Der Vampyr (The Vampire) is an opera (designated as a Romantische Oper) in three acts by
Peter Josef von Lindpaintner. The German libretto by Cäsar Max Hegel was based on a work by Heinrich Ludwig Ritter, based in turn on a French melodrama by Charles Nodier, Pierre Carmouche and Achille de Jouffroy, ultimately traceable to the short story "The Vampyre" (1819) by John William Polidori, although Lindpaintner's libretto credits, erroneously, Lord Byron.
Other early 19th-century operas on the same theme were Silvestro de Palma's I vampiri (1812), Martin-Joseph Mengal's Le vampire (1826), and
Heinrich Marschner's
Der Vampyr of the same year as Lindpaintner's opera (1828).
The first performance took place at the Hoftheater [de] in Stuttgart on 21 September 1828. It proved the most successful of the composer's operas.
Lindpaintner made a revised version of the opera in 1850, when he put recitatives in the place of the original spoken dialogue.
The scene of the action is in the south of France (not Scotland), though in general it follows the same story as Marschner's Der Vampyr.
