Even though he was composing music and writing music criticism in his spare time, Cui turned out to be an extremely prolific composer and feuilletonist. His public "debut" as a composer occurred 1859 with the performance of his orchestral Scherzo, Op. 1, under the baton of Anton Rubinstein and the auspices of the Russian Musical Society. In 1869 the first public performance of an opera by Cui took place; this was his "William Ratcliff" (based on the tragedy by Heinrich Heine); but it did not ultimately have success, partially because of the harshness of his own writings in the music press. All but one of his operas were composed to Russian texts; the one exception, "Le flibustier" (based on a play by Jean Richepin), premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1894 (twenty-five years after "Ratcliff"), but it did not succeed either. Cui's more successful stage works during his lifetime were the one-act comic opera "The Mandarin's Son" (publicly premiered in 1878), the three-act "Prisoner of the Caucasus" (1883), based on Pushkin, and the one-act "Mademoiselle Fifi" (1903), based on Guy de Maupassant. Besides "Flibustier", the only other operas by Cui performed in his lifetime outside of the Russian Empire were "Prisoner of the Caucasus" (in Liège, 1886) and the children's opera "Puss in Boots" (in Rome, 1915).