As well as church and concert music, Gounod was composing operas, beginning with "La Nonne sanglante" (The Bloody Nun, 1854), a melodramatic ghost story with a libretto that Berlioz had tried and failed to set, and that Auber, Meyerbeer, Verdi and others had rejected. The librettists, Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne, reworked the text for Gounod and the piece opened at the Opéra on 18 October 1854. The critics derided the libretto but praised the music and production; the work was doing well at the box-office until it fell victim to musical politics. The director of the Opéra, Nestor Roqueplan, was supplanted by his enemy, François-Louis Crosnier, who described "La Nonne sanglante" as "filth" and shut the production down after its eleventh performance.