Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld is a farcical take on the traditional Greek myth. Within its three acts the viewers see everything, from a hot air balloon to an 80’s party culminating in a Cancan dance number. It was designed with the intent to shock and provoke the audience with a completely irreverent remix of traditions familiar to all. The question is, what were these traditions, and what did Offenbach accomplish by riffing on them in a modern manner?
Part of what makes the story of Orpheus and his wife Eurydice so poignant is the love they share. Orpheus is a man that literally went through hell to retrieve the one he loved, all for naught. The tragedy is what gives this story its timeless quality; its bitter-sweetness to counter the moments of joy. Offenbach reverses that. He has to--after all, his operetta is a comedy, not a tragedy. In his take on this myth, Orpheus and Eurydice are a quarreling couple who cannot stand each other. This may not have a timeless quality to it, but it’s more contemporary, and easier for the audience to relate to. It transforms Orpheus from the lofty hero whose music charms all who hear it, to a beleaguered husband trying to cultivate his international stardom. Certainly more human, and certainly more accessible.
Offenbach has also taken the panoply of gods and goddesses and humanized them for his modern audience. Greek gods from the beginning possessed human traits--indeed, many of the troubles the myths are based on revolve around their mortal-like peccadilloes--but Offenbach takes it that critical step further into the absurd. A whole musical number is devoted to the other divinities ragging out Zeus for his amorous adventures, and the son of Kronos, mightiest of the mightiest, sits in his chair dejected, and takes their abuse. His role seems to alternate between exasperated father and mischievous child, and at times it seems he only gets shoved one way or another between other figures that are temporarily stronger, such as his wife Hera, or his adversary Hades. Yet there is a diplomacy of humiliation, and all the gods and goddesses are portrayed equally as absurd. Each one has its moment of weakness.
The director of this operetta has inserted her own spin into the production to make it even more contemporary. The crowning scene is a party, where Zeus tries to make off with Orpheus’s wife. However, this has been changed to a themed party called “Hades in the Eighties”. This heightens the absurdity, as the divine beings parade around in clothes that fall shy of true contemporaniety. It’s a case where the attempt to become modern has failed, and in doing so the gods become a pantomime of our own mortality. This is a far cry from the timeless essence of the Orphic narrative the operetta is derived from. Then the culmination was reached, and the piece ends with a Cancan dance. Zeus throws a lightning bolt at Orpheus’s bottom and he turns, losing (to his joy) his wife. Eurydice runs off with a random character, and everything is as it should be.
Despite its purely creative merits, Offenbach’s piece offers us a prime example of the problem of interpretation when it comes to ancient stories such as Orpheus in the underworld. Of course Offenbach’s operetta is farcically distorted, and debatably the exact opposite of the tale’s true meaning. All of this was accomplished with the use of modern day symbols for ancient ones. Divorceable marriages replace true love, bickering people in the dress of a dead era replace the immortals. All of these are grotesquely exaggerated interpretations, which serve to illustrate the fact that in many ways we approach works from the ancient world hopelessly mired in our own chains of divorces and 80s clothes, no matter how we try to shed them. Orpheus’s story, or whatever version reaches us, will be misinterpreted no matter how discerning the mind, purely from the fact that it is impossible to completely reconstruct the culture that spun the tale. The pragmatics of placing it in context are irretrievably lost. Therefore, Offenbach’s operetta offers us a well-crafted lesson through the lens of comedy. A lesson in art’s own mortality. More specifically, the mortality of its intended meaning.
Work Cited
“Jacques Offenbach”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Offenbach. 2-15-05.