right|thumb|upright=1.25|alt=Colourful theatre poster depicting a party in Hades|Poster for Paris revival, 1878
Orpheus in the Underworld Cremieux and Ludovic Halévy sketched out a libretto for him lampooning such characters. In his 1980 study of Offenbach, Alexander Faris writes, " became not only a triumph, but a cult." It ran for 228 performances, at a time when a run of 100 nights was considered a success. 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".
In 1874 Offenbach substantially expanded the piece, doubling the length of the score and turning the intimate opéra bouffon of 1858 into a four-act opéra féerie extravaganza, with substantial ballet sequences. This version opened at the Théâtre de la Gaîté on 7 February 1874, ran for 290 performances, and broke box-office records for that theatre. During the first run of the revised version Offenbach expanded it even further, adding ballets illustrating the kingdom of Neptune in Act 3
!Premiere cast (two-act version), 21 October 1858(Conductor: Jacques Offenbach)
!Premiere cast (four-act version), 7 February 1874(Conductor: Albert Vizentini)
|-
|Pluton (Pluto), god of the underworld, disguised as Aristée (Aristaeus), a shepherd
|tenor
|Léonce
|Achille-Félix Montaubry
|-
|Jupiter, king of the gods
|low tenor or high baritone
|Désiré
|Christian
|-
|Orphée (Orpheus), a musician
|tenor
|Henri Tayau
|Meyronnet
|-
|John Styx, servant of Pluton, formerly king of Boeotia
|tenor or baritone
|Bache
|Alexandre, fils
|-
|Mercure (Mercury), messenger of the gods
|tenor
|J. Paul
|Pierre Grivot
|-
|Bacchus, god of wine
|spoken
|Antognini
|Chevalier
|-
|Mars, god of war
|bass
|Floquet
|Gravier
|-
|Eurydice, wife of Orphée
|soprano
|Lise Tautin
|Marie Cico
|-
|Diane (Diana), goddess of chastity
|soprano
|Chabert
|Berthe Perret
|-
| (Public Opinion)
|mezzo-soprano
|Marguerite Macé-Montrouge
|Elvire Gilbert
|-
|Junon (Juno), wife of Jupiter
|soprano or mezzo-soprano
|Enjalbert
|Pauline Lyon
|-
|Vénus (Venus), goddess of beauty
|soprano
|Marie Garnier
|Angèle
|-
|Cupidon (Cupid), god of love
|soprano (en travesti)
|Coralie Geoffroy
|Matz-Ferrare
|-
|Minerve (Minerva), goddess of wisdom
|soprano
|Marie Cico
|Castello
|-
|Morphée (Morpheus), god of sleep
|tenor
| –
|Monet
|-
|Minos
|baritone/tenor
| –
|Scipion
|-
|Éaque (Aeacus)
|tenor
| –
|Jean Paul
|-
|Rhadamante (Rhadamanthus)
|bass
| –
|J. Vizentini
|-
| colspan="4" |Gods, goddesses, muses, shepherds, shepherdesses, lictors and spirits in the underworld
|-
|}
Synopsis
Original two-act version
Act 1, Scene 1: The countryside near Thebes, Ancient Greece
A spoken introduction with orchestral accompaniment (Introduction and Melodrame) opens the work. Public Opinion explains who she is – the guardian of morality (). She says that unlike the chorus in Ancient Greek plays she does not merely comment on the action, but intervenes in it, to make sure the story maintains a high moral tone. Her efforts are hampered by the facts of the matter: Orphée is not the son of Apollo, as in classical myth, but a rustic teacher of music, whose dislike of his wife, Eurydice, is heartily reciprocated. She is in love with the shepherd, Aristée (Aristaeus), who lives next door (), and Orphée is in love with Chloë, a shepherdess. When Orphée mistakes Eurydice for her, everything comes out, and Eurydice insists they abandon the marriage. Orphée, fearing Public Opinion's reaction, torments his wife into keeping the scandal quiet using violin music, which she hates ().
thumb|left|upright=1.1|Marie Garnier as Vénus in the original 1858 production|alt=Young woman with dark hair and moderately revealing pseudo-Ancient-Greek costume
Aristée enters. Though seemingly a shepherd he is in reality Pluton (Pluto), God of the Underworld. He keeps up his disguise by singing a pastoral song about sheep (). Eurydice has discovered what she thinks is a plot by Orphée to kill Aristée – letting snakes loose in the fields – but is in fact a conspiracy between Orphée and Pluton to kill her, so that Pluton may have her and Orphée be rid of her. Pluton tricks her into walking into the trap by showing immunity to it, and she is bitten. As she dies, Pluton transforms into his true form (Transformation Scene). Eurydice finds that death is not so bad when the God of Death is in love with one (). They descend into the Underworld as soon as Eurydice has left a note telling her husband she has been unavoidably detained.
All seems to be going well for Orphée until Public Opinion catches up with him, and threatens to ruin his violin teaching career unless he goes to rescue his wife. Orphée reluctantly agrees.
Act 1, Scene 2: Olympus
The scene changes to Olympus, where the Gods are sleeping (). Cupidon and Vénus enter separately from amatory nocturnal escapades and join their sleeping colleagues, but everyone is soon woken by the sound of the horn of Diane, supposedly chaste huntress and goddess. She laments the sudden absence of Actaeon, her current love (); to her indignation, Jupiter tells her he has turned Actaeon into a stag to protect her reputation. Mercury arrives and reports that he has visited the Underworld, to which Pluton has just returned with a beautiful woman. Pluton enters, and is taken to task by Jupiter for his scandalous private life. To Pluton's relief the other Gods choose this moment to revolt against Jupiter's reign, their boring diet of ambrosia and nectar, and the sheer tedium of Olympus (). Jupiter's demands to know what is going on lead them to point out his hypocrisy in detail, poking fun at all his mythological affairs ().
