The scéne lyrique has a continuous if mottled history in France. Stemming from Rousseau's Pygmalion (1762), the genre became progressively more dramatic in character and was often identified with the mélodrame on the one hand and the drame lyrique on the other. It remained more akin to the Italian cantata, however, with a soloist or soloists, instruments, and sometimes chorus as well, performed as a concert piece rather than a full-fledged tragédie en musique, the form of opera initiated by Lully in the second half of the seventeenth century. Lully's successor Rameau subsequently created other related genres, such as his opéra-ballets, pastorales héroïques, and comédies lyriques, bringing them to a high degree of sophistication.

It was Jean-Frédéric Edelmann (1749–94) and his better-known pupil Etienne Mehul who took up the form of the scéne lyrique and developed it in such a way that Hector Berlioz, a few years later, was able to complete works which included Herminie (1828) and La mort de Cleopatre (1829) as effective, cantata-like compositions. These were written for soprano and orchestra, and Herminie won second prize in the Prix de Rome competition. But it was on his fourth attempt, Sardanapale for tenor, chorus and orchestra (1830), that Berlioz finally won joint first prize. In due course almost every major French composer from Berlioz to Debussy (L'Enfant Prodigue, 1884) undertook to compose a scéne lyrique, from simple voice and piano works to more ambitious choral-orchestral compositions.

Always one for promoting French musicians, Berlioz referred to Theodore Louis Gouvy (1819–98) in the Journal des débats (1851) as an important composer, one who should be known in Parisian musical circles. But the public at that time in the capital was only interested in opera, and Gouvy's extensive instrumental works, many of which were published during his lifetime, had to wait for universal recognition until the twentieth century. He produced over two hundred substantial compositions, including symphonies, cantatas, and religious works, but his industry, poetic sensitivity, and skill are all apparent in the single composition he based on Ossian: the scène lyrique, Le dernier Hymne d'Ossian, op. 15, published in 1858. Its full score of 72 pages is redolent of a mind acutely responsive to nuances in the chosen text, which is based on Macpherson's prose poem “Berrathon.”