Jacques Offenbach

Jacques Offenbach (; 20 June 18195 October 1880) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Franz von Suppé, Johann Strauss II and Arthur Sullivan. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera repertory.

Born in Cologne, Kingdom of Prussia, the son of a synagogue cantor, Offenbach showed early musical talent. At the age of 14, he was accepted as a student at the Paris Conservatoire; he found academic study unfulfilling and left after a year, but remained in Paris. From 1835 to 1855 he earned his living as a cellist, achieving international fame, and as a conductor. His ambition, however, was to compose comic pieces for the musical theatre. Finding the management of Paris's company uninterested in staging his works, in 1855 he leased a small theatre in the . There, during the next three years, he presented a series of more than two dozen of his own small-scale pieces, many of which became popular.

In 1858 Offenbach produced his first full-length operetta, ("Orpheus in the Underworld"), with its celebrated can-can; the work was exceptionally well received and has remained his most played. During the 1860s, he produced at least eighteen full-length operettas, as well as more one-act pieces. His works from this period include (1864), (1866), (1867) and (1868). The risqué humour (often about sexual intrigue) and mostly gentle satiric barbs in these pieces, together with Offenbach's facility for melody, made them internationally known, and translated versions were successful in Vienna, London, elsewhere in Europe and in the US.

Offenbach became associated with the Second French Empire of Napoleon III: the emperor and his court were genially satirised in many of Offenbach's operettas, and Napoleon personally granted him French citizenship and the . With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and the fall of the empire, Offenbach found himself out of favour in Paris because of his imperial connections and his German birth. He remained successful in Vienna, London and New York. He re-established himself in Paris during the 1870s, with revivals of some of his earlier favourites and a series of new works, and undertook a popular US tour. In his last years he strove to finish The Tales of Hoffmann, but died before the premiere of the opera, which has entered the standard repertory in versions completed or edited by other musicians.

Life and career

Early years

Offenbach was born on 20 June 1819, as Jacob (or Jakob) Offenbach to a Jewish family in the German city of Cologne, which was then a part of Prussia. His birthplace in the was a short distance from the square that is now named after him, the . He was the second son and the seventh of ten children of Isaac Juda Offenbach Eberst (1779–1850) and his wife Marianne Rindskopf (–1840). Isaac, who came from a musical family, had abandoned his original trade as a bookbinder and earned an itinerant living as a cantor in synagogues and playing the violin in cafés. He was generally known as "", after his native town, Offenbach am Main, and in 1808 he officially adopted Offenbach as a surname. In 1816 he settled in Cologne, where he became established as a teacher, giving lessons in singing, violin, flute, and guitar, and composing both religious and secular music.

When Jacob was six years old his father taught him to play the violin; within two years the boy was composing songs and dances, and at the age of nine he took up the cello. Together with his brother Julius (violin) and sister Isabella (piano), Jacob played in a trio at local dance halls, inns and cafés, performing popular dance music and operatic arrangements. He concluded that comic opera had become too grand and inflated. His disquisition was a preliminary to the announcement of an open competition for aspiring composers. A jury of French composers and playwrights including , , , and considered 78 entries; the five short-listed entrants were all asked to set a libretto, , written by and . The joint winners were Georges Bizet and Charles Lecocq. became, and remained, a friend of Offenbach. and Offenbach took a dislike to each other, and their subsequent rivalry was not altogether friendly.

Although the played to full houses, the theatre was constantly on the verge of running out of money, principally because of what his biographer Alexander Faris calls "Offenbach's incorrigible extravagance as a manager". An earlier biographer, , wrote, "Jacques spent money without counting. Whole lengths of velvet were swallowed up in the auditorium; costumes devoured width after width of satin." (The English translation is given in Faris.)

In 1858, the government lifted the licensing restrictions on the number of performers, and Offenbach was able to present more ambitious works. His first full-length operetta, ("Orpheus in the Underworld"), was presented in October 1858. Offenbach, as usual, spent freely on the production, with scenery by , lavish costumes, a cast of twenty principals, and a large chorus and orchestra.

As the company was particularly short of money following an abortive season in Berlin, a big success was urgently needed. At first the production seemed merely to be a modest success. It soon benefited from an outraged review by , the critic of the . He condemned the piece for profanity and irreverence to Roman mythology: the theme was the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, although Napoleon III and his government were generally seen as the real targets of its satire. Offenbach and his librettist seized on this free publicity, and joined in a lively public debate in the columns of the Parisian daily newspaper . Janin's indignation made the public agog to see the work, and the box office takings were prodigious. The piece ran for 228 performances, at a time when a run of 100 nights was considered a success. , 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". Among those who wanted to see the satire of the emperor was the emperor himself, who commanded a performance in April 1860.