Orphée's arrival, with Public Opinion at his side, has the gods on their best behaviour (). Orphée obeys Public Opinion and pretends to be pining for Eurydice: he illustrates his supposed pain with a snatch of from Gluck's . Pluton is worried he will be forced to give Eurydice back; Jupiter announces that he is going to the Underworld to sort everything out. The other gods beg to come with him, he consents, and mass celebrations break out at this holiday ().
Act 2, Scene 1: Pluton's boudoir in the Underworld
thumb|upright|alt=man dressed up as a fly|Jupiter transformed into a fly – [[Désiré (baritone)|Désiré, in the 1858 production]]
Eurydice is being kept locked up by Pluton, and is finding life very tedious. Her gaoler is a dull-witted tippler by the name of John Styx. Before he died, he was King of Boeotia (a region of Greece that Aristophanes made synonymous with country bumpkins), and he sings Eurydice a doleful lament for his lost kingship ().
Jupiter discovers where Pluton has hidden Eurydice, and slips through the keyhole by turning into a beautiful, golden fly. He meets Eurydice on the other side, and sings a love duet with her where his part consists entirely of buzzing (). Afterwards, he reveals himself to her, and promises to help her, largely because he wants her for himself. Pluton is left furiously berating John Styx.
Act 2, Scene 2: The banks of the Styx
The scene shifts to a huge party the gods are having, where ambrosia, nectar, and propriety are nowhere to be seen (). Eurydice is present, disguised as a bacchante (), but Jupiter's plan to sneak her out is interrupted by calls for a dance. Jupiter insists on a minuet, which everybody else finds boring (). Things liven up as the most famous number in the opera, the "Galop infernal", begins, and all present throw themselves into it with wild abandon ().
Ominous violin music heralds the approach of Orphée (Entrance of Orphée and Public Opinion), but Jupiter has a plan, and promises to keep Eurydice away from her husband. As with the standard myth, Orphée must not look back, or he will lose Eurydice forever (). Public Opinion keeps a close eye on him, to keep him from cheating, but Jupiter throws a lightning bolt, making him jump and look back, and Eurydice vanishes. Amid the ensuing turmoil, Jupiter proclaims that she will henceforth belong to the god Bacchus and become one of his priestesses. Public Opinion is not pleased, but Pluton has had enough of Eurydice, Orphée is free of her, and all ends happily.
Revised 1874 version
The plot is essentially that of the 1858 version. Instead of two acts with two scenes apiece, the later version is in four acts, which follow the plot of the four scenes of the original. The revised version differs from the first in having several interpolated ballet sequences, and some extra characters and musical numbers. The additions do not affect the main narrative but add considerably to the length of the score. one trombone, timpani, percussion (bass drum/cymbals, triangle), and strings. 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.
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 , Mercure's rondo , and the "Policeman's Chorus" have gained favour, and some or all are often added to performances otherwise using the 1858 text. The Offenbach Edition Keck has subsequently published the 1874 score, and another drawing on both the 1858 and 1874 versions.
Overture and galop
The best-known and much-recorded overture 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 , the couplets , the , the section of the Act 2 finale, and the Act 4 galop.
Fifteen years or so after Offenbach's death the galop from Act 2 (or Act 4 in the 1874 version) became one of the world's most famous pieces of music,]]
From the outset divided critical opinion. Janin's furious condemnation did the work much more good than harm, Bertrand Jouvin, in , criticised some of the cast but praised the staging – "a fantasy show, which has all the variety, all the surprises of fairy-opera". The thought that though it would be wrong to expect too much in a piece of this genre, was one of Offenbach's most outstanding works, with charming couplets for Eurydice, Aristée-Pluton and the King of Boeotia. called the cast "thoroughbreds" who did full justice to "all the charming jokes, all the delicious originalities, all the farcical oddities thrown in profusion into Offenbach's music".
Writing of the 1874 revised version, the authors of said, " 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 (1881) that the piece is "a coarse and grotesque parody" full of "vulgar and indecent scenes" that "give off an unhealthy smell".
The opera was widely seen as containing thinly disguised satire of the régime of Napoleon III, but the early press criticisms of the work focused on its mockery of revered classical authors such as Ovid and the equally sacrosanct music of Gluck's . Faris comments that the satire perpetrated by Offenbach and his librettists was cheeky rather than hard-hitting, and Richard Taruskin in his study of 19th-century music observes, "The calculated licentiousness and feigned sacrilege, which successfully baited the stuffier critics, were recognized by all for what they were – a social palliative, the very opposite of social criticism[...] The spectacle of the Olympian gods doing the cancan threatened nobody's dignity." The Emperor greatly enjoyed when he saw it at a command performance in 1860; he told Offenbach he would "never forget that dazzling evening".
20th and 21st centuries
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 , 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. 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:
Among modern critics, Traubner describes 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 has remained Offenbach's best-known work, "a consensus as to the best of his operettas would probably prefer for its sparkle, for its charm and for its all-round brilliance". Kurt Gänzl writes in The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre that compared with earlier efforts, 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." In a 2014 study of parody and burlesque in , Hadlock writes:
Revivals
France
thumb|alt=man dressed as a giant fly hovering over a reclining young woman|upright=1.5|right|[[Jeanne Granier and Eugène Vauthier as Eurydice and Jupiter, 1887 – ]]
Between the first run and the first Paris revival, in 1860, the Bouffes-Parisiens company toured the French provinces, where 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. 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, 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 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.
Continental Europe
The first production outside France is believed to have been at Breslau in October 1859. It was for this production that Carl Binder put together the version of the overture that is now the best known.