Offenbach wrote Barkouf the year after Orpheus in the Underworld, and that context does the piece no favors. Where Orpheus crackled with irreverence and divine momentum, Barkouf lands as a curiosity — a genuinely strange idea (a dog appointed Sultan of Lahore, his woofs translated for political advantage by a street trader) undone by a libretto that can't keep pace with what the story wants to be. Eugène Scribe's lyrics are competent and nothing more, and competent-and-nothing-more is a death sentence when your composer is in full effervescent mode. The critical mauling of 1860 — Berlioz among the mortified — sent it into a 160-year silence. Opera Rara spent recent decades piecing it back together from unpublished fragments, filling gaps, and presenting what is necessarily a reconstructed object as much as a recovered one. That context matters: you're not hearing what audiences rejected; you're hearing a scholarly best-guess at what they rejected, which is a different experience and a slightly more forgiving one. The score itself is uneven in ways you can't paper over. At its best, Offenbach is doing something genuinely odd — four horns, witty orchestrations that pop like uncorked bottles, a sentimental ballad for Mathias Vidal's Saëb accompanied by a trio of cellos that lands with real warmth, a habanera with genuine lilt. These passages suggest a composer probing at a register he hadn't fully mapped yet. At its worst, the energy drops and you feel the absence of a librettist who could have pulled the satirical premise taut. Paul Daniel conducted the Hallé and the English National Opera Chorus with evident affection for the material, and the cast was clearly enjoying the absurdity. Anne-Catherine Gillet's Maïma — the market trader who serves as the dog-sultan's interpreter-for-hire — is the gravitational center: her coloratura is clean and gleaming, and she plays the role's comedic leverage with precision. Valerie Eickhoff's Balkis makes a strong foil, mezzo voice gutsy and grounded against Gillet's brightness. Loïc Félix throws himself at Bababeck, the treacherous vizier, with comic commitment, and Alistair McGowan's rhyming narration — Jeremy Sams's work — holds the frame together with craft and pace. The honest verdict: this is a work that deserved its fate and also deserves this revival. It deserved its fate because the premise — political satire via canine overlord — needed a librettist capable of following Offenbach where he was trying to go, and Scribe wasn't that. It deserves this revival because there's enough idiosyncratic invention in the score to reward a single, generous listening. Opera Rara has done the field a service. Don't expect a hidden masterpiece; expect a shaggy, intermittently delightful excavation with some real jewels buried in the rubble.
