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= Jacques Offenbach =
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Introduction
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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.
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. As Isaac was by then the permanent
cantor of the local synagogue, he could afford to pay for his son to
take lessons from the well-known cellist Bernhard Breuer. Three years
later, the biographer Gabriel Grovlez records, the boy was giving
performances of his own compositions, "the technical difficulties of
which terrified his master", Breuer. 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. In 1833 Isaac decided that his musically
talented sons Julius and Jacob (then aged 18 and 14) needed to leave
the provincial musical scene of Cologne to study in Paris. With
generous support from local music lovers and the municipal orchestra,
with whom they gave a farewell concert on 9 October, the two young
musicians, accompanied by their father, made the four-day journey to
Paris in November 1833.
Isaac had been given letters of introduction to the director of the
Paris Conservatoire, Luigi Cherubini, but had to persuade Cherubini
even to give Jacob an audition. The boy's age and nationality were
both obstacles to admission. Cherubini had several years earlier
refused the twelve-year-old Franz Liszt admission on similar grounds,
but he eventually agreed to hear the young Offenbach play. He listened
to his playing and stopped him, saying, "Enough, young man, you are
now a pupil of this Conservatoire." Julius was also admitted. Both
brothers adopted French forms of their names, Julius becoming Jules
and Jacob becoming Jacques.
Isaac hoped to secure permanent employment in Paris but failed to do
so and returned to Cologne. Before leaving, he found several pupils
for Jules; the modest earnings from those lessons, supplemented by
fees earned by both brothers as members of synagogue choirs, supported
them during their studies. At the conservatoire, Jules was a diligent
student; he graduated and became a successful violin teacher and
conductor, and was of his younger brother's orchestra for several
years. By contrast, Jacques was bored by academic study and left after
a year. The conservatoire's roll of students notes against his name
"Struck off on 2 December 1834 (left of his own free will)".
Cello virtuoso
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Having left the conservatoire, Offenbach was free from the stern
academicism of Cherubini's curriculum, but as the biographer James
Harding writes, "he was free, also, to starve". He secured a few
temporary jobs in theatre orchestras before gaining a permanent
appointment in 1835 as a cellist at the . He was no more serious there
than he had been at the conservatoire, and regularly had his pay
docked for playing pranks during performances; on one occasion, he and
the principal cellist played alternate notes of the printed score, and
on another they sabotaged some of their colleagues' music stands to
make them collapse in mid-performance. Nevertheless, the earnings from
his orchestral work enabled him to take lessons with the celebrated
cellist Louis-Pierre Norblin. He made a favourable impression on the
composer and conductor Fromental Halévy, who gave him lessons in
composition and orchestration and wrote to Isaac Offenbach in Cologne
that the young man was going to be a great composer. Some of
Offenbach's early compositions were played by the fashionable
conductor Louis-Antoine Jullien. Offenbach and another young composer,
Friedrich von Flotow, collaborated in 1839 on a series of works for
cello and piano. Although Offenbach's ambition was to compose for the
stage, he could not gain an entrée to Parisian theatre at this point
in his career; with Flotow's help, he built a reputation composing for
and playing in the fashionable salons of Paris. Through contacts he
made there he gained pupils. In 1838 the commissioned him to compose
songs for the play , staged in March 1839. In January 1839, together
with his elder brother, he gave his first public concert.
Among the salons at which Offenbach most frequently appeared, from
1839, was that of Madeleine-Sophie, . There he met Hérminie d'Alcain,
the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Carlist general. They fell in love,
and in 1843 they became engaged, but he was not yet in a financial
position to marry. To extend his fame and earning power beyond Paris,
he undertook tours of France and Germany. Among those with whom he
performed were Anton Rubinstein and in September 1843 in a concert in
Offenbach's native Cologne, Liszt. In 1844, probably through English
family connections of Hérminie, he embarked on a tour of England.
There, he was immediately engaged to appear with some of the most
famous musicians of the day, including Felix Mendelssohn, Joseph
Joachim, Michael Costa and Julius Benedict. 'The Era' wrote of his
debut performance in London, "His execution and taste excited both
wonder and pleasure, the genius he exhibited amounting to absolute
inspiration." The British press reported a triumphant royal command
performance; 'The Illustrated London News' observed, "Herr Jacques
Offenbach, the astonishing Violoncellist, performed on Thursday
evening at Windsor before the Emperor of Russia, the King of Saxony,
Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert with great success." The use of the
German "", reflecting the fact that Offenbach remained a Prussian
citizen, was common to all the British press coverage of Offenbach's
1844 tour. The ambiguity of his nationality sometimes caused him
difficulty in later life when France and Prussia became enemies.
