Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
The face that launched a thousand ships admits to her spiritual adviser that she would much rather have been a 'bonne bourgeoise' in Mytilene, married to a wholesale merchant. When her royal husband comes home unexpectedly and finds her in bed with Paris, she declares that any husband who returns unannounced is a fool, letting himself in for unpleasantness. This is the core of Beautiful Helen, a burlesque wherein, as the High Priest Calchas says, the gods are at a discount, and so are the kings. The real subject is sex, and the seduction scene is the climax of the play.
It would be interesting to calculate how many of the plots of successful operettas deal with marital infidelity: this one is perhaps the classic of the genre (it's a classic tale, after all). It had great and direct influence on Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, where, by contrast, the infidelity remains suggested and hinted at rather than directly, cynically but wittily exposed. Perhaps here lies the difference between French and German attitudes (and for that matter Anglo-Saxon ones) to this fascinating subject, and it is also one of the reasons why Offenbach is so difficult to reproduce faithfully in translation. Sacheverell Sitwell, in a book subtitled 'A tribute to Offenbach', writes that it is impossible, inconceivable, to translate Meilhac and Halévy, Offenbach's incomparable librettists, into any true resemblance to their original. Sitwell is not the only literary man to have admired the work of this stage-writing firm – here is what Nietzsche, that champion of the Gallic spirit against German ponderousness, observed of Offenbach:
'this spoiled child has had the luck of finding the cleverest Frenchmen as his librettists: Halévy…Meilhac, and others – Offenbach’s texts have something enchanting about them, and are…probably the only good thing so far accomplished by opera that has done a good turn for poetry.'
Meilhac and Halévy
Concentrating first, for once, on the libretto and its authors may not be upsetting the balance of importance when considering this work for the musical stage. La Belle Hélène was Meilhac and Halévy’s first great success writing together, the first of many, including, most enduring of all, the libretto of Bizet's Carmen. In 1864 HaIévy had outlined to Offenbach a libretto he called 'The Capture of Troy', in which one of the ideas was for Homer to be a war correspondent for the London Times.Another parody of classical antiquity and legend, thought Halévy, could build on the success of Orpheus in the Underworld (1859).
Once Meilhac was brought into the project, a hilarious version of the Helen story rapidly took shape. The literary collaborators had been schoolmates, and their work went smoothly (to quote Meilhac 'One spoke a few words, the other almost none/ That was the way La Belle Hélène was done'). Meilhac sketched out the plots and the general content, Halévy wrote the verse.
Ludovic Halévy wrote for the boulevard theatre in the moments he could spare from his work as secretary to the Duc de Morny, perhaps the most powerful political figure of the Second Empire. Meilhac, unlike Halévy, was no intellectual and no family man; he had started his career as a bookseller, and was a confirmed bachelor, happiest in the company of young ladies from the chorus; his greatest gift was for humorous characterisation.
The satirical assault these writers helped Offenbach launch against the society and institutions of their time came from the very heart of the privileged classes. Halévy was responsible for most of the political satire, and he was in a position to know. These operettas were seen and laughed at by high society, from the Emperor Louis Napoleon down. There is a parallel in the popularity of Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789: both societies were on the eve of collapse, though they did not know it (the characters in La Belle Hélène, on the other hand, are perfectly aware of the inevitability of the catastrophe of the Trojan War).
The political satire in Orpheus in the Underworld, and especially in La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein, where the target is the military mentality, is less obvious in La Belle Hélène. Paul Henry Lang has written in words themselves inviting parody, that this operetta 'is the humorous parody of a whole system of government and of theology, and, allowing for the variations made with comic intent, surprisingly Greek in spirit. The cheap parodies of many late nineteenth century play makers are not to be mentioned in the same breath with this scholarly fooling'.
"...a success, immediate and overwhelming..."
Not everyone laughed – Offenbach touched some raw nerves, and it was he who was 'blamed' for the operettas, probably justly, since it was Offenbach, impresario as well as composer, who chose the subjects and unified contributions from collaborators he chose with a sharp eye for talent. La Belle Hélène was a success, immediate and overwhelming, but some were appalled. Composer Camille Saint-Saëns protested in the name of 'higher art': 'It was when Offenbach was transplanted to the Variétés that operetta-madness and the collapse of good taste began. When La Belle Hélène came on, Paris took leave of its senses; everyone’s head was turned'.
