“CE BAL EST ORIGINAL!”: CLASSICAL PARODY AND BURLESQUE IN ORPHÉE AUX ENFERS BY CRÉMIEUX, HALÉVY AND OFFENBACH
HEATHER HADLOCK
Orpheus in a funhouse mirror What myth has been more significant in the history of opera than Orpheus? Two of the earliest Italian libretti, Rinuccini’s L’Euridice and Striggio’s L’Orfeo, treated the legend, and Orpheus became significant for the genesis of French opera as well when Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo helped sparked Parisian interest in the new form of sung drama in 1647. In the mid-eighteenth century, another Orpheus gave the first compelling voice to the values of operatic reform in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (Vienna, 1762) revised and expanded for the Paris Opéra as Orphée et Eurydice in 1774.1 In every incarnation it asserted that love can overcome death, and at the same time offered cautionary tales about how the human weaknesses of doubt, impatience, lack of faith, susceptibility, and over-reliance on the senses could bring down even the greatest hero. Most irresistibly to opera’s creators and renewers, it celebrated the power of music to captivate, to uplift, and to inspire merciful and generous actions in the listener. The modern French operetta that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century also had its Orpheus. In 1858 Orphée aux enfers, with music by Jacques Offenbach and a libretto by Hector Jonathan Crémieux and the uncredited Ludovic Halévy, presented the Classical subject, and Gluck’s iconic rendering of it, as in a funhouse mirror. Nor did the comic work rely exclusively on the Orpheus archetype transmitted in
1 Gluck’s librettist Calzabigi followed his classical exemplars Ovid and Virgil, with two exceptions: first, he represented Orpheus’ turning to look at Euridice as a response to Euridice’s pleading, rather than a result of inner weakness (so that the woman causes her own second death with her lack of faith); second, he created a lieto fine to suit the optimistic ethos of reform opera by having Amor appear to revive Euridice and reunite the couple. 156 Heather Hadlock earlier operas, but also restores the Bacchic dimension of Orpheus’ myth (which operas had tended to omit), depicts the denizens of Mt. Olympus as well as Hades, and incorporates a new subplot inspired by Jupiter’s catalogue of seductions. The parenthetical elements in italics indicate the new events that Offenbach’s librettists wove into the familiar plot:
Orpheus, the musician and demi-god, won the nymph Eurydice with his beautiful playing and singing, but she (tired of him, fell for a handsome shepherd who turned out to be Pluto, god of the underworld, and) died. (Orpheus was relieved, yet the power of Public Opinion compelled him to go after her.) Assisted by the power of music (and Public Opinion), he appealed to the gods to give her back, (first visiting them on Mount Olympus, and) finally descending into Hades to retrieve her. (Meanwhile, in Hades, Jupiter took the form of a golden fly to seduce the already bored Eurydice.) The gods granted Orpheus’ plea, on the condition that he not look at her until he had returned to the surface. But (Jupiter threw a thunderbolt to distract him and) he did look back, thereby again losing Eurydice (who remained happily in the underworld, transformed into a bacchante).
In order to understand the relation of this opéra-bouffon to its sources, we need to consider not only the classical myth transmitted by Ovid and Virgil, but also the classic work of Gluck, a foundation of modern opera. For the nineteenth century, Gluck’s was the Orpheus opera that mattered, both as a neo-classical model of noble simplicity and as a powerful presentation of the myth’s themes. Orphée et Eurydice had been staged regularly at the Paris Opéra between 1774 and 1831. Between 1831 and 1858 (apart from a short-lived production of the full opera in 1848, which seems to have made little or no impression), audiences mainly knew it through a few famous excerpts: the Act II “scène d’enfer” of Orpheus with the Furies, the Act III duet in which Eurydice begs Orpheus to look at her, and the lament “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice” that he sings after her second