Un mari à la porte

operetta in one act to a libretto by Alfred Delacour and Léon Morand

All of Offenbach’s most popular operettas – Orphée aux enfers, La belle Hélène, La vie parisienne, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, La Périchole – are full-length pieces in two, three or even four acts. But in the five years before the earliest of those, Orphée aux enfers, was first performed at the Bouffes-Parisien in 1858 he wrote literally dozens of one-act entertainments for the same company – and he continued to produce them, though not so regularly, until he put all his resources into serious work on Les contes d”Hoffmann in the last three years of his life.

Offenbach’s extraordinary activity in writing one-act operettas with small casts was, at least in the early years, the result of necessity rather than choice. According to the terms of the licence of the Bouffes-Parisiens, which he directed – at first in a little wooden building on the Champs-Élysées and then in more comfortable premises in the passage Choiseul – no more than three characters could appear on the stage. By the time he wrote Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld) the restrictions had been relaxed. It is clear from his next production for the Bouffes-Parisiens, however, that he and his librettists were still thinking in terms of the old regulations and the satisfaction that was to be had in devising clever ways of getting round them. The whole point of the plot of Un mari à la porte (A Husband at the Door) is that a fourth character, the husband of the title, plays an important role but without appearing on the stage.

Ingenious though the libretto is, the main reason for the success of Un mari à la porte when it was first performed at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1859 was the soprano aria “J’entends, ma belle, la ritournelle” at the end of the second scene. Known, for no good reason, as the “Valse tyrolienne,” it remains a popular item and is to be found on numerous “best of” and other Offenbach CD compilations, even though the operetta itself has apparently never been recorded. While it is true that Rosine’s waltz song is the most brilliant number in the whole work, there are other good tunes, some of them also in waltz time. The overture, for example, is a suite of waltzes worthy of comparision with anything that was being produced in Vienna at the time. Its main theme is heard again in the first scene as Florestan, the intruder who has got into Susanne’s room by way of the chimney, takes refuge in a wardrobe.

Apart from the waltz tunes Un mari à la porte is particularly strong in its ensembles, like the duet (“Ah, ah, ah! quelle mine piteuse”) where Rosine attempts to talk the newly wed Susanne out of excluding her husband from her room in revenge for some imagined slight and the lively trio (“Juste ciel! que vois-je?”) where Florestan attempts to explain to the two girls who he is and how he came to be where he is. Best of all is the quartet (“Il se moque de toi!”) where the husband joins the others but only from the other side of a locked door. The refrain “Tu l’as voulu Georges Dandin!” is a quotation from Molière meaning “It’s all your own fault!” – which, even though it occurs again in the concluding couplet addressed to the audience, seems scarcely relevant to the blameless, if hapless, characters of Un mari à la porte.