Offenbach returned to Paris with his reputation and his bank balance
both much enhanced. The last remaining obstacle to his marriage to
Hérminie was the difference in their professed religions; he converted
to Roman Catholicism, with the acting as his sponsor. Isaac
Offenbach's views on his son's conversion from Judaism are unknown.
The wedding took place on 14 August 1844; the bride was seventeen
years old, and the bridegroom was twenty-five. The marriage was
lifelong, and happy, despite some extramarital affairs on Offenbach's
part. After Offenbach's death, a friend said that Hérminie "gave him
courage, shared his ordeals and comforted him always with tenderness
and devotion".
Returning to the familiar Paris salons, Offenbach gradually shifted
the emphasis of his work from being a cellist who also composed to
being a composer who also played the cello. He had already published
many compositions, and some of them had sold well, but now he began to
write, perform and produce musical burlesques as part of his salon
presentations. He amused the comtesse de Vaux's 200 guests with a
parody of Félicien David's currently fashionable , and in April 1846
gave a concert at which seven operatic items of his own composition
were premiered before an audience that included leading music critics.
The following year he staged his first operetta, the one-act . It had
been written at the invitation of the , which had then failed to
present it, and Offenbach mounted the production himself as part of an
evening of his works at the . He seemed on the verge of breaking into
theatrical composition when the 1848 revolution broke out, sweeping
Louis Philippe from the throne and leading to serious bloodshed in the
streets of the capital. Three hundred and fifty people were killed
within three days. Offenbach hastily took Hérminie and their
two-year-old daughter to join his family in Cologne. The city was
experiencing its own nationalistic revolutionary upheaval and
Offenbach found it expedient to change his forename back to the German
while there.
Returning to Paris in February 1849 Offenbach found the grand salons
closed down. He went back to working as a cellist, and occasional
conductor, at the , but was not encouraged in his aspirations to
compose. His talents had been noted by the director of the
Comédie-Française, Arsène Houssaye, who appointed him musical director
of the theatre in 1850, with a brief to enlarge and improve the
orchestra. Offenbach composed songs and incidental music for eleven
classical and modern dramas for the in the early 1850s. Some of his
songs became very popular, and he gained valuable experience in
writing for the theatre. Houssaye later wrote that Offenbach had done
wonders for his theatre, but the management of the was uninterested
in commissioning him to compose for its stage. The composer and critic
Claude Debussy later wrote that the musical establishment could not
cope with Offenbach's irony, which exposed the "false, overblown
quality" of the operas they favoured - "the great art at which one was
not allowed to smile".
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Between 1853 and May 1855 Offenbach wrote three one-act operettas and
managed to have them staged in Paris. They were all well received, but
the authorities of the remained unmoved. Offenbach found more
encouragement from the composer, singer and impresario Florimond
Ronger, known professionally as . At his theatre, the , opened in
1854, pioneered French light comic opera, or "". In 'The Musical
Quarterly', Martial Teneo and Theodore Baker wrote, "Without the
example set by , Offenbach might perhaps never have become the
musician who penned , , and so many other triumphant works." Offenbach
approached , who agreed to present a new one-act operetta with words
by Jules Moinaux and music by Offenbach, called . It was presented on
26 June 1855 and was well received. Offenbach's biographer Peter
Gammond describes it as "a charming piece of nonsense". The piece
depicts a double-bass player, played by , shipwrecked on a cannibal
island, who after several perilous encounters with the female chief of
the cannibals makes his escape using his double-bass as a boat.
Offenbach pressed ahead with plans to present his works himself at his
own theatre and to abandon further thoughts of acceptance by the .
Offenbach had chosen his theatre, the Salle Lacaze in the
Champs-Élysées. The location and the timing were ideal for him. Paris
was about to be filled between May and November with visitors from
France and abroad for the 1855 Great Exhibition. The Salle Lacaze was
next to the exhibition site. He later wrote:
The description of the theatre as "little" was accurate: it could hold
an audience of at most 300. It was therefore well suited to the tiny
casts permitted under the prevailing licensing laws: Offenbach was
limited to three speaking (or singing) characters in any piece. With
such small forces, full-length works were out of the question, and
Offenbach, like Hervé, presented evenings of several one-act pieces.
The opening of the theatre was a frantic rush, with less than a month
between the issue of the licence and the opening night on 5 July 1855.
