A comic opera that lampoons classical myth and satirizes Second Empire France
What the Work Is
Orpheus in the Underworld (French: Orphée aux enfers) is a comic opera with music by Jacques Offenbach and a French libretto by Hector Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy. It premiered as a two-act opéra bouffon at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris on 21 October 1858, and was later expanded into a four-act opéra féerie version presented at the Théâtre de la Gaîté on 7 February 1874. The work was Offenbach’s first full-length opera and became one of his most frequently performed pieces.
What the Book Is About
The opera is a lampoon of the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. In this irreverent retelling, Orpheus is not the son of Apollo but a rustic violin teacher who is glad to be rid of his wife when she is abducted by Pluto, the god of the underworld. Orpheus must be bullied by the character Public Opinion into attempting to rescue Eurydice. The reprehensible conduct of the gods of Olympus in the opera was widely understood as a veiled satire of the court and government of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central comic engine of the work is its systematic deflation of classical mythology. The gods of Olympus are portrayed as bored, hypocritical, and morally corrupt, more concerned with their amorous escapades than with any divine dignity. Jupiter, the king of the gods, is depicted as a hypocrite who criticizes Pluto’s scandalous private life while pursuing Eurydice for himself. The opera’s treatment of the Orpheus myth inverts the tragic seriousness of the original legend: Orpheus does not want his wife back, and the gods are not majestic but petty and ridiculous.
The work also parodies earlier operatic treatments of the myth, particularly Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. At one point Orpheus illustrates his supposed grief with a snatch of “Che farò senza Euridice” from Gluck’s opera, a moment of musical quotation that underscores the parody. The librettists’ disrespect for classic mythology and the composer’s parody of Gluck provoked outrage from some critics, while others praised the piece highly.
The satire was widely seen as targeting the régime of Napoleon III, though early press criticisms focused more on its mockery of revered classical authors such as Ovid and the sacrosanct music of Gluck. Later commentators have noted that the satire was cheeky rather than hard-hitting. As one music historian observed, the calculated licentiousness and feigned sacrilege were recognized for what they were—a social palliative rather than genuine social criticism. The spectacle of the Olympian gods dancing the cancan threatened nobody’s dignity. The Emperor himself greatly enjoyed the opera when he saw it at a command performance in 1860, telling Offenbach he would never forget that dazzling evening.
Structure and Approach
The original 1858 version consists of two acts, each divided into two scenes. The first scene is set in the countryside near Thebes, where the mortal characters are introduced and Eurydice is tricked into the underworld. The second scene moves to Olympus, where the gods are shown sleeping off their nocturnal amatory adventures and where Jupiter decides to intervene. The second act takes place in the underworld, first in Pluto’s boudoir where Eurydice is kept locked up, and finally on the banks of the Styx, where a wild party erupts and the famous “Galop infernal” is danced.
The 1874 revision follows essentially the same plot but expands it into four acts with substantial ballet sequences, additional characters, and new musical numbers. The additions do not affect the main narrative but add considerably to the length of the score. New material includes an opening chorus for shepherds, a solo entrance for Mercury, a new solo for Eurydice, a number for Cupid, and the addition of the three judges of Hades and a band of policemen involved in Jupiter’s search for the concealed Eurydice.
The score displays an abundance of couplets—songs with repeated verses—alongside a variety of solos, duets, large choruses, and two extended finales. Offenbach wrote in a range of styles, from Rococo pastoral to pastiche of Italian opera to the uproarious galop. His melodies often leap backwards and forwards in an acrobatic manner while still sounding smoothly lyrical and spontaneous. In up-tempo numbers like the “Galop infernal,” he makes a virtue of simplicity, often keeping to the same key through most of the number with largely unvarying instrumentation. Elsewhere the orchestra is given greater prominence, as in the “duo de la mouche,” where Jupiter’s part consists of buzzing like a fly, accompanied by the violins playing sul ponticello to produce a similarly buzzing sound.
The opera was the first of Offenbach’s major works to have a chorus. Although the chorus appears extensively as Pluto’s minions, bored residents of Olympus, and bacchantes in Hades, they are treated as a nameless, faceless crowd who fill out the vocal parts in large ensemble numbers. In the Olympus scene, the chorus has an unusual bocca chiusa section, marked “Bouche fermée,” an effect later used by Bizet in Djamileh and Puccini in the “Humming Chorus” in Madama Butterfly.
