La princesse de Trébizonde

La Princesse de Trébizonde is an opéra bouffe with music by Jacques Offenbach and text by Étienne Tréfeu and Charles-Louis-Étienne Nuitter.

The work was first given in two acts at the Theater Baden-Baden on 31 July 1869 and subsequently presented in a revised three-act version at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens on 7 December of the same year.

While dusting the waxwork of the princess of Trébizonde, Zanetta accidentally breaks its nose off but in order to save the show she offers to impersonate the statue herself.

A suspicious Prince Casimir has returned early from the hunt and after a certain amount of elaborate pretence by Cabriolo it is revealed that his son is in love with a circus performer, but when it is discovered that he himself had once been married to a lady acrobat – in fact Paola's long-lost sister – he can offer no objection to his son's choice, and the work concludes with festive preparations for a triple marriage.

The larger Théâtre des Variétés presented the work in 1888 with Christian (Cabriolo), Cooper (Trémolini), Barral (Casimir), Georges (Sparadrap), Mary Albert (Prince Raphaël), Mily-Meyer (Regina), Crouzet (Zanetta) and Aubrys (Paola).

[7] The Wiener Kammeroper performed it in a production by Fritz Muliar in 1985, with Anton Duschek as the tutor Sparadrap, Michael Pinkerton as Trémolini and Sabine Rossert as the Princess.

[8] Recent productions include performances in Baden-Baden, where the original version of the piece had its première, in 2015,[3] in Limoges, France, in 2016,[9] and Hildesheim Stadttheater in 2019.

with the Baden-Badener Philharmonie conducted by Werner Stiefel (Sterling CDS 1062–2) in 2004, and on a CPO CD with the Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt under Howard Griffiths in 2019.

[14] It used the Keck edition of the 1869 Paris version, but with eight numbers from the original Baden Baden production as an appendix; the cast included Anne-Catherine Gillet (Zanetta), Virginie Verrez (Prince Raphael), Antoinette Dennefeld (Regina), Katia Ledoux (Paola), Josh Lovell (Prince Casimir), Christophe Mortagne (Tremolini), Christophe Gay (Cabriolo) and Loïc Félix (Sparadrap).