OrpheusEurydice1.0226

Jacques Offenbach, Orphée aux Enfers. Libretto by L. Halévy and H-J. Crémieux. Premiered Paris 1858, revised by Halévy and Meilhac and performed 1874.

A. Lamb, "Orphée aux enfers." The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Grove Music Online.Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press.

A parody of Gluck and a parody of the Second Empire of Napoleon III at once. This landmark comic operetta has been called "the parody to end all parodies". It opened 1858 (rev. 1874) at the Bouffes-Parisiens theatre and became scandalously popular. The Orpheus myth becomes "a vehicle for satirising the [2nd Empire] and contemporary social conditions." (Howard p. 95)
“ ... [The] cancan underlines and popularizes the leading motive of all the Offenbach libretti, ‘the profan-ation of the principle of authority … its dragging into the gutter.’ The Offenbach parodies were uncon-sciously to play their part in weaken-ing the authority of the very Emperor [Napoleon III] who applauded them. But when OaE was given for the first time at the [Theatre] Bouffes, on October 21, such an ideasurred to no one. It ran for 288 nights in succession, and its final galop, the cancan, ‘in which a whole civilization seems to fling itself into a gigantic comic apodtheo-sis,’ at once became the dance in fashion. " F. H. Martens, “Music Mirrors of the Second Empire — Part II” The Musical Quarterly 16 (1930) 566 (563 – 87)[JSTOR].

At right: contemporary poster for 1874 revised production