was a French composer and music critic. A prolific composer of operas and ballets, he is best known today for his ballets Giselle and Le corsaire , his operas Le postillon de Lonjumeau , Le toréador and Si j'étais roi , and his Christmas...

, Massenet's early Don César de Bazan

Don César de Bazan

Don César de Bazan is an opéra comique in four acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Adolphe d'Ennery, Jean Henri Dumanoir and Jules Chantepie, based on the drama Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo...

(1872) and Hervé

Hervé (composer)

Hervé , real name Louis Auguste Florimond Ronger, was a French singer, composer, librettist, conductor and scene painter, whom Ernest Newman, following Reynaldo Hahn, credited with inventing the genre of operetta in Paris.-Life:Hervé was born in Houdain near Arras...

's La nuit aux soufflets (1884) He prepared for the stage Balzac

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....

's posthumous comedy Mercadet ou le faiseur, presented at the Théâtre du Gymnase Marie Bell

Théâtre du Gymnase Marie Bell

The Théâtre du Gymnase or Théâtre du Gymnase Marie Bell, is a theatre in Paris, at 38, boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle in the 10th arrondissement .-History:...

 in 1851. Reversing the usual order of procedure, d'Ennery adapted some of his plays to the form of novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

s.

He died in Paris in 1899.