Significance and Influence
The original 1858 production was initially only moderately successful at the box office, but business received an inadvertent boost from the critic Jules Janin of the Journal des débats, who published a furious condemnation of what he called a blasphemous, lascivious outrage—”a profanation of holy and glorious antiquity.” His attack, and the irreverent public ripostes by Crémieux and Offenbach, made headlines and provoked huge interest among the Parisian public. The opera ran for 228 performances, at a time when a run of 100 nights was considered a success. The 1874 revival broke box-office records at the Gaîté, running for 290 performances.
The work divided critical opinion from the outset. Some praised it as unprecedented, splendid, outrageous, gracious, delightful, witty, amusing, successful, perfect, and tuneful. Others condemned it as a coarse and grotesque parody full of vulgar and indecent scenes. The opera was frequently staged in France and internationally during the composer’s lifetime and throughout the 20th century, and it continues to be revived in the 21st century.
In the last decade of the 19th century, the Paris cabarets the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère adopted the music of the “Galop infernal” from the culminating scene of the opera to accompany the can-can, and ever since then the tune has been popularly associated with the dance. The original galop was considerably more spontaneous and riotous than the fin de siècle can-can—one scholar likens the original to a modern rave—but the tune is now inseparable in the public mind from high-kicking female can-can dancers.
The best-known overture associated with the opera is not by Offenbach at all. It was arranged by the Austrian musician Carl Binder for the first production of the opera in Vienna in 1860. Offenbach’s 1858 score has only a short orchestral introduction, while the 1874 revision has a longer overture drawing on many themes from the score.
Modern critics have described the work as the first great full-length classical French operetta, a gloriously imaginative parody of classic mythology and of modern events decorated with Offenbach’s most laughing bouffe music. One scholar notes that with Orpheus in the Underworld, the genre now known as operetta gathered its forces and leapt forward, while still retaining the quick, concise style of its one-act predecessors, their absurdist and risqué sensibility, and their economy in creating maximum comic impact with limited resources. At the same time, it reflects Offenbach’s desire to establish himself and his company as legitimate heirs of the 18th-century French comic tradition.
The theatrical licensing laws in force between 1855 and 1858 permitted Offenbach only four singers in any piece, and with such small casts, full-length works were out of the question. In 1858 the licensing restrictions were relaxed, and Offenbach was free to go ahead with a two-act work that had been in his mind for some time. Two years earlier he had told his friend the writer Hector Crémieux that when he was musical director of the Comédie-Française in the early 1850s he swore revenge for the boredom he suffered from the posturings of mythical heroes and gods of Olympus in the plays presented there. Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy sketched out a libretto for him lampooning such characters. By 1858, when Offenbach was finally allowed a large enough cast to do the theme justice, Halévy was preoccupied with his work as a senior civil servant, and the final libretto was credited to Crémieux alone. Most of the roles were written with popular members of the Bouffes company in mind, including Désiré, Léonce, Lise Tautin, and Henri Tayau as an Orphée who could actually play Orpheus’s violin.
The Original Production’s Financial Context
At first the piece did reasonably well at the box-office but was not the tremendous success Offenbach had hoped for. He insisted on lavish stagings for his operas: expenses were apt to outrun receipts, and he was in need of a substantial money-spinner. The original 1858 production became a box-office success, and ran well into the following year, rescuing Offenbach and his Bouffes company from financial difficulty. Albert Lasalle, in his history of the Bouffes-Parisiens (1860), wrote that the piece closed in June 1859 – although it was still performing strongly at the box-office – “because the actors, who could not tire the public, were themselves exhausted”. During the first run of the revised version Offenbach expanded it even further, adding ballets illustrating the kingdom of Neptune in Act 3 and bringing the total number of scenes in the four acts to twenty-two.
The 1874 Revision’s Orchestral Forces
The orchestra at the Bouffes-Parisiens was small – probably about thirty players. The 1858 version of Orphée aux enfers is scored for two flutes (the second doubling piccolo), one oboe, two clarinets, one bassoon, two horns, two cornets, one trombone, timpani, percussion (bass drum/cymbals, triangle), and strings. The Offenbach scholar Jean-Christophe Keck speculates that the string sections consisted of at most six first violins, four second violins, three violas, four cellos, and one double bass. The 1874 score calls for considerably greater orchestral forces: Offenbach added additional parts for woodwind, brass and percussion sections. For the premiere of the revised version he engaged an orchestra of sixty players, as well as a military band of a further forty players for the procession of the gods from Olympus at the end of the second act.
