No looking back

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Simeone, Nigel

Jacques Offenbach: Orphee aux enfers: opera-bouffon en 2 acres et 4 tableaux: version de 1858 Edited by Jean-- Christophe Keck. Bote & Bock/Boosey & Hawkes (2001); full score, including CD-Rom with critical commentary, libretto and iconography; L85.00 / piano-vocal score, 24.99.

NIGEL SIMEONE looks forward to future volumes in a ground-breaking critical edition

ORPHEE AUX ENFERS was first produced as an opera-bouffon in two acts at the Theatre des Bouffes-Parisiens on 21 October 1858; it was Offenbach's earliest full-length work to be performed there. A few weeks later a piano-vocal score of the work was published by Heugel, as were several individual songs. In May the following year Orphee had already reached its 150th performance, and this tremendous box-office success was further nourished by attacks on the piece from the likes of Jules Janin, who denounced it as sacrilege and a desecration of classical civilisation. Other critics were outraged by the irreverent treatment of Gluck's Orphee, a work viewed by these unsmiling guardians of artistic decency as an inviolable icon of operatic excellence. The reaction to remarks of this kind was both pleasing and predictable, and it was neatly summed up by Alexander Faris: `The public, intrigued by the rumpus and its attendant publicity, began to flock to the Bouffes and Orphee became not only a triumph but a cult.' A couple of months later in 1859, when the Emperor's troops came back from victory at Magenta, they marched to tunes from Orphee.

So within a year of its premiere, this music had made such an impact that it was being taken up by France's victorious armies; it was this kind of institutional acceptance which led directly to Offenbach's own acceptance as a French citizen: his official naturalisation papers are dated 14 January 1860. In April the same year, a gala performance of Orphee was given at the Theatre des Italiens for the Emperor Louis-Napoleon. By the time Offenbach expanded the work into a four-- act `opera-feerie' in 1874, France had been through the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War, the horrors of the Siege of Paris and the Commune and, ultimately, the establishment of a new Republic. Things were never the same again for Offenbach, but the new success of the revised Orphee, in a spectacular production, maintained the composer's place in the public's affection; it is the 1874 four-act opera which subsequently established itself as the standard version of the work, especially in France.

This new edition of Orphee aux enfers is an impressive publication in every way, and an important one too. Here, for the first time ever, is a full score - any full score - of the work, beautifully printed and handsomely bound. It is the first volume of the projected `Offenbach Edition Keck', a complete edition of his works, edited by Jean-- Christophe Keck.

This enterprise could not have wished for a better start. While Orphee is more familiar in Offenbach's revamped 1874 version (this will appear as vol.IV/1 of the Keck edition in due course), it was an inspired decision to publish the 1858 version: less well-known but arguably taughter and fresher in its two-act format. Certainly it is a good deal shorter: the original Heugel edition of the 1858 version runs to 147 pages of vocal score, whereas the 1874 vocal score issued by the same firm weighs in at over double that length at a hefty 301 pages. For the 1874 revival, Offenbach added the opening chorus (`Void, voici la douzieme heure'), the enchanting `Couplets des regrets' (`Ah! quelle triste destinee'), the `Valse des petits violinistes', the numbers including policemen, the trial scene. and a lot of ballet music (much of it delightful), as well as expanding some other numbers.

Otherwise, however, the first version contains many of the familiar songs, but is a good deal more compact: instead of a substantial overture and the opening chorus, the opera begins after a much shorter overture (ending with a brief passage of melodrama introducing L.Opinion publique) with Euridice's first song (`La femme dont le coeur reve'). Most of the other big numbers were in the 1858 version: the Orpheus and Euridice duet with violin obbligato, the 'Fly' duet (Euridice/Jupiter), the wonderful finale to Act I (or Act 11 in 1874) with its send-up of a triumphal chorus, `Gloire, gloire A Jupiter', followed by the jauntiest imaginable journey to Hell - one early production had the cast travelling the length of a bus route from the Champs-Elysees to the Barriere des Enfers during this scene; the Revolutionary chorus, John Styx's song (of which more in a moment), and the `Galop infernal', much better known as... well - rather endearingly, in the critical report the word `can-can' is mentioned just once, on page 40 of 43 pages of the English version, in a brief but stern paragraph which stresses that its transformation into one of the world's most famous pieces of music thanks to the Moulin Rouge and the Folies-Bergere came some fifteen years after Offenbach's death. No need to worry though: as the editor points out, the original `Infernal galop' was a considerably more spontaneous and riotous affair (Keck likens it to a modern rave, but let us hope that opera directors aren't minded to try this).