Ombre légère qui suis mes pas (Shadow Song) (Dinorah)

Meyerbeer's Dinorah — properly Le pardon de Ploërmel — reached the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 4 April 1859, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré set among Breton peasants and turning on a treasure hunt that ends in a storm. Its heroine has lost her reason after being abandoned on her wedding day, and the opera's best-known number makes spectacle of that condition: alone on a moonlit path, Dinorah sings and dances with her own shadow. Meyerbeer wrote the part for the coloratura Marie Cabel; the Shadow Song has outlived the opera around it.