This kind of criticism only made the box office busier. Critic Jules Janin had virtually ‘made’ the success of Orpheus in the Underworld when he objected to its sacrilegious desecration of antiquity by Offenbach’s frivolous treatment of the religion of the Greeks and their classical legends. How else should he have treated the subject? As conductor Alexander Faris has commented in his book on Offenbach, it was hard to see how the amorous doings of Jupiter and Venus, let alone Helen, could be made to conform to the morals of the Catholic Church. There was ample precedent in the Greek comic playwrights of antiquity. More to the point is to enquire why Offenbach chose the setting in antiquity for some of his most effective humour. Offenbach may have sworn revenge on classical antiquity for the years when, as conductor of the entr’acte music at the Théâtre-Français, he had to endure the tirades of French classical tragedy. Such plays (and the tragic operas based on them) had evoked parodistic imitations in their time, and Offenbach wanted to revive these on his own terms ‘to spin out further the inexhaustible threads of French mirth’.
Offenbach (in Lang’s words again), the great expert of the human marionette theatre that was the Second Empire, felt that the leading personalities of his era were too small to inspire tragic greatness. So he laughed at idiotic monarchs, profligate ladies from the highest circles, mercenary and rapacious priests. They are all in La Belle Hélène: the pompous ‘Two Ajaxes’, always presented as a tandem, like Thompson and Thomson, Achilles the vulnerable hero with his sore heel, Menelaus the comic cuckold, Calchas the pompous intellectual High Priest who cheats at cards.
Before we meet the kings, we are introduced to Agammemnon’s son Orestes, accompanied by the ‘good time girls’ Parthoénis and Léoena, and singing how he ‘makes daddy’s money dance; daddy couldn’t care less, 'cause Greece will pay’ – this from the tragic central figure of the Oresteia! After the Kings have made their entrance and introduced themselves with the aid of the chorus ‘ces rois rem-plis de vaillance’ (these kings filled up with valour), the key word (‘remplis’) wittily split in Offenbach's music – their intellectual capacities are mercilessly exposed in the intelligence contest from which Paris, disguised as a mere shepherd, emerges the easiest of victors. The solution to the charade is the word 'locomotive' – how clever, exclaims Paris, to have found the word (a typical Meilhac touch) four thousand years before the invention of railways!
"...deliberate and conscious anachronism"
A good part of the wit of this libretto lies in its incongruities, its deliberate and conscious anachronism. The scene in the third act at Nauplia, where Spartan society has come for its holidays by the sea, could almost be a portrait of Empire society at Biarritz, with bored husbands and wives scolding each other, and gossiping about the outbreak of unfaithfulness, marriage breakdown, and promiscuity Venus has visited on Sparta to punish that city-state for helping Menelaus prevent Paris from fulfilling Helen’s pre-ordained destiny. Yet the satire is aimed at humanity in general, as James Harding observes: men and women always have been, always will be frivolous. The hackneyed themes of cuckoldry and abduction are treated with a freshness of real originality.
La Belle Hélène is the prime candidate among Offenbach’s operettas for successful modern revival, but inevitably a good deal must be lost of the topical references wittily underlined by Offenbach’ music. The immense success of La Belle Hélène was also due not least to its stars, and especially Hortense Schneider, who played Helen.
The daughter of a Jewish tailor from Strasbourg who settled in Bordeaux, Hortense Schneider was stagestruck as a child. When Offenbach first heard her, he told her ‘take no more lessons’, afraid that she would spoil her natural talent. Although she suffered badly from stage-fright, she had only to appear on the stage for her magnetism to fill the public with excitement, and her buxom beauty matched the feminine ideal of the time. Most importantly, she was a gifted stage actress as well as singer. Offenbach, who was for a brief time one of her many lovers, had wanted her, but failed to get her, for the part of Euridice in Orpheus. For Offenbach she was the only possible Helen, but he had a job persuading her; then in the rehearsals she was irritable and began a feud with Mlle Silly, a pretty, boyish actress who played Orestes – a rivalry that fed the gossip columns for months.
Hortense Schneider played Helen, the fashionable woman who is bored, vain, and longing for a change, with irresistible suggestiveness. As Meilhac reported, her most potent weapons were ‘her smile and her voice: that smile which, even when it said yes, did not prevent you from fearing, and which, when it said no, did not prevent you from hoping’. As in many a great stage hit, one line became a catchcry – Helen, in her Invocation to Venus, sings ‘quel plaisir trouves tu/ à faire ainsi cascader la vertu’ (what pleasure do you find in making virtue come tumbling down like this). At the word for tumbling down, which can also mean ‘to lead a fast life’, the regulars would shout 'Cascade, Hortense!'
