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Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Jacques Offenbach
(20 June 1819, in Cologne – 5 October 1880, in Paris) was a
French composer and cellist of the Romantic era and one of the
originators of the operetta form. Of German-Jewish descent, he was one
of the most influential composers of popular music in Europe in the
19th century, and many of his works remain in the repertory.
Offenbach's numerous operettas, such as Orpheus in the Underworld, and
La belle Hélène, were extremely popular in both France
and the English-speaking world in the 1850s and 1860s. They combined
political and cultural satire with witty grand opera parodies. But he
was forced to flee France in the 1870s, living in Spain and then
touring successfully. During the last years of his life, his popularity
rebounded. While his name remains most closely associated with the
French operetta and the Second Empire, it is his one fully operatic
masterpiece, Les contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), composed at
the end of his career, that has become the most familiar of Offenbach's
works in major opera houses.
Offenbach's father, born Isaac Eberst in Offenbach am Main around
1780, changed his name to Offenbach when he settled down in Deutz in
1802. He was a man of many talents who worked as a bookbinder,
translator, publisher, music teacher and composer and became a cantor
some 30 years later. In 1816 the family moved to Cologne, where his son
Jacob (later changed to Jacques) was born in 1819.
In 1833 his father took Jacob to Paris and managed to get him
admitted as a cello student to the Paris Conservatoire. Financial
difficulties forced Jacques, as he was known by then, to break off his
studies at the end of 1834. After a few odd jobs he eventually found a
position as a cellist in the orchestra of the Opéra Comique. He
soon made a name for himself as a cello virtuoso, appearing with famous
pianists like the young Anton Rubinstein, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and, very
often, with Flotow with whom he performed jointly composed pieces. In
1844, he converted to Catholicism and married Herminie d'Alcain. He
moved to Germany with his wife and daughter in 1848 (the couple
eventually had four daughters) to escape revolutionary violence in
France, but returned after a brief stay. In 1850, he became conductor
of the Théâtre Français, but the musical theatre
establishment in Paris did not immediately accept his sometimes pointed
songs and music. Therefore, in 1855, he rented for the Expo season a
little theatre on the Champs-Élysées and named it the
Bouffes Parisiens. In the following winter he moved the Bouffes to a
larger and, above all, heatable theatre on rue Monsigny/Passage
Choiseul. There he began a successful career devoted largely to
composing operettas. In the early years, Offenbach's permit limited his
productions to one-act works with only a few speaking or singing
characters. Les deux aveugles, Ba-ta-clan (both premiering in 1855),
and La bonne d'enfant were three of his popular works from this period.
Only in 1858, after these restrictions had been lifted, it became
possible for him to produce his first full-length work, Orpheus in the
Underworld. Offenbach wrote almost 100 operettas, some of which were
wildly popular in his time, and his most popular works are still
performed regularly today. The best of these works combined hilarious
political and cultural satire with witty grand opera parodies. His
best-known operettas in the English-speaking world are Orpheus in the
Underworld (1858), La belle Hélène (1864), La vie
parisienne (1866), The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein (1867), and La
Périchole (1868). Les Brigands (1869) was very popular in the
English-speaking world initially but was later forgotten. Offenbach
worked with the librettists Meilhac and Halévy more often than
any other librettist or team and produced some of his most successful
works with them. He said of his relationship with the team: Je suis
sans doute le Père, chacun des deux autres est à la fois
mon Fils et Plein d'Esprit (literally "No doubt I am the Father; each
of the two others is at once my Son and Full of Verve"— esprit
meaning both [Holy] Spirit and wit and Plein d'Esprit rhyming with
Saint Esprit).
Offenbach was much attached to his adopted country, and many of his
works are very patriotic in nature. That didn't help him much when war
broke out between France and Germany in 1870. Reviled in the German
press as a traitor to the German fatherland, and attacked in the French
press as an agent of Bismarck, he had to bring his family to safety in
Spain. When he returned to Paris after the war, his irreverent
operettas were out of favor with the public. It was felt that by
"turning royalty into a farce and the army into a joke" they had
undermined Napoleon III and were therefore the cause, or at least one
of the causes, of the defeat and the end of his reign. It is not
without irony, some reviewers note, that only a few years later
Offenbach was blamed (and harassed by the police) for his loyalty to
the deposed emperor. 1875 marked a low point. Offenbach was forced into
bankruptcy. In 1876, though, a very successful tour of the United
States at the occasion of the U.S. Centennial Exhibition allowed him to
recover part of his losses. While there, he conducted two of his
operettas, La vie parisienne and La jolie parfumeuse, and also gave as
many as 40 concerts in New York and Philadelphia. Offenbach enjoyed
renewed popularity with Madame Favart (1878), which built a fantasy
plot around the real-life French actress Marie Justine Favart, and La
fille du tambour-major, a musically inventive piece. Most experts are
of the opinion that his last work, The Tales of Hoffmann, was his only
grand opera. It is more serious and more ambitious in its musical scope
than his other works, perhaps reflecting the eternal wish of the
humourist to be taken seriously. The opera was still unfinished at his
death in 1880, but was completed by his friend Ernest Guiraud and
premiered in 1881. In 1938, Manuel Rosenthal (1904-2003) assembled the
popular ballet Gaîté Parisienne from his own orchestral
arrangements of melodies from Offenbach's operettas and the
"barcarolle" from The Tales of Hoffman.Offenbach is buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre, Paris, France.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
with Frédéric Chopin and Leó Delibes:
Gaité Parisienne / Les Sylphides (Deutsche Grammophone, 1972)