Background
In 1825 his La Dame blanche proved a major success, partly due to the reaction against Rossini's Italian operas and partly to the simple sweetness of its melodies (some of them originally Scots airs) and the fashionable interest of the libretto, which the dramatist Augustin Scribe had constructed from Sir Walter Scott's The Monastery and Guy Mannering. Boieldieu never again succeeded in pleasing the Parisian public, for whom Daniel Auber and then Giacomo Meyerbeer were the new gods, and his last years were shadowed by money troubles and by the pulmonary disease which it seems he had contracted in Russia.
Education
He received a rudimentary musical education from the organist of Rouen cathedral.
Career
at age 18 had considerable local success with La Fille coupable, an opéraopera comique with libretto by his father. Two years later the success of a second work prompted him to try his fortune in Paris, where his gifts won him the friendship of many musicians. These included Luigi Cherubini, who is said to have rebuked him for the success of his Le Calife de Bagdad (1800), which Cherubini thought was undeserved, and to have put Boieldieu through a course of further musical studies, although he was already a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. Ma Tante Aurore (1803) again delighted the Parisian public, and in the same year Boieldieu was offered the post of conductor at the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg. Accepting, he remained in Russia eight years, but few of his compositions of that period have survived, with the exception of the popular Les Voitures verséesversees (1808).
In 1817 Boieldieu succeeded Etienne Méhul (Mehul) as professor of composition at the Conservatoire, and his activity as a composer considerably diminished.