In the 1859 season the presented new works by composers including Flotow, Jules Erlanger, , , and Offenbach himself. Of Offenbach's new pieces, , though initially only a mild success, was later revised and gained much popularity; the comedy duet of the two cowardly gendarmes became a favourite number in Britain as well as France and the basis for the Marines' Hymn in the US.

Early 1860s

The 1860s were Offenbach's most successful decade. At the beginning of 1860, he was granted French citizenship by the personal command of Napoleon III, and the following year he was appointed a chevalier of the ; this appointment scandalised those members of the musical establishment who resented such an honour for a composer of popular light opera. Offenbach began the decade with his only substantial ballet score, ("The Butterfly"), produced at the Opéra in 1860. It achieved what was then a successful run of 42 performances, without, as the biographer Andrew Lamb says, "giving him any greater acceptance in more respectable circles".

Apart from that setback, Offenbach flourished in the 1860s, the successes greatly outnumbering the failures. In 1861 he led the company in a summer season in Vienna. Encountering packed houses and enthusiastic reviews, Offenbach found Vienna much to his liking. He even reverted, for a single evening, to his old role as a cello virtuoso at a command performance before Emperor Franz Joseph I. That success was followed by a failure in Berlin. Offenbach, though born a Prussian citizen, observed, "Prussia never does anything to make those of our nationality happy." ("La prusse ne ferait jamais le bonheur de nos nationaux".)

In 1862, Offenbach's only son, Auguste (died 1883), was born, the last of five children. In the same year, Offenbach resigned as director of the Bouffes-Parisiens, handing the post over to Alphonse Varney. He continued to write most of his works for the company, with occasional pieces first given at the summer season at Bad Ems. (The Bad Ems pieces were, (1862), (1863), (1863), (1864), (1864), (1865), and (1867).) Most of them were played at the Bouffes-Parisiens in the winter season after their premieres. The opera was presented with substantial cuts at the Vienna Court Opera and in Cologne in 1865. It was not given again until 2002, when it was finally performed in its entirety. Since then it has been given several productions. It contained one number, the , described by the critic Eduard Hanslick as "lovely, luring and sensuous", which Ernest Guiraud later adapted as the Barcarolle in The Tales of Hoffmann. After December 1864, Offenbach wrote less frequently for the Bouffes-Parisiens, and many of his new works premiered at larger theatres. said of this trinity: a play on words loosely translated as "I am certainly the Father, but each of them is my Son and Wholly Spirited".

For Offenbach secured Hortense Schneider to play the title role. Since her early success in his short operas, she had become a leading star of the French musical stage. She now commanded large fees and was notoriously temperamental, but Offenbach was adamant that no other singer could match her as Hélène. Once again the success of the piece was inadvertently assured by the critic Janin; his scandalised notice was strongly countered by liberal critics and the ensuing publicity again brought the public flocking.

was a success in early 1866 and was quickly reproduced elsewhere. later in the same year was a new departure for Offenbach and his librettists; for the first time in a large-scale piece they chose a modern setting, instead of disguising their satire under a classical cloak. It needed no inadvertent boost from Janin but was an instant and prolonged success with Parisian audiences, although its very Parisian themes made it less popular abroad. Gammond describes the libretto as "almost worthy of [W. S.] Gilbert", and Offenbach's score as "certainly his best so far". The piece starred Zulma Bouffar, who began an affair with the composer that lasted until at least 1875.

In 1867 Offenbach had one of his greatest successes. The premiere of , a satire on militarism, took place two days after the opening of the Paris Exhibition, an even greater international draw than the 1855 exhibition which had helped him launch his composing career. The Parisian public and foreign visitors flocked to the new operetta. Sovereigns who saw the piece included King Wilhelm I of Prussia accompanied by his chief minister, Otto von Bismarck. Halévy, with his experience as a senior civil servant, saw the looming threat from Prussia; he wrote in his diary, "Bismarck is helping to double our takings. This time it's war we're laughing at, and war is at our gates." La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein was followed by a quick succession of modest successes. In 1867 he produced Robinson Crusoé and a revised version of Geneviève de Brabant; in 1868, , and a revised version of .

