The German text is a translation of the original French libretto Orphée aux enfers by Hector Crémieux, for the operetta by Jacques Offenbach. The item is a published copy (Berlin: Ed. Bote und G. Bock, 1860; "Den Bühnen gegenüber als Manuscript gedruckt"), which has been annotated as a prompt book. (The German translation is not attirubted in the book, but in recent scholarship Kalisch is commonly identified as the translator. Also, the original French libretto is considered to have been written with the anonymous collaboration of Ludovic Halévy.) The book is labeled as the property of Theodor Bloch, who ran a theater lending library in Philadelphia from around 1880 to the mid 1890s. A clipping from a German-language newspaper, an obituary of Offenbach, dated 5 Oct. 1880, is pasted to the inside front cover. Names written on the inside back cover might reflect the cast of a performance, probably in the 1880s (at least several names are recognizable from the casts of other German-language plays in Philadelphia at that time). See also a theater newspaper of Oct. 1892 advertising a performance of the operetta in preparation (folder 698).
