Robinson Crusoé is an opéra comique with music by Jacques Offenbach and words by Eugène Cormon and Hector-Jonathan Crémieux. It premiered in Paris on 23 November 1867. The writers took the theme from the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, though the work owes more to British pantomime than to the book itself. Crusoé leaves his family in England and runs away to sea. He is marooned on an island with only his friend and helper Vendredi (Man Friday) for company. His fiancée and two family servants come to the island in search of him, and after narrow escapes from cannibals and pirates they seize the pirates' ship and set sail for home. The opera was written for the prestigious Opéra-Comique in Paris, his second work for that theatre, following the unsuccessful Barkouf seven years earlier. The music is on a grander scale than that of most of the composer's earlier works. The opera was well received but ran for only 32 performances. In the 20th century it was not revived until the 1970s (in London) and was not seen again at the Opéra-Comique until 1986. Background and first production By the mid-1860s Offenbach had established himself both in Paris and internationally with his opéras bouffes Orphée aux enfers (1858), La belle Hélène (1864), La vie parisienne (1866) and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) and many others.{{refn|Orphée aux enfers is described on its title page as an opéra bouffon; the other three are given the more usual label of "opéra bouffe.|group=n}} These were box-office successes in commercial theatres, but the composer's only work for the prestigious state-owned Opéra-Comique, Barkouf (1860), had been a failure, hampered by a plot described by Hector Berlioz as puerile. Since then Offenbach had hoped for a triumphant return to the Opéra-Comique, which commissioned a new work from him for the 1867 season. The piece was described as an opéra comique – regarded by the musical establishment as a superior genre to Offenbach's more usual opéra bouffe. Audiences at the Opéra-Comique were more straight-laced than those at the Bouffes-Parisiens, Variétés and other Parisian theatres where Offenbach's works were usually seen, and Offenbach, determined not to alienate them, chose a familiar subject, Robinson Crusoe. It was well known to Parisian audiences from stage adaptations, particularly one by René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt described by Le Figaro as "a happy amalgam of Shakespeare and Daniel de Foë" .