In October 1868 La Périchole marked a transition in Offenbach's style, with less exuberant satire and more human romantic interest. Lamb calls it Offenbach's "most charming" score. There was some critical grumbling at the change, but the piece, with Schneider in the lead, made a good profit. It was quickly produced elsewhere in Europe and both North and South America. Of the pieces that followed it at the end of the decade, Les brigands (1869) was another work that leaned more to romantic comic opera than to the more ebullient opéra bouffe. It was well received, but has been less often revived than Offenbach's best-known operettas. Having risen to fame under Napoleon III, satirised him, and been rewarded by him, Offenbach was universally associated with the old régime: he was known as "the mocking-bird of the Second Empire". When the empire fell in the wake of Prussia's crushing victory at Sedan in September 1870, Offenbach's music was suddenly out of favour. France was swept by violently anti-German sentiments, and despite his French citizenship and , his birth and upbringing in Cologne made him suspect. His operettas were now frequently vilified as the embodiment of everything superficial and worthless in Napoleon III's régime.

Although his Parisian audience deserted him, Offenbach had by now become highly popular in London's West End. John Hollingshead of the Gaiety Theatre presented Offenbach's operettas to large and enthusiastic audiences. Between 1870 and 1872, the Gaiety produced fifteen of his works. At the Royalty Theatre, Richard D'Oyly Carte presented in 1875. In Vienna, too, Offenbach works were regularly produced. While the war and its aftermath ravaged Paris, the composer supervised Viennese productions and travelled to England as the guest of the Prince of Wales.

By the end of 1871 life in Paris had returned to normal, and Offenbach ended his voluntary exile. His new works (1872) and (1873) were modestly profitable, but lavish revivals of his earlier successes did better at the box office. He decided to go back into theatre management and took over the Théâtre de la Gaîté in July 1873. His spectacular revival of there was highly profitable; an attempt to repeat that success with a new, lavish version of proved less popular. Along with the costs of extravagant productions, collaboration with the dramatist Victorien Sardou culminated in financial disaster. An expensive production of Sardou's in 1874, with incidental music by Offenbach, failed to attract the public to the Gaîté, and Offenbach was forced to sell his interests in the Gaîté and to mortgage future royalties.

In 1876 a successful tour of the US in connection with its Centennial Exhibition enabled Offenbach to recover some of his losses and pay his debts. Beginning with a concert at Gilmore's Garden before a crowd of 8,000 people, he gave a series of more than 40 concerts in New York and Philadelphia. To circumvent a Philadelphia law forbidding entertainments on Sundays, he disguised his operetta numbers as liturgical pieces and advertised a "Grand Sacred Concert by M. Offenbach". "" from became a "", and other equally secular numbers were billed as "" or "". The local authorities were not deceived, and withdrew authorisation for the concert at the last minute. At Booth's Theatre, New York, Offenbach conducted and his recent (1873) . Offenbach did not live to finish the piece. He left the vocal score substantially complete and had made a start on the orchestration. Ernest Guiraud, a family friend, assisted by Offenbach's 18-year-old son Auguste, completed the orchestration, making major changes as well as the substantial cuts demanded by the 's director, Carvalho.

Operettas

By his own reckoning, Offenbach composed more than 100 operas. Both the number and the noun are open to question: some works were so extensively revised that he evidently counted the revised versions as new, and commentators generally refer to all but a few of his stage works as operettas, rather than operas. Offenbach reserved the term (English: operetta) or for some of his one-act works, more often using the term for his full-length ones (though there are several one- and two-act examples of this type). It was only with the further development of the genre in Vienna after 1870 that the French term began to be used for works longer than one act. Offenbach also used the term for at least 24 of his works in either one, two or three acts.

However much the young Sullivan was influenced by Offenbach, the influence was evidently not in only one direction. Hughes observes that two numbers in Offenbach's (1878) bear "an astonishing resemblance" to "My name is John Wellington Wells" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer (1877).

Offenbach's popularity with Viennese audiences led composers there to follow his lead. He encouraged Johann Strauss to turn to operetta when they met in Vienna in 1864, but it was not until seven years later that Strauss did so. and the operetta specialist Richard Traubner comments that Strauss was influenced by "the two brilliant party scenes" in Offenbach's . A leading Viennese critic demanded that composers "remain within the realm of pure operetta, a rule strictly observed by Offenbach", and among Strauss's later stage works was Prinz Methusalem (1877), described by Lamb as "a satirical Offenbachian piece".