During this period Offenbach had to "equip the theatre, recruit
actors, orchestra and staff, find authors to write material for the
opening programme - and compose the music". Among those he recruited
at short notice was , the nephew of Offenbach's early mentor . Ludovic
was a rising civil servant with a passion for the theatre and a gift
for dialogue and verse. While maintaining his civil service career he
went on to collaborate (sometimes under discreet pseudonyms) with
Offenbach in 21 works over the next 24 years.
wrote the libretto for one of the pieces in the opening programme,
but the most popular work of the evening had words by . , "The Two
Blind Men", is a comedy about two beggars feigning blindness. During
rehearsals there had been some concern that the public might judge it
to be in poor taste, but it was not only the hit of the season in
Paris: it was soon playing successfully in Vienna, London and
elsewhere. Another success in 1855 was (The Village Fiddler), which
made a star of Hortense Schneider in her first role for Offenbach.
When she auditioned for him, aged 22, he engaged her on the spot. From
1855 she was a key member of his companies through much of his career.
The Champs-Élysées in 1855 were not yet the grand avenue laid out by
Baron Haussmann in the 1860s, but an unpaved . The public who were
flocking to Offenbach's theatre in the summer and autumn of 1855 could
not be expected to venture there in the depths of a Parisian winter.
He cast about for a suitable venue and found the , known also as the
or , in central Paris. He entered into partnership with its proprietor
and moved the there for the winter season. The company returned to
the Salle Lacaze for the 1856, 1857 and 1859 summer seasons,
performing at the in the winter. Legislation enacted in March 1861
prevented the company from using both theatres, and appearances at the
were discontinued.
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Offenbach's first piece for the company's new home was (December
1855), a well-received piece of mock-oriental frivolity, to a libretto
by . He followed it with fifteen more one-act operettas over the next
three years. They were all for the small casts permitted under his
licence, although at the he was granted an increase from three to
four singers.
Under Offenbach's management, the staged works by many composers.
These included new pieces by Leon Gastinel and Léo Delibes. When
Offenbach asked Rossini's permission to revive his comedy , Rossini
replied that he was pleased to be able to do anything for "the Mozart
of the Champs-Élysées". Offenbach revered Mozart above all other
composers. He had an ambition to present Mozart's neglected one-act
comic opera ('The Impresario') at the , and he acquired the score
from Vienna. With a text translated and adapted by and , he presented
it during the Mozart centenary celebrations in May 1856 as ; it was
popular with the public and also greatly enhanced the critical and
social standing of the . By command of the emperor, Napoleon III, the
company performed at the Tuileries Palace shortly after the first
performance.
In a long article in in July 1856, Offenbach traced the history of
comic opera. He declared that the first work worthy to be called was
Philidor's 1759 (Blaise the Cobbler), and he described the gradual
divergence of Italian and French notions of comic opera, with verve,
imagination and gaiety from Italian composers, and mischief, common
sense, good taste and wit from the French composers. 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."
Moreover, Offenbach was personally generous and liberally hospitable.
To boost the company's finances, a London season was organised in
1857, half the company remaining in Paris to play at the and the
other half performing at the St James's Theatre in the West End of
London. The visit was a success, but did not cause the sensation that
Offenbach's later works did in London.
{{lang|fr|Orphée aux enfers}}
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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. Despite many great successes during the
rest of Offenbach's career, remained his most popular work. Gammond
lists among the reasons for its success, "the sweeping waltzes"
reminiscent of Vienna but with a new French flavour, the patter songs,
and "above all else, of course, the can-can which had led a naughty
life in low places since the 1830s or thereabouts and now became a
polite fashion, as uninhibited as ever".
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
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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". Among other operettas in the same year,
he finally had a piece presented by the , the three-act . It was not a
success; its plot revolved around a dog, and Offenbach attempted
canine imitations in his music. Neither the public nor the critics
were impressed, and the piece survived for only seven performances.
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. 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." He and the company hastened back to Paris.
Meanwhile, among his operettas that season were the full-length and
the one-act .
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. Despite problems
with the libretto, Offenbach completed a serious opera in 1864, , a
hotchpotch of romantic and mythological themes. 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.
Later 1860s
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Between 1864 and 1868 Offenbach wrote four of the operettas for which
he is chiefly remembered: (1864), (1866), (1867) and (1868).
Halévy was joined as librettist for all of them by Henri Meilhac.
Offenbach, who called them "Meil" and "Hal", 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. Rehearsals for the premiere at the
were tempestuous, with Schneider and the principal mezzo-soprano Léa
Silly feuding, the censor fretting about the satire of the imperial
court, and the manager of the theatre attempting to rein in
Offenbach's extravagance with production expenses. 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|[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 William 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.
