Russian text “Orpheus in Hell” by V. Mass and N. Erdman in relation to the libretto of Offenbach’s operetta

Today, the name of the playwright Nikolay Robertovich Erdman is widely known in the world theatrical space, primarily as the name of the author of two plays for the drama theater “Mandate” and “Suicide”. Written in 1925 and 1928, they received the highest appraisal of the figures of the national theater, but were banned by the Main Repertory Committee in the early 1930s and only in the late 1980s were published in the author’s homeland. Since then, they have been predominantly the object of attention of domestic literary critics. Few people know about the works created by Erdman in different years with co-authors, including for musical theaters. For the most part, they have not been published, and as a result, they did not fall into the field of view of researchers. The still unpublished text of the play by V. Mass and N. Erdman to the music of the operetta Orpheus in Hell by J. Offenbach became the subject of literary research for the first time. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice has long been of interest to composers and artists, but the composer J. Offenbach and his librettists were the first to present it in a clearly comic development. In travestying the main characters of ancient history, its plot situations, French authors of the mid-nineteenth century focused on the moral and everyday side of the private life of high-ranking people. Creating their text to the music of J. Offenbach, Russian playwrights developed its travesty expressiveness in the dialogues of action, represented in the comic history of heroes with mythological names the growing trends in world political reality at the turn of the 1920s–1930s.

J. Offenbach, “Orpheus in Hell”, libretto, operetta, public opinion, V. Mass, N. Erdman, travesty, play, dialogue, action, image of the burgomaster