Jacques Offenbach

Jacob Offenbach was born in Cologne on June 20, 1819, the seventh of ten children of Isaac Juda Offenbach, a cantor, bookbinder, and itinerant musician who had taken his surname from his hometown of Offenbach am Main ^[1]. The household was poor but intensely musical. Isaac taught his children violin and singing, and young Jacob took up the cello at around age nine, quickly outpacing the local teachers his father could afford ^[2].

By his early teens Jacob was performing in Cologne taverns and dance halls alongside his brother Julius on violin and sister Isabella at the piano, earning money the family needed ^[1]. Isaac recognized that Cologne offered a Jewish musician limited prospects, so in 1833 he brought Jacob and Julius to Paris and secured them an audition with Luigi Cherubini, the formidable director of the Paris Conservatoire. Cherubini's rules excluded foreigners, but the fourteen year old cellist played well enough that the director admitted him anyway ^[2].

Jacob, who soon adopted the French form Jacques, lasted barely a year at the Conservatoire before leaving to earn a living. He found work in the cello section of the Opera-Comique orchestra, a post that paid poorly but placed him inside the world of French comic opera, the tradition he would later transform ^[3].

Through the 1840s Offenbach built a reputation as a cello virtuoso rather than a composer. He studied with Louis-Pierre Norblin and took composition lessons from Fromental Halevy, performed in fashionable Parisian salons, and toured as a soloist, appearing with Anton Rubinstein and playing in London in 1844 before an audience that included Queen Victoria ^[2]. Critics of the period ranked him among the finest cellists in Europe, and he published salon pieces and a course of cello duets that remained in pedagogical use ^[4].

Composing for the stage was his real ambition, yet the established Paris theatres repeatedly turned him away. The Opera-Comique showed little interest in the short, witty pieces he wanted to write ^[3]. In 1850 he accepted the post of conductor at the Theatre Francais, where he supplied incidental music and grew more frustrated watching his own works go unstaged.

His solution was audacious. In 1855, as the Exposition Universelle drew crowds to Paris, Offenbach leased a tiny wooden theatre on the Champs-Elysees and opened it as the Bouffes-Parisiens, a house dedicated to his own brand of short comic opera ^[1]. Licensing laws at first restricted him to one act pieces with only a handful of singers, constraints that sharpened his gift for economy and speed. The opening bill included Les deux aveugles, a farce about two fake blind beggars, which became a hit with Exposition visitors and made his name almost overnight ^[3].

Any account of Jacques Offenbach achievements begins with Orpheus in the Underworld (Orphee aux enfers), staged at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1858 once licensing restrictions had eased ^[1]. The work turned the Greek myth upside down: Orpheus is a bored violin teacher, Eurydice is happy to be abducted, and the gods of Olympus escape their dull routine for a party in Hades. A hostile review by the critic Jules Janin, who accused the piece of profaning antiquity, gave the production priceless publicity, and it ran for over 200 consecutive performances ^[2]. Its closing galop infernal later became universally known as the music of the can-can.

The 1860s were his imperial decade. Working chiefly with the librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, Offenbach produced La belle Helene (1864), Barbe-bleue (1866), La Vie parisienne (1866), La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein (1867), and La Perichole (1868) ^[3]. These works teased the army, the court, diplomacy, and the pleasure seeking rich, and Second Empire audiences, including Emperor Napoleon III himself, applauded the mockery. La Grande-Duchesse opened during the 1867 Exposition and drew visiting monarchs including Tsar Alexander II and Bismarck ^[2]. The soprano Hortense Schneider became the era's biggest star in his leading roles.

Rossini reportedly called Offenbach the Mozart of the Champs-Elysees, a label that has followed him ever since ^[2]. In 1858 he had received French citizenship by imperial decree, and in 1861 he was made a chevalier of the Legion d'honneur, marks of official favor unusual for a composer of comedies ^[1]. Across his career he wrote nearly one hundred operettas and stage works, an output that effectively created a genre. Composers from Johann Strauss II in Vienna to Arthur Sullivan in London built on the model he established ^[3].

In 1844 Offenbach married Herminie d'Alcain, the daughter of a Spanish family living in Paris. To marry her he converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism ^[1]. The marriage lasted until his death and produced five children, four daughters and a son, Auguste, who became a conductor. Contemporaries described the household as warm and the marriage as stable despite the composer's punishing work schedule and constant financial anxieties ^[2].

Offenbach was a slight, bespectacled man of restless energy, famous among colleagues for composing at extraordinary speed, often writing in carriages, cafes, and theatre corridors. He was also chronically extravagant. He entertained lavishly, gambled, and repeatedly spent his way into debt even in his most successful years ^[3]. Gout tormented him from middle age onward, and he sometimes conducted premieres while barely able to walk.

His origins made him a target. As a German-born Jew who had become the musical voice of Paris, he was attacked from both directions: French nationalists questioned his loyalty during the Franco-Prussian War, while some German commentators, later including Richard Wagner's circle, sneered at his art ^[2].

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the fall of the Second Empire broke the world Offenbach had entertained. His satires of imperial society suddenly seemed relics of a discredited regime, and his German birth made him suspect in a defeated and resentful France ^[1]. He spent part of the war outside the country, and although he resumed producing works in the 1870s, fashions had shifted toward the gentler operettas of Charles Lecocq.

He took over management of the Theatre de la Gaite in 1873, mounting expensive spectacular revivals, including an enlarged Orphee aux enfers, but the venture collapsed and left him bankrupt by 1875 ^[3]. To pay his debts he undertook an American tour in 1876, conducting concerts in New York and Philadelphia timed to the Centennial Exhibition. The tour earned solid fees, and he published a wry travel memoir, Offenbach en Amerique, the following year ^[2].

His final ambition was a serious opera worthy of the Opera-Comique. Drawing on a play by Jules Barbier and Michel Carre based on stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann, he worked on Les contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) through his last years while gout and heart disease wore him down. He died in Paris on October 5, 1880, with the score unfinished, reportedly anxious above all to live long enough to see it staged ^[1]. Ernest Guiraud completed the orchestration, and the opera premiered at the Opera-Comique on February 10, 1881, to immediate success ^[3].

Offenbach's most durable single work is the one he never heard. The Tales of Hoffmann entered the international repertory quickly, and its Barcarolle became one of the most recognized melodies in opera ^[3]. Because the composer left the score incomplete, editors and scholars have argued for over a century about which version is authentic, and new critical editions based on rediscovered manuscripts continued to appear into the twenty-first century ^[4].

The operetta tradition he founded spread across Europe and beyond. Viennese operetta, the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and eventually the American musical comedy all descend in part from the Bouffes-Parisiens formula of tuneful satire delivered at speed ^[3]. The critic and theorist Siegfried Kracauer devoted a full study, Orpheus in Paris, to reading Offenbach's career as a portrait of the Second Empire itself ^[5].

Among the essential Jacques Offenbach facts is the sheer reach of his tunes. The galop from Orphee aux enfers accompanies the can-can in films, cartoons, and advertising to this day, often by people who could not name its composer. Later musicians kept returning to him: Manuel Rosenthal arranged his melodies into the 1938 ballet Gaite Parisienne, and major houses from Salzburg to New York continue to stage La belle Helene, La Perichole, and Hoffmann ^[2]. A composer once dismissed as a maker of frivolities is now studied as one of the sharpest musical wits of the nineteenth century, and any Jacques Offenbach biography must reckon with both the laughter and the craft beneath it ^[4].