Instead of the traditional story of the musician Orpheus, who loses his wife, Eurydice, then attempts to win her back from death through the power of song, Offenbach offers a cutting alternative.
His Eurydice is irritated with Orpheus’ incessant violin playing and has an affair with the shepherd next door, who turns out to be Pluto, god of the underworld. She is only too happy to die and join him in Hades. The character of Public Opinion demands that Orpheus descend there to rescue Eurydice — not out of love, but merely in the interest of bourgeois morality.
In the words of director Barrie Kosky, whose new production of the operetta opens at the Salzburg Festival on Aug. 14, it’s “fabulous nonsense.”
In an interview in Munich, Kosky pointed to Offenbach’s “incredibly sophisticated idea of sexual politics and gender.” But, he added, “what I absolutely can’t get enough of is the sheer brilliance of much of the music, the wonderful play with irony, with melancholy. The Dionysian life force is fantastic.”
Kosky has become a crucial advocate for the modern revival of operetta. He was first introduced to the genre as a child, courtesy of his Hungarian grandmother. At the Komische Oper in Berlin, where he has been in charge since 2012, he has directed a series of productions of forgotten works from the 1920s and ’30s, like Paul Abraham’s “Ball at the Savoy.”
While other German and Austrian theaters often stage operetta as cozy nostalgia, Kosky’s work is more snazzy musical theater — less Johann Strauss II than Cole Porter. That means drag, jazz and physical comedy; in their mixture of contemporary and period details, his productions have suggested an unsettling affinity between the rapacious capitalism of the Weimar Republic and contemporary society.
Offenbach, from an earlier era, is a different flavor of operetta. But Kosky sees a similar showbiz sparkle, pointing to the composer’s roots in variety and vaudeville theater. Written in 1858, “Orpheus” was Offenbach’s first large-scale operetta; the genre had been enabled, by a change in theatrical regulations, to expand to multiple acts and larger casts. Kosky described Offenbach as “a wonderful miasma of different theatrical styles.”
The key, he added, is variety: the sincere parts need to be taken seriously, and the funny parts need to be funny. “I think the mistake most directors make is to attempt to play one thing in the production,” he said. “It doesn’t work.”
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Offenbach’s birth, a landmark which has passed without much fanfare in the United States, where he is probably best known as the composer of “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” his only full-fledged opera. But in Europe, productions have proliferated. In an interview, American musicologist Jacek Blaszkiewicz called Offenbach “the prototypical European satirist. I think European audiences still, to an extent, kind of get the joke.”
For 20th-century theorists like Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer, Offenbach was a political figure; they claimed his satire deconstructed the decadence of Second Empire Parisian society and unmasked hypocrisy. More recent writers have taken a milder tack, casting Offenbach as an entertainer with satirical tendencies.
“This is not like a didactic political-polemic theater here,” Kosky said. “This is half-naked dances. There were political strands in it, but he was above all the entertainer, you know; he was writing music that was influenced by vaudeville and variety.”
Massively popular, Offenbach was both a Second Empire insider and not: a German Jew living in Paris, but one who had acclimated to local culture and whose works allowed the social elite to gently laugh at themselves. In “Orpheus,” he allowed the assembled society to see themselves as the work’s gods and goddesses — but those deities spend the evening lying, cheating, whining and otherwise misbehaving.
The reference points were well-known: Gluck’s operatic telling of the Orpheus myth had recently been revived in Paris by the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot. And audiences today likely still know the story from Monteverdi, or the Broadway musical “Hadestown.”
Kosky’s production combines past and present, recalling Offenbach’s own mixture of mythological characters and contemporary language.
“We’re playing with images and ideas from some of my favorite time periods,” Kosky said. “It’s not set in the 19th century, it’s not set in the 21st century. It’s an entirely constructed fantasy world.
“We’re not interested in any form of naturalism here,” he added, “and I think that that liberates.”
That lack of naturalism includes the production’s most radical conceit: All the characters’ speaking voices during dialogue scenes are provided by a single actor, Max Hopp, who is cast as John Styx, the operetta’s equivalent to the underworld ferryman Charon.
The idea was initially born of expediency; clarity in the dialogue, in a single language, was difficult for the international, multilingual cast. But going further and making Styx a kind of ventriloquist for an ensemble that mouths the words as he speaks them came to Kosky one night while he was watching “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” (Think “lip sync for your life.”)
For Kosky, Styx, the only mortal who has lived and lost, represents the constant presence of death; he sings an elegy for his days as a king. “The sadness of his song,” Kracauer wrote, “is the sadness of one to whom the present means nothing, the past everything.” Blaszkiewicz, the musicologist, even suggested that Styx can be seen as a stand-in for Emperor Napoleon III, a supporter of Offenbach.
At the Salzburg Festival, operetta has had its ups and downs. In 2001, director Hans Neuenfels took the role of social critic to an extreme when he unleashed a production of Johann Strauss’ “Die Fledermaus,” perhaps the most recognizable operetta, that suggested that Austrian culture was a vortex of sex, drugs and fascism. Audiences were largely unamused.
At least as he describes it, Kosky’s approach is less confrontational. He said he is proud to put Offenbach in the Salzburg “pantheon, where he belongs.”
“If he knew that his ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’ was being performed in the Haus für Mozart in Salzburg, with his love of Mozart,” Kosky added, “I think he’d be smiling in his grave.”
—
“Orpheus in the Underworld”
Aug. 14-30 at the Salzburg Festival in Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.