In Gammond's view, the Viennese composer most influenced by Offenbach was Franz von Suppé, who studied Offenbach's works carefully and wrote many successful operettas using them as a model. Traubner writes that Suppé's early works frankly imitated Offenbach's, and his operas – and Strauss's – were "unmistakably Parisian (as much derived from Meilhac and Halévy as from Offenbach)". Suppé's (The Boarding School, 1860) not only emulates Offenbach, but refers to him in the first act, when the heroine, the schoolgirl Sophie, and her friends learn about the can-can and proceed to dance it. Suppé's most enduring one-act success, (The Beautiful Galatea, 1865), was modelled, in both title and style, on Offenbach's which had been a great success in Vienna earlier that year. Elsewhere in Europe, Offenbach was an important influence on the development of zarzuela in Spain, and the 20th-century German composer Kurt Weill described his own (Cattle Trading) as "an operetta influenced by Offenbach".

In his 1957 article, Lubbock wrote, "Offenbach is undoubtedly the most significant figure in the history of the 'musical'", and traced the development of musical theatre from Offenbach via Sullivan, Lehár, Messager and Lionel Monckton to Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Lamb writes, "During the nineteenth century the works of Offenbach, Johann Strauss, and Gilbert and Sullivan had scarcely less success in the New World than in the Old", and according to the historian Adrian Wright the 1858 New York premiere of made Offenbach "a Broadway constant", putting his works in vogue in America until the end of the century. He influenced some American composers such as John Philip Sousa in his operetta El Capitan (1896). Sousa's contemporary, David Braham, was dubbed "the American Offenbach", and included phrases from Offenbach's scores in his own music. Later, Lamb finds echoes of La Vie parisienne in Cole Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), although the influence in that case is more that of Meilhac and Halévy than of Offenbach. In a 2005 study of Lerner and Loewe, Gene Lees writes, "The wellspring of the American musical is to be found in the opéra-bouffe of Jacques Offenbach", and Alan Jay Lerner said that Offenbach "was indeed the father of us all".

Reputation During Offenbach's lifetime, and in the obituary notices in 1880, fastidious critics (dubbed "Musical Snobs Ltd" by Gammond) showed themselves at odds with public appreciation. In a 1980 article in The Musical Times, George Hauger commented that those critics not only underrated Offenbach, but wrongly supposed that his music would soon be forgotten. Although most critics of the time made that erroneous assumption, a few perceived Offenbach's unusual quality; in The Times, Francis Hueffer wrote, "none of his numerous Parisian imitators has ever been able to rival Offenbach at his best". Nevertheless, the paper joined in the general prediction: "It is very doubtful whether any of his works will survive." After the posthumous production of The Tales of Hoffmann, The Times partially reconsidered its judgment, writing, " [will] confirm the opinion of those who regard him as a great composer in every sense of the word". It then lapsed into what Gammond calls "Victorian sanctimoniousness" by taking it for granted that the opera "will uphold Offenbach's fame long after his lighter compositions have passed out of memory".

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called Offenbach both an "artistic genius" and a "clown", but wrote that "nearly every one" of Offenbach's works achieves half a dozen "moments of wanton perfection". The novelist Émile Zola commented on Offenbach in an essay, "La féerie et l'opérette IV/V". While granting that Offenbach's best operettas are full of grace, charm and wit, Zola blames him for what others have made of the genre. Zola calls operetta a "public enemy" and a "monstrous beast". Some critics saw the satire in Offenbach's works as a social protest, an attack against the establishment, but Zola saw the works as a homage to the social system in the Second Empire. Otto Klemperer, although best known as a conductor of the German symphonic classics, was an admirer of Offenbach; late in life he reflected: "At the Kroll [in 1931] we did . That's a really delightful score. So is Orpheus in the Underworld and . Those who called him 'The Mozart of the Boulevards' were not much mistaken". Debussy, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov loved Offenbach's operettas. Debussy rated them higher than The Tales of Hoffmann: "The one work in which [Offenbach] tried to be serious met with no success." He wrote this in 1903, when The Tales of Hoffmann, after initial success, with 101 performances in its first year, had become neglected. A production by Thomas Beecham at His Majesty's Theatre, London, in 1910 restored the work to the mainstream operatic repertoire, where it has remained. A London critic wrote, on Offenbach's death, "I somewhere read that some of Offenbach's latest work shows him to be capable of more ambitious work. I, for one, am glad he did what he did, and only wish he had done more of the same kind." In Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Lamb writes:

Notes and references