Opéra bouffe · Operatic Genre & Catalogue

Opéra bouffe is the nineteenth-century French satirical operatic form most closely associated with Offenbach, characterised by sharp social comedy, parodistic borrowings from earlier serious opera, and a brilliant orchestral wit.

The OperaPedia catalogue currently records 23 operas identified by the source data with the genre tag Opéra bouffe, premiered between 1697 and 1945. A span of 248 years separates the earliest from the most recent, which gives the modern reader a useful longitudinal view of how the genre evolved over time. The principal composers represented under this heading include Jacques Offenbach, Hervé, Charles Lecocq, Emmanuel Chabrier, and Francis Poulenc. Each of those composers maintains a full biographical entry on the site, linked from the list below.

Operas in the Opéra bouffe tradition catalogued here were composed in German and French. The works fall principally within the Romantic, Baroque, and Modern traditions. For the listener encountering the genre for the first time, the language and era of a particular work usually offer the most useful first orientation: a Romantic opera in Italian will sound and behave differently from a Baroque opera in French, even where the genre tag is the same.

Representative works from this genre catalogued by OperaPedia include Barbe-bleue by Jacques Offenbach (1697), La Périchole by Jacques Offenbach (1828), and Fisch-Ton-Kan by Emmanuel Chabrier (1835). These entries are good starting points for readers wishing to gain a concrete sense of what the genre tag Opéra bouffe refers to in practice. As always, the full encyclopaedia entries set out the synopsis, the principal voice categories required, the premiere details, and the production history through to the present day.

Houses associated in this catalogue with premieres in the Opéra bouffe tradition include Théâtre des Variétés and Avenue Theatre. The clustering of a genre at a particular venue is rarely accidental: it reflects the resident orchestra's strengths, the kind of singers under contract, and the audience's established appetite for a particular kind of evening.

The complete list of catalogued operas in the Opéra bouffe tradition is set out below in chronological order of premiere. Each title is linked to a full editorial entry; each composer is linked to a full biographical entry. We invite the curious reader to follow those internal links rather than treating the present page as a destination. The encyclopaedia is intended above all to encourage cross-reading among related works.

Complete Catalogue: Opéra bouffe

An Intermission

Most Featured Composers