Editions and Scholarly Reconstructions
For more than a century after the composer’s death one cause of critical reservations about this and his other works was the persistence of what the musicologist Nigel Simeone has called “botched, butchered and bowdlerised” versions. Since the beginning of the 21st century a project has been under way to release scholarly and reliable scores of Offenbach’s operas, under the editorship of Keck. The first to be published, in 2002, was the 1858 version of Orphée aux enfers. The Offenbach Edition Keck has subsequently published the 1874 score, and another drawing on both the 1858 and 1874 versions.
The Overture’s Structure
Offenbach’s 1858 score has a short orchestral introduction of 104 bars; it begins with a quiet melody for woodwind, followed by the theme of Jupiter’s Act 2 minuet, in A♭ major and segues via a mock-pompous fugue in F major into Public Opinion’s opening monologue. The overture to the 1874 revision is a 393-bar piece, in which Jupiter’s minuet and John Styx’s song recur, interspersed with many themes from the score including “J’ai vu le Dieu Bacchus”, the couplets “Je suis Vénus”, the Rondeau des métamorphoses, the “Partons, partons” section of the Act 2 finale, and the Act 4 galop.
Musical Analysis and Critical Commentary
In a 2014 study Heather Hadlock comments that for the King of the Boeotians’ song, Offenbach composed “a languid yet restless melody” over a static musette-style drone-bass accompaniment of alternating dominant and tonic harmonies, simultaneously evoking and mocking nostalgia for a lost place and time and “creating a perpetually unresolved tension between pathos and irony”. Wilfrid Mellers finds that Styx’s aria has “a pathos that touches the heart” – perhaps, he suggests, the only instance of true feeling in the opera. In 1999 Thomas Schipperges wrote in the International Journal of Musicology that many scholars hold that Offenbach’s music defies all musicological methods. He did not agree, and analysed the “Galop infernal”, finding it to be sophisticated in many details: “For all its straightforwardness, it reveals a calculated design. The overall ‘economy’ of the piece serves a deliberate musical dramaturgy.” Hadlock observes that although the best-known music in the opera is “driven by the propulsive energies of Rossinian comedy” and the up-tempo galop, such lively numbers go side by side with statelier music in an 18th-century vein: “The score’s sophistication results from Offenbach’s intertwining of contemporary urban musical language with a restrained and wistful tone that is undermined and ironized without ever being entirely undone”. In Le Figaro, Gustave Lafargue remarked that Offenbach’s use of a piccolo trill punctuated by a tap on a cymbal in the finale of the first scene was a modern recreation of an effect invented by Gluck in his score of Iphigénie en Aulide. Gervase Hughes comments on the elaborate scoring of the “ballet des mouches” [Act 3, 1874 version], and calls it “a tour de force” that could have inspired Tchaikovsky.
Reception of the 1874 Revision
The music of the 1874 revision was well received by contemporary reviewers, but some later critics have felt the longer score, with its extended ballet sections, has occasional dull patches. Nonetheless, some of the added numbers, particularly Cupidon’s “Couplets des baisers”, Mercure’s rondo “Eh hop”, and the “Policeman’s Chorus” have gained favour, and some or all are often added to performances otherwise using the 1858 text. Writing of the 1874 revised version, the authors of Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique said, “Orphée aux enfers is above all a good show. The music of Offenbach has retained its youth and spirit. The amusing operetta of yore has become a splendid extravaganza”, against which Félix Clément and Pierre Larousse wrote in their Dictionnaire des Opéras (1881) that the piece is “a coarse and grotesque parody” full of “vulgar and indecent scenes” that “give off an unhealthy smell”.
