Conventional wisdom has it that Offenbach was "the unofficial court jester of the Second Empire" until the very end, even after the Empire was no more, when he revealed unsuspected grandeurs hand-in-hand with great delicacy in Les contes d'Hoffmann, posthumously performed in 1881. But no one who knows Offenbach's career accepts that—even the Barcarolle, Hoffmann's best-known number, was originally the "Goblins' Song" in Die Rheinnixen, a sprawling romantic opera commissioned by the Vienna Opera and performed there in 1864. Of the beginning of his career, Offenbach recalled, "I said to myself that the Opéra-Comique was no longer the home of comic opera, and that truly funny, gay, and witty music was gradually being forgotten. The composers who worked for the Opéra-Comique wrote miniature grand operas." Yet his own yen to compose grand operas kept peeking through the seemingly inexhaustible spate of "truly funny, gay, and witty" spectacles flying from his pen for a quarter-of-a century, often as scintillant send-ups, but occasionally, too, as a drag on his customary vivacity. As early as Ba-Ta-Clan (1855), a sidesplitting parody of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, Offenbach demonstrated an ability to ape operatic finales on a grand scale. Die Rheinnixen, on the other hand, was taken off after eight performances. Amid the stunning variety of Offenbach's productions several not only hit the mark but look forward to the deeper vein mined in Hoffmann—La chanson de Fortunio (1861), for instance, or Pomme d'api (1873). When the madcap hilarity of the banquet scene in La vie parisienne (1866) is capped by the waltz song of the worldly wise, world weary courtesan Metella, surveying its aftermath in the dawn, its piquant bittersweet achieves a perfect balance between farce and reality not far removed from similar scenes in Verdi's La Traviata (1853). The danger of mixed genres, however, is falling between two stools. On the heels of La vie parisienne and La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867), Robinson Crusoé—opening at the Opéra Comique on November 23,1867—was afflicted with a lumbering libretto by Eugène Cormon and Hector Crémieux through which Offenbach's muse grazed for long stretches in the more genteel fields plowed by Bellini and Donizetti, with proper cadenza-rounded arias and earnest duets less comic in effect than yearning to be taken seriously. It ran for 32 performances and was not revived until the 1970s. Of note, the trousers role of Man Friday was taken by Célestine Gali-Marié, the first Carmen at that opera's premiere in 1875.

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