Schneider’s notorious offstage life added to the piquancy of her playing Helen. Many other details are bound to be lost by the change of time and place, and even more by translation (for example, the Greek royalty in the operetta often speak in argot, slang – doing so was a widespread affectation in French high society at the time). Yet La Belle Hélène has not lost any of its freshness, and many admirers of Offenbach have warned against the mistake of updating it with forced contemporary asides.
This enduring freshness is in good measure due to Offenbach’s music. James Harding, in his compulsively readable history of French operetta, Folies de Paris, sees La Belle Hélène as a landmark: Offenbach, he explains, showed that operetta was no longer a matter of curtain raisers and modest one-act burlesques. The genre had flowered now into a full-length production in three acts, played not by talented clowns but by actors and actresses who could sing as well as they spoke their dialogue. Characteris ation was deeper, and instead of a scratch ensemble of bored musicians, there was an orchestra of some 30 good ones.
Nevertheless, Offenbach had by no means abandoned the musical methods which made his one-acters (such as Ba-ta-clan) so amusing: the impudent melodies, the lilting, slightly lascivious dances, the pointed declamation, and the orchestration which seemed to make every instrumental passage a burst of laughter. But in La Belle Hélène Offenbach works on a larger scale and with more thoughtful integration, and greater musical daring.
Parody and allusions still play a large part in this ironic music. Just as in Ba-ta-clan he had quoted Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots in a ridiculous context, here, in the patriotic trio (the Kings tell Menelaus he must give up his wife for the good of the country), Offenbach quotes the patriotic trio from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. Just as in Orpheus he had made the gods dance a can-can, here he sets the phrase ‘a vile seducer’ to a luscious waltz tune anticipating both Die Fledermaus and Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty.
"...the last flowering of the tradition of the Neapolitan opera buffa"
Sacheverell Sitwell regarded Offenbach’s comic genius as the culmination of Rossini, the last flowering of the tradition of the Neapolitan opera buffa. Supporting this claim is Offenbach’s highly irreverent spoof of the conventions of the operatic finale, in Act I of La Belle Hélène. Paris, victorious in the intelligence competition, has just revealed who he really is. Helen and all the others, astonished, recognis e him as the man who awarded the golden apple to Venus in the beauty contest on Mount Ida (Paris had earlier described this to Calchas in one of Offenbach’s catchiest melodies – the yodelling Mount Ida Song). Now all exclaim ‘l’homme à la pomme’ (the apple man), and Offenbach uses all the clichés of Italianate vocal display to build up a grandiose ensemble on these trivial words. The affinity is with the madcap finale of the first act of Rossini’s The Italian Girl in Algiers. This ‘Rossinism’ is even more marked in the Act II finale, where the assembled company respond to Menelaus’s calls to defend his honour by breaking into vocal imitations of orchestral instruments.
Offenbach’s musical ideas may often be formulas, but they are formulas which grow out of the dramatic situation, and could not be transferred to his other operas – in this sense he is a true music dramatist, and even Wagner’s initially scornful attitude to him mellowed in time. The idea of contests, especially song contests, had put Tannhäuser very much in Offenbach’s mind while he was composing La Belle Hélène, which is full of allusions to Wagner’s opera, a sensationally controversial failure in Paris in 1861. The fanfare, noisy and harmonically crude, that keeps recurring in the charade scene is explained by Menelaus: ‘It’s some German music I commissioned for the ceremony’.
Most true musicians will admit Offenbach’s genius – not only his sheer melodic inventiveness (does any operetta have more sheerly memorable tunes than La Belle Hélène?), not only his elegance and irony, but also the range of his expression – the kind of flexible, sensitive phrases which help us to identify with Helen, for all her frivolous inconstancy and vanity, while at the same time we are carried away by her ravisher Paris, with his ‘I am gay, you be gay, you must, I want you to!’ (lines no longer to be heard without unintended camp). The critic Camille Bellaigue wrote ‘Really I do not know any music on earth which contains such a striking mixture of extremes; it is impossible to choose between the sentimental Offenbach and the other, or to know them from each other, they are so completely fused’. Offenbach, without radical change to his style, could conclude his career with the serious, indeed touching The Tales of Hoffmann, where he shows sadness under the cover of revelry, but it is for the all-round brilliance of works like La Belle Hélène that he most deserves to be remembered and revived.
First published in Opera Australia, 1987