Can-Can (Orphée aux enfers)

Orphée aux enfers opened at the Bouffes-Parisiens on 21 October 1858, in two acts, and treated the Orpheus myth as a domestic scandal: the couple cannot stand each other, Public Opinion forces the husband to go and fetch his wife back, and the gods on Olympus behave like bored civil servants. The critic Jules Janin attacked it as a profanation of antiquity, which filled the theatre for months. Offenbach expanded the piece into four acts in 1874. Its galop infernal, danced in the underworld, became detached from the operetta altogether and is now known simply as the can-can.