War and aftermath
===================
Offenbach returned hurriedly from a trip to Ems and Wiesbaden just
before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He then went
to his home in Étretat in Normandy and arranged for his family to move
to the safety of San Sebastián in northern Spain, joining them shortly
afterwards. 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. was banned in France because of its antimilitarist
satire.
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) . He
returned to France in July 1876, with profits that were handsome but
not spectacular.
Offenbach's later operettas enjoyed renewed popularity in France,
especially (1878), which featured a fantasy plot about the real-life
French actress Marie Justine Favart, and (1879), which was the most
successful of his operettas of the 1870s.
Last years
============
Profitable though was, composing it left Offenbach less time to work
on his cherished project, the creation of a successful serious opera.
Since the beginning of 1877, he had been working when he could on a
piece based on a stage play, , by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré.
Offenbach had suffered from gout since the 1860s, often being carried
into the theatre in a chair. Now in failing health, he was conscious
of his own mortality and wished passionately to live long enough to
complete the opera, ("The Tales of Hoffmann"). He was heard saying to
Kleinzach, his dog, "I would give everything I have to be at the
première". 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. The opera was first seen at the on 10 February
1881. Offenbach also left his last comedy, , unfinished; Léo Delibes
orchestrated it and it was given at the Théâtre de la Renaissance on
30 October 1880.
Offenbach died in Paris on 5 October 1880 at the age of 61. His cause
of death was certified as heart failure brought on by acute gout. He
was given a state funeral; 'The Times' reported, "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 is buried in the Montmartre
Cemetery.
Works
======================================================================
In 'The Musical Times', Mark Lubbock wrote in 1957:
Among other well-known Offenbach numbers are (the Doll Song from 'The
Tales of Hoffmann'); and (); and in , which Lamb notes was
Offenbach's last major song for Hortense Schneider.
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.
Offenbach's earliest operettas were one-act pieces for small casts.
More than 30 of these were presented before his first full-scale "", ,
in 1858, and he composed over twenty more of them during the rest of
his career. Lamb, following the precedent of Henseler's 1930 study of
the composer, divides the one-act pieces into five categories: (i)
country idylls; (ii) urban operettas; (iii) military operettas; (iv)
farces; and (v) burlesques or parodies. Offenbach enjoyed his greatest
success in the 1860s. His most popular operettas from that decade have
remained among his best known.
Texts and word setting
========================
The first ideas for plots usually came from Offenbach, his librettists
working along lines agreed with him. Lamb writes, "In this respect
Offenbach was both well served and skilful at discovering talent. Like
Sullivan, and unlike Johann Strauss II, he was consistently blessed
with workable subjects and genuinely witty librettos." In his setting
of his librettists' words he took advantage of the rhythmic
flexibility of the French language, and sometimes took this to
extremes, forcing words into unnatural stresses. Harding comments that
he "wrought much violence on the French language". A frequent
characteristic of Offenbach's word setting was the nonsensical
repetition of isolated syllables of words for comic effect; an example
is the quintet for the kings in :
Musical structure
===================
In general, Offenbach followed simple, established forms. His melodies
are usually short and unvaried in their basic rhythm, rarely, in
Hughes's words, escaping "the despotism of the four-bar phrase". In
modulation Offenbach was similarly cautious; he rarely switched a
melody to a remote or unexpected key, and kept mostly to a
tonic-dominant-subdominant pattern. Within these conventional limits,
he employed greater resource in his varied use of rhythm; in a single
number he would contrast rapid patter for one singer with a broad,
smooth phrase for another, illustrating their different characters. He
often switched quickly between major and minor keys, effectively
contrasting characters or situations. When he wished to, Offenbach
could use unconventional techniques, such as the leitmotif, used
throughout to accompany the eponymous Docteur Ox (1877) and to parody
Wagner in (1860).
Orchestration
===============
In his early pieces for the Bouffes-Parisiens, the size of the
orchestra pit had restricted Offenbach to an orchestra of sixteen
players. He composed for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two horns,
piston, trombone, percussion (including timpani) and a small string
section of seven players. After moving to the he had an orchestra of
30 players. The musicologist and Offenbach specialist Jean-Christophe
Keck notes that when larger orchestras were available, either in
bigger Paris theatres or in Vienna or elsewhere, Offenbach would
compose, or rearrange existing music, accordingly. Surviving scores
show his instrumentation for additional wind and brass, and even extra
percussion. When they were available he wrote for cor anglais, harp,
and - exceptionally, Keck records - an ophicleide ('Le Papillon'),
tubular bells ('Le carnaval des revues'), and a wind machine ('Le
voyage dans la lune').
