Orpheus in the Underworld

Operetta in four acts by Jacques Offenbach | German-language premiere

Orpheus and Eurydice are the quintessential dream couple of antiquity. The mythology-loving opera stage celebrates them in various musical variations: as an azione teatrale per musica by Christoph Willibald Gluck or as a favola in musica by Claudio Monteverdi. While the latter work ends in transfiguration and the former with the couple's wedding, Jacques Offenbach takes a different path. In his version, Orpheus and Eurydice are making divorce plans. But after Eurydice's sudden death, an unusual authority appears on the scene: Public Opinion. She commands Orpheus, out of regard for mythology and morality, as well as consideration for his contemporaries, posterity, and the environment, to beg Jupiter for his wife's life. But that is just the beginning of an absurd journey through Elysian fields and hellish terrain …


Jacques Offenbach's international career began in 1858 with Orpheus in the Underworld. While the first version was a chamber play with can-can and infernal gallop, he expanded it in 1874 into an opéra féerie, thereby creating what is likely the first revue operetta in music history. The witty plot was enriched with piquant spectacle, choral tableaux, and ballet scenes. The Gerhart-Hauptmann-Theater Görlitz-Zittau is proud to present, as part of this new production, the German premiere of the long-lost ballet music Le Royaume de Neptune.