 Grand opera had already been prefigured by works such as Spontini's "La vestale" and Cherubini's "Les Abencérages" (1813), but the composer history has above all come to associate with the genre is Giacomo Meyerbeer.Like Gluck, Meyerbeer was a German who had learnt his trade composing Italian opera before arriving in Paris.His first work for the Opéra, "Robert le diable" (1831), was a sensation; audiences particularly thrilled to the ballet sequence in Act Three in which the ghosts of corrupted nuns rise from their graves.