The libretto to Nina, ou La folle par amour, was written by French author Benoit-Joseph Marsollier de Vivetieres. The highly witty text was turned into a one-act comédie melee d'Ariettes by Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac and first performed at the Paris Comedie-Italienne on May 15, 1786. Supposedly the story on which the opera is based was true. Nina was a young lovesick woman who went mad when she believed her true love had been sent away and murdered; she spent several hours of each day in delirium, anxiously waiting for his return. This particular figure of deranged femininity was used in a contemporary play by Baculard d'Arnaud and in the novel Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stern. The text for Dalayrac's Nina also formed the basis for Paisiello's 1790 Italian opera on the same subject.

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