writer Hector Crémieux that when he was musical director of the Comédie-Française in the early 1850s he swore revenge for the boredom he suffered from the posturings of mythical heroes and gods of Olympus in the plays presented there. Cremieux and Ludovic Halévy sketched out a libretto for him lampooning such characters. By 1858, when Offenbach was finally allowed a large enough cast to do the theme justice, Halévy was preoccupied with his work as a senior civil servant, and the final libretto was credited to Crémieux alone. Most of the roles were written with popular members of the Bouffes company in mind, including Désiré, Léonce, Lise Tautin, and Henri Tayau as an Orphée who could actually play Orpheus's violin. The first performance took place at the Salle Choiseul on 21 October 1858. At first the piece did reasonably well at the box-office but was not the tremendous success Offenbach had hoped for. He insisted on lavish stagings for his operas: expenses were apt to outrun receipts, and he was in need of a substantial money-spinner. Business received an inadvertent boost from the critic Jules Janin of the . He had praised earlier productions at the Bouffes-Parisiens but was roused to vehement indignation at what he maintained was a blasphemous, lascivious outrage – "a profanation of holy and glorious antiquity". His attack, and the irreverent public ripostes by Crémieux and Offenbach, made headlines and provoked huge interest in the piece among the Parisian public, who flocked to see it. In his 1980 study of Offenbach, Alexander Faris writes, " became not only a triumph, but a cult." It ran for 228 performances, at a time when a run of 100 nights was considered a success. Albert Lasalle, in his history of the Bouffes-Parisiens (1860), wrote that the piece closed in June 1859 – although it was still performing strongly at the box-office – "because the actors, who could not tire the public, were themselves exhausted". In 1874 Offenbach substantially expanded the piece, doubling the length of the score and turning the intimate opéra bouffon of 1858 into a four-act opéra féerie extravaganza, with substantial ballet sequences. This version opened at the Théâtre de la Gaîté on 7 February 1874, ran for 290 performances, and broke box-office records for that theatre. During the first run of the revised version Offenbach expanded it even further, adding ballets illustrating the kingdom of Neptune