Gounod's opera Mirella was produced in Paris in 1864, and enjoyed a popular success. It has fallen into oblivion, and now only its overture is at all well known. The opera tells of -the course of true love running far from smoothly, and ending in the lovers' union too late. Mirella and her sweetheart, Vincent, find each other and win consent to their wedding, only for her to die in a mystic ecstasy. The tragic end of the story would hardly be guessed from the overture, which is thoroughly bright and tuneful.
In 1903 Sir George Alexander produced play entitled Old Heidelberg at the St. James's Theatre. It proved to be a highly sentimental but well-constructed play with considerable charm, and was a great success, being revived in 1909 and again in 1925. In Germany it is practically a classic of its kind. In 1926 a musical version of it was put on at His Majesty's Theatre; this, entitled The Student Prince, had some success chiefly owing to the introduction of a number of authentic students' songs sung with the precision and spirit one is led to expect from the undergraduates in a German university. This version, too, was revived in 1929 at the Piccadilly Theatre.