Taking as a point of departure an exposé of the now-obsolete cultural context underlying the libretti of Meilhac and Halévy and of the dilemma of their performance in translation (into German for instance), the initial translation of Orphée aux enfers by Ludwig Kalisch (1895, constantly reprinted and redone up until 1994) was presented alongside the stage version by Walter Felsenstein (1947). Given the tendency of subsequent translators to make use of formulations by their predecessors, it would be clearly worthwhile to examine in detail the relationships of dependency.