20th-Century Critical Assessment
After Offenbach’s death his reputation in France suffered a temporary eclipse. In Faris’s words, his comic operas were “dismissed as irrelevant and meretricious souvenirs of a discredited Empire”. Obituarists in other countries similarly took it for granted that the comic operas, including Orphée, were ephemeral and would be forgotten. By the time of the composer’s centenary, in 1919, it had been clear for some years that such predictions had been wrong. Orphée was frequently revived, as were several more of his operas, and criticisms on moral or musical grounds had largely ceased. Gabriel Groviez wrote in The Musical Quarterly: “The libretto of Orphée overflows with spirit and humour and the score is full of sparkling wit and melodious charm. It is impossible to analyse adequately a piece wherein the sublimest idiocy and the most astonishing fancy clash at every turn. […] Offenbach never produced a more complete work.” Among modern critics, Traubner describes Orphée as “the first great full-length classical French operetta […] classical (in both senses of the term)”, although he regards the 1874 revision as “overblown”. Peter Gammond writes that the public appreciated the frivolity of the work while recognising that it is rooted in the best traditions of opéra comique. Among 21st-century writers Bernard Holland has commented that the music is “beautifully made, relentlessly cheerful, reluctantly serious”, but does not show as the later Tales of Hoffmann does “what a profoundly gifted composer Offenbach really was”; Andrew Lamb has commented that although Orphée aux enfers has remained Offenbach’s best-known work, “a consensus as to the best of his operettas would probably prefer La vie parisienne for its sparkle, La Périchole for its charm and La belle Hélène for its all-round brilliance”. Kurt Gänzl writes in The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre that compared with earlier efforts, Orphée aux enfers was “something on a different scale […] a gloriously imaginative parody of classic mythology and of modern events decorated with Offenbach’s most laughing bouffe music.”
French Revivals
Between the first run and the first Paris revival, in 1860, the Bouffes-Parisiens company toured the French provinces, where Orphée aux enfers was reported as meeting with “immense” and “incredible” success”. Tautin was succeeded as Eurydice by Delphine Ugalde when the production was revived at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1862 and again in 1867. The first revival of the 1874 version was at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in 1875 with Marie Blanche Peschard as Eurydice. It was revived again there in January 1878 with Meyronnet (Orphée), Peschard (Eurydice), Christian (Jupiter), Habay (Pluton) and Pierre Grivot as both Mercure and John Styx. For the Exposition Universelle season later that year Offenbach revived the piece again, with Grivot as Orphée, Peschard as Eurydice, the composer’s old friend and rival Hervé as Jupiter and Léonce as Pluton. The opera was seen again at the Gaîté in 1887 with Taufenberger (Orphée), Jeanne Granier (Eurydice), Eugène Vauthier (Jupiter) and Alexandre (Pluton). There was a revival at the Éden-Théâtre (1889) with Minart, Granier, Christian and Alexandre. 20th-century revivals in Paris included productions at the Théâtre des Variétés (1902) with Charles Prince (Orphée), Juliette Méaly (Eurydice), Guy (Jupiter) and Albert Brasseur (Pluton), and in 1912 with Paul Bourillon, Méaly, Guy and Prince; the Théâtre Mogador (1931) with Adrien Lamy, Manse Beaujon, Max Dearly and Lucien Muratore; the Opéra-Comique (1970) with Rémy Corazza, Anne-Marie Sanial, Michel Roux and Robert Andreozzi; the Théâtre de la Gaïté-Lyrique (1972) with Jean Giraudeau, Jean Brun, Albert Voli and Sanial; and by the Théâtre français de l’Opérette at the Espace Cardin (1984) with multiple casts including (in alphabetical order) André Dran, Maarten Koningsberger, Martine March, Martine Masquelin, Marcel Quillevere, Ghyslaine Raphanel, Bernard Sinclair and Michel Trempont. In January 1988 the work received its first performances at the Paris Opéra, with Michel Sénéchal (Orphée), Danielle Borst (Eurydice), François Le Roux (Jupiter), and Laurence Dale (Pluton). In December 1997 a production by Laurent Pelly was seen at the Opéra National de Lyon, where it was filmed for DVD, with Yann Beuron (Orphée), Natalie Dessay (Eurydice), Laurent Naouri (Jupiter) and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt (Pluton) with Marc Minkowski conducting. The production originated in Geneva, where it had been given in September – in a former hydroelectric plant used while the stage area of the Grand Théâtre was being renovated – by a cast headed by Beuron, Annick Massis, Naouri, and Éric Huchet.
Continental European Productions
The first production outside France is believed to have been at Breslau in October 1859. In December of the same year the opera opened in Prague. The work was given in German at the Carltheater, Vienna, in March 1860 in a version by Ludwig Kalisch, revised and embellished by Johann Nestroy, who played Jupiter. Making fun of Graeco-Roman mythology had a long tradition in the popular theatre of Vienna, and audiences had no difficulty with the disrespect that had outraged Jules Janin and others in Paris. It was for this production that Carl Binder put together the version of the overture that is now the best known. There were revivals at the same theatre in February and June 1861 (both given in French) and at the Theater an der Wien in January 1867. 1860 saw the work’s local premieres in Brussels, Stockholm, and Copenhagen.
