The Hallé and Opera Rara: Offenbach’s Barkouf at The Bridgewater Hall

Barkouf survived just eight performances before disappearing completely. Offenbach’s political satire, in which a Great Mogul appoints his dog as governor, was too much for Paris in 1860. Manchester, you’d hope, won’t be quite so scandalised in 2026, as Opera Rara presents its UK premiere at The Bridgewater Hall.

The fictional city of Lahore has overthrown 10 governors in a single year – a turnover rate that won’t feel unfamiliar to anyone who follows British politics. As a kind of punishment, the Mogul installs his dog Barkouf in the job. An animal immune to bribery or flatter, it turns out, is the city’s best ruler in years. While the sacked human officials scheme to get their old jobs back, the dog’s edicts are “translated” by the resourceful flower-seller Maïma into tax cuts and freed prisoners.

After the frosty critical reception (Hector Berlioz went so far as to question the “twisted” minds behind it), the score disappeared for a good century and a half, until musicologist Jean-Christophe Keck tracked it down and prepared the critical edition used here. Its first performance since 1861 came only in 2018, at the Opéra du Rhin in Strasbourg. ResMusica called it “a superb discovery”. Conductor Jacques Lacombe went further, saying it was “to be counted among the greatest successes” of Offenbach’s career.

Keck himself has argued that Offenbach pushed his musical language further here than anywhere else in his career until Les Contes d’Hoffmann, pointing to the dense part-writing and unexpected harmonic turns. These happen inside the high spirits of opéra-bouffe – the light, satirical comic opera genre Offenbach popularised – with pointed woodwind and cello solos doing a lot of the satirical work.

In 166 years, Barkouf has never once been recorded, but as part of this collaboration, Opera Rara and the Hallé are putting that right in the studio. A week later, conducted by Paul Daniel, the live performance reunites the Hallé with Opera Rara and the Royal Northern College of Music Opera Chorus, led by Yann Beuron as the scheming vizier Bababeck. Alistair McGowan narrates Jeremy Sams’ English adaptation of Offenbach’s original dialogue, with the sung sections in French and surtitled throughout.

Opera Rara exists to restore operas that got left behind in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Barkouf makes as good a case as any for why that work matters. It’s a genuinely sharp piece of political comedy that Paris simply wasn’t ready for at the time. Here, it gets not only its British debut but its first-ever recording. Not a bad way for a dog to finally have his day.