Jacques Offenbach

Jacques Offenbach: The Cellist Who Laughed at an Empire

In 1867 King William of Prussia and Otto von Bismarck sat in a Paris theatre watching La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Offenbach's satire on toy generals and the appetite for war. His librettist Ludovic Halévy noted the scene with a chill: "This time it's war we're laughing at, and war is at our gates." Three years later Prussian artillery was outside Paris, the Second Empire had collapsed, and the German-born composer who had taught France to laugh at itself was abruptly a suspect in his own city.

A Cantor's Son from Cologne

He was born Jacob Offenbach on 20 June 1819 in Cologne, in the Kingdom of Prussia, into a Jewish family. His father, Isaac Juda Offenbach, had been born Eberst and worked as a bookbinder before becoming a synagogue cantor; in 1808 he formally adopted the name of his native town, Offenbach am Main. The household was musical from the start. Jacob took up the violin at six and the cello at nine.

Paris at Fourteen

In 1833 he arrived in Paris and applied to the Conservatoire. The director, Luigi Cherubini, balked at his age and his nationality, heard him play, and admitted him anyway. Jacob became Jacques. He lasted a single year, found academic study unrewarding, and stayed in the city regardless. From 1835 he earned his living as a cellist and conductor, building an international reputation across France, Germany and England, and was lionised in London after an 1844 tour that included playing before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

He had met Hérminie d'Alcain, daughter of a Carlist general, in the Paris salons around 1839, and married her on 14 August 1844, converting to Roman Catholicism to remove the obstacle. The marriage lasted and was by report a happy one, his affairs notwithstanding.

Building His Own Theatre

The Opéra-Comique wanted nothing from him, and his diagnosis of the problem was that "comic opera was no longer found at the Opéra-Comique; that really funny, gay, witty music was gradually being forgotten." So in 1855, timing it to the Paris Great Exhibition, he leased the Salle Lacaze on the Champs-Élysées and opened the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens on 5 July. It held roughly three hundred people, and the licence permitted only three speaking or singing characters on stage — a restriction that pushed him into evenings of one-act pieces and, incidentally, into an extreme economy of means that became a style. Les deux aveugles was an early hit. The house made Hortense Schneider a star.

Orphée and the Can-Can

Orphée aux enfers (1858), his first full-length operetta, contained the can-can. Reception was modest until the critic Jules Janin published a furious review denouncing its irreverence toward Roman mythology, whereupon it ran 228 performances — an extraordinary figure for the period — and became the most-performed work of his life. Napoleon III came in April 1860.

The pattern repeated. La belle Hélène (1864), again with Schneider, was again propelled by hostile notices. La Vie parisienne (1866) traded classical settings for a contemporary one and was an immediate and durable Paris success, though its local jokes travelled badly. La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein opened two days after the 1867 Exhibition and drew sovereigns. La Périchole (1868) turned toward romantic comedy with the satire dialled down; the conductor Andrew Lamb calls its score Offenbach's "most charming." Between 1864 and 1868 the librettists were Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac. Offenbach called them his sons and himself the father.

Citizenship, the Légion, and the Fall

Napoleon III granted him French citizenship in 1860, and the Légion d'honneur followed in 1861 — a decoration that scandalised conservatives in the musical establishment, who resented the honouring of a writer of light opera. It also welded him to a regime. After Prussia's victory in 1870 and the Emperor's fall, Offenbach, Cologne-born and an imperial favourite, was suspect from every direction. His operettas were dismissed as the frivolous residue of a discredited government, and La Grande-Duchesse was banned outright for its antimilitarism. He removed himself to Spain, Vienna and London.

Recovery and America

By late 1871 Paris had steadied and he came back, taking over the Théâtre de la Gaîté in July 1873 and mounting lavish, profitable revivals — until an expensive collaboration with the dramatist Victorien Sardou ruined him and forced him to mortgage future royalties. Rescue came from the United States. The 1876 tour attached to the Centennial Exhibition opened before eight thousand people at Gilmore's Garden, later Madison Square Garden, and ran to more than forty concerts in New York and Philadelphia. In Philadelphia he circumvented the Sunday entertainment ban by disguising operetta numbers as liturgical pieces until the authorities withdrew his permission. The tour made serious money. Madame Favart (1878) and La fille du tambour-major (1879) restored him at home.

Hoffmann

From 1877, by then badly afflicted with gout, he worked on the thing he had always wanted: a serious opera drawn from Barbier and Carré's play Les contes fantastiques d'Hoffmann. He is reported to have said to his dog Kleinzach, "I would give everything I have to be at the première." He did not get there. Offenbach died in Paris on 5 October 1880, aged sixty-one, with the vocal score substantially complete and the orchestration unfinished. Ernest Guiraud, assisted by Offenbach's eighteen-year-old son Auguste, finished and heavily cut it for the Opéra-Comique, where The Tales of Hoffmann premiered on 10 February 1881. It entered the standard repertory and has never left it.

Why Jacques Is Called a Genius

The word has been applied by people whose opinion carried weight. Rossini called him "the Mozart of the Champs-Élysées." Nietzsche called him both "an artistic genius" and "a clown," and credited nearly every one of his works with half a dozen "moments of wanton perfection" — which is the correct register, because Offenbach's gift is local rather than architectural. Sacheverell Sitwell compared his gifts to Mozart's and Rossini's, and Otto Klemperer concluded late in life that "those who called him 'The Mozart of the Boulevards' were not much mistaken." Debussy, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov all admired the operettas.

The faculty involved is craft rather than intellect, and it is worth stating precisely what it consists of. Offenbach could write a melody that carries a joke — music that is genuinely funny while remaining genuinely well made, landing a satirical point in eight bars without pausing to explain it. He paired this with a producer's instincts: shut out by the institutions, he built his own theatre, and converted a licensing restriction of three characters into a house style. Against him stands the sheer volume of ephemera, the fact that his work is inseparable from a Paris that ceased to exist in 1870, and the awkward truth that the one piece he took entirely seriously he neither finished nor orchestrated — the Hoffmann in the repertory is partly Guiraud's. Contemporaries confidently predicted his music would date within a decade. They were wrong, but the reason the prediction sounded reasonable is that Offenbach's genius was for the disposable, practised at a level that refused to be disposed of.

Legacy

He effectively invented the operetta and laid the foundations of modern musical theatre, influencing composers across Europe and Britain. He was given a state funeral, and The Times observed that "the crowd of distinguished men that accompanied him on his last journey amid the general sympathy of the public shows that the late composer was reckoned among the masters of his art." He lies in Montmartre Cemetery.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1861
• Notable work: The Tales of Hoffmann
• Notable work: Orpheus in the Underworld
• Instruments: cello
• Genres: opera, opéra bouffe and operetta