Jacques Offenbach

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Offenbach, Jacques (1819–80), composer. Although born in Cologne, he achieved his fame in Paris where he became France's finest and best‐known composer of opéra bouffe. In 1867 his The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein was presented in New York and initiated the American rage for the genre. Among his other works popular here were La Belle Hélène (1868), Orpheus in the Underworld (1868), Barbe Bleue (1868), La Perichole (1869), La Vie Parisienne (1869), and The Princess of Trebizonde (1871). This rash of premieres came at the same time as the success of The Black Crook, Humpty Dumpty, and the semimusical Fritz, Our Cousin German and thus helped open American stages to musical theatre.

(b Cologne, 20 June 1819; d Paris, 5 Oct 1880). French composer of German origin. His career began with a year's study at the Paris Conservatoire and several years experience as a solo and orchestral cellist; he became a theatre conductor in 1850, finally getting his own stage works performed in 1855. Writing mainly for the Bouffes Parisiens, he reached the peak of his international success in the 1860s; revivals and tours, as well as the score of his serious opera Les contes d′Hoffmann (unfinished, completed by Guiraud), dominated the 1870s.

With Johann Strauss (ii), Offenbach was one of the two outstanding composers in popular music of the 19th century and writer of some of the most exhilaratingly gay, tuneful music ever written. Les contes d′Hoffmann has retained a place in the international repertory for its fantasy and its strongly appealing music; but his most significant achievements lie in operetta: Orphée aux enfers (1858), La belle Hélène (1864), La vie parisienne (1866), La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) and La Périchole (1868) are striking examples. Moreover, it was through the success of Offenbach's works abroad that operetta became an established international genre, producing major national exponents in Strauss, Sullivan and Léhar and evolving into the 20th-century musical.

Offenbach was well served both by his skilful chief librettist Ludovic Halévy and by his talented leading ladies Hortense Schneider and Zulma Bouffer. His comic subjects, usually satirical treatments of familiar stories with a sharp glance at contemporary society and politics, are enhanced by none-too-subtle musical devices, including the quotation of well-known operatic music in incongruous settings: his tunes are often built upon a rising phrase in a major key and his finales are made exciting by gradual tempo acceleration and the use of brass at climaxes. He had a rare gift for catchy tunes, usually in dance rhythms, and telling harmonic touches. Through its famous overture (in fact composed by Carl Binder) and can-can, Orphée aux enfers has remained his best-known operetta.

works:
Dramatic music

• Orphée aux enters (1858)
• La belle Hélène (1864)
• Barbe-bleue (1866)
• La vie parisienne (1866)
• La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867)
• La Périchole (1868)
• Les contes d′Hoffmann, completed by Guiraud (1881)
• c 80 others
• vaude-villes, incidental music
• 5 ballets

Vocal music

• songs, duets, partsongs

Instrumental music

• works for vc, orch
• vc, pf
• chamber works with vc
• pieces for vc solo, cello duo, etc
• dance music

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The German-French composer Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) can be considered the father of the operetta because his lighthearted works conquered the world and found imitators everywhere.

Although he created a typically French musical idiom, Jacques, originally Jacob, Offenbach was born in Cologne, the son of a Jewish cantor and itinerant musician from the town of Offenbach. Jacques, one of 10 children, showed precocious musical talent, particularly for the cello. He studied with local teachers and performed in restaurants with a brother and sister. In 1833 the father took Jacques and another son to Paris for further training and for the musical opportunities offered there. The young German was accepted at the conservatory, but he left after a year to enter the professional world of music. His first position was as a cellist at the Opéra Comique, and for the rest of his life he was active in the musical-entertainment world as composer, conductor, and manager.

Offenbach was music director of the Comédie Française for 7 years, but when the International Exposition was held in Paris in 1855, he leased a theater seating only 50 people and presented his own satirical and topical sketches. The project was a sensational success, and he soon moved to a larger theater. In the following years he composed and produced almost 100 operettas. In them, he satirized political figures of the day and pretentious snobbery in the arts. There was nothing sentimental about Offenbach's operettas (this was a later development), only wit and high spirits. The most famous are Orpheus in theUnderworld (1858), La Belle Hélène (1864), and La Vie Parisienne (1866).

