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Full Dark House(54)

By:Christopher Fowler


Bryant swivelled his head and studied his partner coolly. ‘You’re not much of a music lover, are you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I like a bit of a dance to Glenn Miller. I’m always willing to learn.’

‘I know a numbers-and-fractions merchant when I meet one. You’re a science bod. I saw you listening to Oswald Finch when he was going on about body fluid ratios. Your ears pricked up.’

‘I just thought I should know a bit about all this.’ He bounced his fingers in time with the music.

‘I must say, it’s suspiciously appropriate.’ Bryant unknotted a few feet of his scarf and sat up. ‘Jacques Offenbach was a forerunner of Gilbert and Sullivan. He’s the reason they started writing together. He had huge successes with these romps in Paris, even though the critics were sniffy. Orpheus in the Underworld is over eighty years old. Back when it was first performed, everyone who could afford to visit the theatre had a decent working knowledge of the classics, so Offenbach could make fun of Greek legends and everyone would get the joke. Here, he’s taken the most famous part of the Orpheus myth and reworked it. Orpheus was the son of a muse who saved the Argonauts from the Sirens. He ventured into the Underworld to get back his beloved nymph, Eurydice, who had been bitten by a snake.’

‘Oh, I remember that bit. Pluto let him have Eurydice back on the condition that he didn’t look behind him at her until she reached daylight, but he did.’

‘Well done. Offenbach’s version breaks with traditional mythology. He cynically parodies the characters and makes the story a social satire. He turns Orpheus into a salacious violin teacher, makes Eurydice a tart and has her old man moaning about having to go off and save her.’

‘Who’s that, then?’ May pointed out a statuesque woman in vast grey crinolines. He had last seen her throwing a histrionic fit in Helena Parole’s office.

‘That’s the figure of Public Opinion. In Offenbach’s version of the myth Orpheus is pleased to see the back of his wife, and goes down to Hades only because Public Opinion threatens him with exposure about his own dalliances. Eurydice lusts after a shepherd called Aristaeus, who is really Pluto in disguise. She gets bitten, and is taken down to Hell, but finds it more boring than she expected. Meanwhile, on Mount Olympus, the gods are grumbling to Jupiter about their rights, he gets hot for Eurydice and they all go down to Hell.’

‘I think I get the idea,’ interrupted May. ‘Presumably it all ends in tears.’

‘No, it ends with the cancan. A real trouser rouser, sends you home with a song on your lips and a lump in your drawers. In those days, the stage used to be lit with floats, oil wicks that were floated on water to reduce the risk of fire. It was an effect designed to show up the dancers’ thighs, so you can imagine the excitement it caused with a lot of saucy high-kicking. The ladies of the Paris chorus rarely bothered to wear knickers, and performed all kinds of athletic motions to reveal themselves to the wealthy patrons in the front rows.

‘As well as stuffing his recitative with knowing jokes, like Morpheus being the only god awake when all the others are sleeping, Offenbach filled his entertainments with references to other nineteenth-century operas, so the trio of the last act of La Belle Hélène is lifted from the William Tell Overture, and in this opera there’s a direct pinch from Gluck’s version of Orpheus that got screams of laughter from the audience. The ending’s topsy-turvy too, because Eurydice doesn’t want to go back with boring old Orpheus, and he doesn’t want her, so Pluto’s condition of not looking back at her on the way out of Hades is really an escape clause for both of them. Eurydice ends up as a bacchante, one of Hell’s call girls, merrily high-kicking in the inferno.’

‘Sounds rather immoral.’

‘That was the whole point. What interests me,’ Bryant continued, warming to his subject, ‘is Offenbach’s capacity for deceit. Here was a man who used tricks and jokes, paradox, caricature and parody, who lied about when and where he was born, a man who was not French at all but probably a German rabbi, who conned his way into the Paris Conservatoire despite the fact that foreigners were banned from attending, who was a published composer at nineteen, a virtuoso on the cello and, bizarrely, the toy flute, who had five children and became a Roman Catholic, whose success was so great that le tout Paris had to be nightly turned away from his theatre. He was a conundrum, a shamelessly charming scoundrel. He had what our Jewish friends call “chutzpah”.’ Bryant folded his arms across the back of the seat in front of him, lost in admiration. ‘Offenbach’s been out of favour for the last few years. But he was capable of scandalizing in his time.’