Monsieur Choufleury restera chez lui le . . ., operetta in 1 act

• Composer: Jacques Offenbach
• Period: Romantic (1820-1869)

Review

Those fashionable gossips, the waspish Goncourt brothers, though they might refer to Offenbach's tiny Bouffes-Parisiens as "that big little theatre, the Figaro of theatres," entertained some very personal dislikes amid the Parisian theater scene. One of Offenbach's oldest and most reliable librettists, Hector Crémieux, was viciously derided as one who "rises and rises, makes money with plays he doesn't write, a mountebank combined with a Jewish clown, a buffoon who jobs in manufactured verse." But the point of their attack was not wholly anti-Semitic, though they castigated the circle extending "from Halévy to that Crémieux, from Crémieux to Villemessant, from Villemessant to Offenbach, chevalier in the Légion d'honneur -- engaged in shady deals, selling a bit of everything, their wives to a certain extent included...and to Morny, Offenbach's patron, the prototype man of the Empire, immersed and rotted in every sort of Parisian corruptness...." What could have prompted so much venom? The Duc de Morny, Napoléon III's illegitimate half-brother and the second most powerful man in France, was not only an Offenbach fan -- whose influence had shielded the composer from censorship on occasion and lifted restrictions on the size of the spectacles offered at the Bouffes-Parisiens -- but stage-struck. Having written the scenario for an opéra-comique, he was avid to make his debut (though under the pseudonym M. de Saint-Rémy) and summoned Offenbach, with his chief librettist, Ludovic Halévy, to his office. Morny's scenario, concerning a social climbing nouveau riche, was not only viable but offered possibilities for parodies of Italian opera. Halévy, with Crémieux's assistance, worked the sketch into a substantial one-act piece for which Offenbach composed, with his usual rapidity, one of his freshest and most delightful scores -- a score, moreover, anticipating the sublime farce of the banquet scene in La Vie parisienne. Every number is a jewel -- the soubrette's sprightly bolero, a spirited spoof on cheeky servants, a deliciously inane love duet, and, surpassing all, the compact ensemble guying the stereotypes of Italian opera, at which Chabrier would take aim in L'étoile (1877), and which was still providing fodder for satire as late as 1916 in Busoni's Arlecchino. After a round of exacting rehearsals, supervised by de Morny, Monsieur Choufleuri Restera chez lui... was given a brilliant presentation at the Presidential Palace on May 31, 1861, and opening at the Bouffes-Parisiens only on September 14, though it had already been heard in Vienna on July 6, 1861, in French, to be re-christened in German at Salon Pitzelberger later that year. ~ Adrian Corleonis, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Vive Offenbach!

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