During the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867 thousands of visitors, including royalty and nobility as well as commoners, visited Offenbach's theater. In his later years he appeared as guest conductor in London, Vienna, Berlin, and other European centers. In 1875 he visited the United States and conducted special concerts in New York City and Philadelphia. The tour was less than a success, but his memoirs of the trip, Orpheus in America, give lively insights into big city life of the time.

Offenbach wrote one serious opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, a masterpiece that is frequently performed. It is his operettas, however, with their mixture of social satire with attractive melodies and ebullient dances that gave him his fame. He did not invent the can-can, but his use of this high-spirited, high-kicking dance made it as much a symbol of Paris as the Eiffel Tower.

Further Reading

A translation of Offenbach's account of his trip to the United States was published as Orpheus in America: Offenbach's Diary of His Journey to the New World (1957). Siegfried Kracauer, Orpheus in Paris: Offenbach and the Paris of His Time (1938), is rich in its treatment of social conditions during the composer's life. For a reasonable estimation of Offenbach's importance as a composer see Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers (1970).

Additional Sources

Faris, Alex., Jacques Offenbach, New York: Scribner, 1981, 1980.

Gammond, Peter., Offenbach, London; New York: Omnibus Press, 1986 1980.

Gammond, Peter., Offenbach: his life and times, Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Midas Books, 1980.

Harding, James., Jacques Offenbach: a biography, London: J. Calder; New York: Riverrun Press, 1980.

Offenbach, Jacques (b Cologne, 20 June 1819, d Paris, 5 Oct. 1880). German-French composer. He wrote the music for M. Taglioni's ballet Le Papillon (Paris, 1860). His theatre music has often been used for ballet purposes: by M. Rosenthal for Masssine's Gaîté parisienne (1938), by Dorati for Fokine's Bluebeard (1941), by George Crumb for Tudor's Offenbach in the Underworld (1955), and by L. Aubert for Cranko's La Belle Hélène (1955). Lanchbery arranged Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffmann for Peter Darrell's full-length ballet Tales of Hoffmann (Scottish Ballet, 1972).

Offenbach, Jacques (1819–80), German‐French composer, one of the most important representatives of the opéra bouffe and the French operetta. Born in Cologne, the son of a Jewish cantor, Offenbach went with his father to Paris in 1833 and was admitted to study at the Paris Conservatoire at 14 because of his extraordinary talent. Once he had completed his studies, he worked as a cellist and conductor. In 1853 he produced his first operetta, and during the following years he was the head of two theatres and also lived in the United States for a long time. His greatest successes, however, were in Paris, where he was regarded as a pioneer of musical comedy of the kind created by Johann Strauss in Austria and Gilbert and Sullivan in England. What made Offenbach's operettas so distinctive was his social critique. He combined satire and irony with an unusual compassion and understanding for his characters.

Among his approximately 90 operettas, Offenbach wrote a parody of the Bluebeard tale, Barbe‐bleue (1866). This fascinating and mysterious fairy‐tale character, created by Charles Perrault, has been adapted in operas many different times: Raoul Barbe‐bleue (King Bluebeard, 1789) by André‐Ernest‐Modeste Grétry, Ariadne et Barbe‐bleue (1907) by Paul Dukas, A Kékszakállú herceg vára (Duke Bluebeard's Castle, 1918) by Béla Bartók, Ritter Blaubart (Knight Bluebeard, 1920) by Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek. In Perrault's tale, Bluebeard wants to kill his disobedient wife because she has opened the forbidden door behind which the other murdered wives of Bluebeard are concealed. Offenbach collaborated closely with his librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy in his adaptation, and he set the action in the south of France during the crusades, but he made references through caricatures to the conditions in France during the reign of Napoleon III and he depicted the affable relations between the aristocracy and the common people while also revealing the servility of the nobles. The knight Bluebeard has six wives killed by his Alchemist Popolani so that he can marry the daughter of the king. However, Popolani had instead given the wives sleeping tablets and eventually brings them alive and well to the king. Bluebeard's marriage is then nullified, and as ‘punishment’ he must live the rest of his life with his sixth cranky and angry wife.

