In many ways, especially in the opéra bouffe La belle Hélène (Beautiful Helen) of 1864, Jacques Offenbach and his librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy ensured that the audiences own world, familiar and strange at the same time, greeted them from the world of mythology. The musical-scenic outline of his myth travesty was sketched six years earlier in Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld), the epochal model of a new kind of sung comical theatre that exerted its influence far beyond the boundaries of France. The composer expanded this outline in La belle Hélène, developing it further and bringing it to an unsurpassed zenith. The libretto of his brilliant collaborators, whose literary quality as authors of comedy also surpasses the average of their contemporaries, is wittier and dramatically sounder. It offers even more space for rich ensemble and chorus scenes that give a sonorous ambience to the ridiculed individuals (Menelaus) as well as to those who are taken seriously (Helen and Paris).
The world known to the Paris audience of the Second Empire is superficially but effectively indicated as the background of the plot by means of allusions, turns of phrase and anachronisms. The authors lend the ancient sites of Sparta and Nauplia some of the characteristics of then-modern Paris and of the worldly bathing beach, Trouville; the ancient priestly caste bear some of the traits of the modern clergy with its business acumen; the ancient heroes of the calibre of Achilles receive some of the traits of the usual rigid/stupid officer corps. Nevertheless, even when singing and dancing, the traditional figures are in principle what they always were: clearly contoured types with a few clear characteristics absolutely necessary to guarantee the external proceeding of the familiar story. This was necessary in order to give that familiar story an unfamiliar and very different twist. The names of the ancient heroes remain the same, as did the adventures they have and the places of the action. What is new is the internal motives and the external circumstances of their deeds and sufferings. What they have to sing is completely new, as is the odd perspective the interpreting and judging orchestra gives to the whole story.
Another fundamental allegory the mythical story provides goes much deeper than the mythological society's allusion to the modern society of the Second Empire: competition is the motivation and form of interaction of most of the acts portrayed. The authors work noni the mythical heroes’ agonistic principle of life, from the open rivalry in warlike, athletic, and playful single combat, man against man, But they alter it to a calculating competition, characteristic of bourgeois business life, in which each has an eye to his own advantage. It is not simply humour when the authors turn generous deeds into petty intrigues and daring self-assertion into cautious selfishness, whereby the zealous securing of property and decorum turn into a grimly comical elegy for what was once daring adventure.
Jacques Offenbach's light opera bouffe La belle Hélène, the story of the beautiful Greek queen for whom the Trojan War was fought, portrays in a humorous and satirical way the vulgar, decadent Parisian high society of the Second Empire, which cheerfully abandoned itself to every kind of sexual and moral license. This is done with great subtlety and all the finesses of the medium of theatre, with word play and comical situations. The interpretation by the actor and director Helmuth Lohner (the dialogue version is by Helmuth Lohner and Ulrich Peter) has transported the oper(ett)a to our times in an incomparably entertaining manner. The humorously wide costumes created by the fashion designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac contribute to this. Robertus Cremer's subtle lighting increases the similar effect of Paolo Piva's stage set, which is nothing less than a highly allusive bow to the sets and props of classical theatre and Hollywood movies.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt has also successfully worked with the light muse before this production, which was recorded in 1997 at the Zurich opera house. Here he realised an orchestra that sounds firmly in Offenbach’s tradition. With a very small group of strings, chromatically illuminated horns and rich percussion, this music seems not only extremely humorous, but also unusually contemporary.