La belle Hélène
After successes with his early works – short pieces for modest forces – he was granted a licence in 1858 to stage full-length operas with larger casts and chorus.
The first of these to be produced, Orphée aux enfers, achieved notoriety and box-office success for its risqué satire of Greek mythology, French musical tradition, and the Second Empire.
His frequent collaborator, Ludovic Halévy, wrote a sketch for an opera to be called The Capture of Troy (La prise de Troie).
The manager of the Théâtre des Variétés, Théodore Cogniard, was penny-pinching and unsympathetic to Offenbach's taste for lavish staging and large-scale orchestration, and the two leading ladies – Hortense Schneider and Léa Silly – engaged in a running feud with each other.
[11] It ran through most of 1865 (with a summer break in mid-run),[12] and was replaced in February 1866 with Barbe-bleue, starring the same leading players, except for Silly, with whom Schneider declined ever to appear with again.
Paris arrives, disguised as a shepherd, and wins three prizes at a "contest of wit" (outrageously silly wordgames) with the Greek kings under the direction of Agamemnon, whereupon he reveals his identity.
While the Greek kings party in Menelaus's palace in his absence, and Calchas is caught cheating at a board game, Paris comes to Helen at night.
[14] From its Russian premiere in the 1868–69 season in St Petersburg, La belle Hélène became, and remained for a decade, the most popular stage work in Russia.
[14] In 1999 the Aix-en-Provence Festival staged a production by Herbert Wernicke described by Kurt Gänzl as "sadly tawdry and gimmicky ... showing no comprehension of the opéra-bouffe idiom".
Scottish Opera toured the work in the 1990s in a translation by John Wells,[23] and English National Opera (ENO) presented Offenbach's score with a completely rewritten libretto by Michael Frayn as La belle Vivette which ran briefly at the Coliseum in 1995,[24] and was bracketed by Hugh Canning of The Sunday Times with Wernicke's Aix production as "horrors unforgotten".
[31] The reviewer in Le Journal amusant thought the piece had all the expected Offenbach qualities: "grace, tunefulness, abandonment, eccentricity, gaiety and spirit.
[n 3] In his 1980 biography of Offenbach, Peter Gammond writes that the music of La belle Hélène is "refined and charming and shows the most Viennese influence".
[35] However, Alexander Faris (1981) writes: "It would be difficult to name an operetta with more good tunes than La belle Hélène (although Die Fledermaus would be a strong contender)".
Both writers regard the music more highly than did Neville Cardus, who wrote of this score that Offenbach was not fit for company with Johann Strauss, Auber and Sullivan.
"[38] In his history of operetta (2003), Richard Traubner writes: "La belle Hélène is more than an elaborate copy of Orphée aux enfers.
Its finales are funnier, more elaborate, and involve an even greater use of the chorus; the orchestrations are richer, the tunes more plentiful, and there is a waltz of great grace and beauty in Act II".