Offenbach did not write only operettas. He also composed important operas. One fairy‐tale opera, Die Rheinnixen (The Nixies of the Rhine, 1864), commissioned by the Viennese Court Opera, was not particularly successful. However, during his last years Offenbach was working on his opus summum, the great fantastical opera, which he never completed, Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1880). The composer died during the rehearsals on 5 October 1880. The opera was completed by Ernest Guiraud and produced in Paris in February 1881. The librettists, Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, took episodes from various tales by the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, whom Offenbach greatly admired, and they fused them together in a frame story. The central figure of the opera is the writer Hoffmann, who tells drinking companions about three adventures with women whom he had loved. Olympia, a mechanical doll, whom Hoffmann views through magical glasses and mistakes for a live woman, is destroyed because of a mysterious duel between her inventors. The fragile and beautiful singer Antonia dies from consumption. The courtesan Giuletta, who has a liaison with a sorcerer, mocks and deceives Hoffmann, who is left forlorn and alone at the end of the opera. Offenbach combined reality, magic, and the grotesque in his final work, which is one of the greatest fairy‐tale operas ever composed.

— Thomas H. Hoernigk

Offenbach, Jacques (1819-80), composer, see Meilhac.

• Period: Romantic (1820-1869)
• Country: France
• Born: June 20, 1819 in Cologne, Germany
• Died: October 05, 1880 in Paris, France
• Genres: Ballet, Concerto, Keyboard Music, Miscellaneous Music, Opera, Orchestral Music, Music Theater

Biography

Jacques Offenbach is best known for his opera Les contes d'Hoffman (Tales of Hoffmann) and for a work he did not compose, Gaîté parisienne, which used his themes as assembled and arranged by Manuel Rosenthal. Offenbach was one of those populist figures whose tuneful and exhilarating music could, at its best, elevate his art to classic status. His chief importance was in the development of the operetta as a bona fide genre on the world's stages. In this endeavor he would exert influence to varying degrees over Johann Strauss II, Lehár, Sullivan, and many others.

Offenbach was born Jacob Offenbach in Cologne on June 20, 1819. His first lessons were on violin. At age nine his focus turned to the cello, possibly to become the third member of a family trio: his brother Julius was already proficient on the violin, and his sister Isabella was a good pianist. Together, the three played local engagements for small sums of money. Offenbach's teachers included Joseph Alexander and Bernhard Breuer.

In 1833, Offenbach's father took him to Paris, where he was enrolled at the Conservatory. It was during his early years there that he adopted the French version of his name, "Jacques." After leaving the Conservatory about a year later, Offenbach took further lessons on the cello from Louis Norblin, but, more importantly, studied composition with Halévy. He supported himself during this period by playing in the Opéra-Comique orchestra. By 1838, when he left his orchestral post, he had become one of the finest cellists in Europe and began performing with Flotow, who played the piano. Although he had been composing small pieces since his childhood, Offenbach began writing larger works now, like the score for the comedy, Pascal et Chambord, premiered in 1839.

Over the next several years, Offenbach met and performed with Anton Rubinstein and Franz Liszt, and he traveled to London in 1844 to give concerts with Mendelssohn and Joachim. That same year he married Herminie d'Alcain, following his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism. Clearly, Offenbach could have chosen to remain primarily a performing artist, but in 1847 he began composing operettas, his first being L'alcove. He was appointed conductor at the Théâtre Français in 1850, and by 1855, when he resigned that conducting post for another, began attaining regular performances of his works at important theaters like the Bouffes-Parisiens, at Salle Marigny.

Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the underworld) was a great success in 1858 and paved the way for his subsequent larger operettas. He had a string of hits in the mid-1860s: La belle Hélène (1864), Barbe-bleue (1866), La vie parisienne (1866), and La Périchole (1868). While his later works also achieved success, they did not generate the level of excitement attained by these.

In 1874, Offenbach, now director of the Théâtre de la Gaité, mounted new versions of some of his earlier successful operettas, like La Périchole, but failed to turn profits. Eventually he went into bankruptcy. A concert tour to the United States in 1876 and new productions of his works in London a few years later helped give him financial solvency. Offenbach continued composing up to his last days. He was working on his opera, the aforementioned Les contes d'Hoffman, when he died on October 5, 1880. The work, existing in piano score only, was orchestrated by Guiraud, who also made a few additions. ~ Robert Cummings, All Music Guide

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