Orpheus in the Underworld by Offenbach, Ds. 17 Des. 2022, De (2022/2022), Dirigit per Vito Taufer,, Director musical Ayrton Desimpelaere, SNG, Ljubljana, Slovenia

We start the season with a slightly more comic or satirical version of the myth of Orpheus, created by Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880). His real name was Jakob Levy Eberscht, and he took the nickname Offenbach after a town near his native Cologne. After studying music in Paris, he became an excellent cellist and then a composer who dominated the Parisian stage for more than thirty years, and even founded a theater for the performance of his works. The operetta Orpheus in Hell (premièred in 1858 in Paris) was performed 250 times in one year, and even today everyone knows the melody of its cancano. This work, originally titled Orfej v podzemlje in Slovenian, was last performed at the Ljubljana Opera in 1925. Offenbach was an extremely popular author with the Ljubljana audience, but unfortunately many of his operettas were only performed before World War II. after her, several times only Hoffmann's tales; and the internationally renowned world premiere of the romantic opera Nymph of the Rhine on the stage of Cankarjev dom in 2005 was memorable. Offenbach's Orpheus is known above all for its masterful cancan, but otherwise it is the story of the director of the music conservatory in Thebes, who got tired of his wife Eurydice and fell in love with another nymph. Even Eurydice is fed up with Orpheus' capriciousness, she falls in love with a passing shepherd. So here is the cause of divorce! Public opinion (a character from the aforementioned operetta) demands that Orpheus fight for his reputation and also for his wife... Will Jim be able to save the marriage in crisis? After the successful Viennese operetta The Bat, the operetta repertoire of the Ljubljana Opera will be enriched with a Parisian operetta in a new translation by Primož Vitez, director Vito Taufer is returning.