Hughes describes Offenbach's orchestration as "always skilful, often
delicate, and occasionally subtle". He instances Pluton's song in
'Orphée aux enfers', introduced by a three-bar phrase for solo
clarinet and solo bassoon in octaves immediately repeated on solo
flute and solo bassoon an octave higher. In Keck's view, "Offenbach's
orchestral scoring is full of details, elaborate counter-voices,
minute interactions coloured by interjections of the woodwinds or
brass, all of which establish a dialogue with the voices. His
refinement of design equals that of Mozart or Rossini."
Compositional method
======================
According to Keck, Offenbach would first make a note of melodies a
libretto suggested to him in a notebook or straight onto the
librettist's manuscript. Next using full score manuscript paper he
wrote down vocal parts in the centre, then a piano accompaniment at
the bottom possibly with notes on orchestration. When Offenbach felt
sure the work would be performed, he began full orchestration, often
employing a sort of shorthand.
Parody and influences
=======================
Offenbach was well known for parodying other composers' music. Some of
them saw the joke and others did not. Adam, Auber and Meyerbeer
enjoyed Offenbach's parodies of their scores. Meyerbeer made a point
of attending all Bouffes-Parisiens productions, always seated in
Offenbach's private box. Among the composers who were not amused by
Offenbach's parodies were Berlioz and Wagner. Offenbach mocked
Berlioz's "strivings after the antique", and his initial light-hearted
satire of Wagner's pretensions later hardened into genuine dislike.
Berlioz reacted by bracketing Offenbach and Wagner together as "the
product of the mad German mind", and Wagner, ignoring Berlioz,
retaliated by writing some unflattering verses about Offenbach.
In general, Offenbach's parodistic technique was simply to play the
original music in unexpected and incongruous circumstances. He slipped
the banned revolutionary anthem 'La Marseillaise' into the chorus of
rebellious gods in 'Orphée aux enfers', and quoted the aria from
Gluck's 'Orfeo' in the same work; in he quoted the patriotic trio
from Rossini's 'William Tell' and parodied himself in the ensemble for
the kings of Greece, in which the accompaniment quotes the 'rondeau'
from . In his one act pieces, Offenbach parodied Rossini's and
familiar arias by Bellini. In 'Croquefer' (1857), one duet consists of
quotations from Halévy's 'La Juive' and Meyerbeer's 'Robert le diable'
and 'Les Huguenots'. Even in his later, less satirical period, he
included a parodic quotation from Donizetti's in .
Other examples of Offenbach's use of incongruity are noted by the
critic Paul Taylor: "In , the kings of Greece denounce Paris as 'un
vil séducteur' [vile seducer] to a waltz tempo that is itself
unsuitably seductive ... the potty-sounding phrase becomes the absurd
nucleus of a big cod-ensemble." Another lyric set to absurdly
ceremonious music is (your coat has split down the back) in 'La vie
parisienne'. The Grand Duchess of Gérolstein's rondo is rhythmically
and melodically similar to the finale of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony,
but it is not clear whether the similarity is parodic or coincidental.
In Offenbach's last decade, he took note of a change in public taste:
a simpler, more romantic style was now preferred. Harding writes that
Lecocq had successfully moved away from satire and parody, returning
to "the genuine spirit of opéra-comique and its peculiarly French
gaiety". Offenbach followed suit in a series of twenty operettas; the
conductor and musicologist Antonio de Almeida names the finest of
these as (1879).
Other works
=============
Of Offenbach's two serious operas, 'Die Rheinnixen', a failure, was
not revived until the 21st century. His second attempt, 'The Tales of
Hoffmann', was originally intended as a grand opera. When the work was
accepted by for production at the , Offenbach agreed to make it an
with spoken dialogue. It was incomplete when he died; Faris speculates
that, but for Georges Bizet's premature death, Bizet rather than
Guiraud would have been asked to complete the piece and would have
done so more satisfactorily. The critic Tim Ashley writes,
"Stylistically, the opera reveals a remarkable amalgam of French and
German influences ... Weberian chorales preface Hoffmann's narrative.
Olympia delivers a big coloratura aria straight out of French grand
opera, while Antonia sings herself to death to music reminiscent of
Schubert."
Although he wrote ballet music for dance sequences in many of his
operettas, Offenbach wrote only one full-length ballet, . The score
was much praised for its orchestration, and it contained one number,
the "Valse des rayons", that became an international success. Between
1836 and 1875 he composed several individual waltzes and polkas, and
suites of dances. They include a waltz, ("Evening Papers") composed
for Vienna with Johann Strauss's ("Morning Papers") as a companion
piece. Other orchestral compositions include a piece in 17th-century
style with cello solo, which became a standard work of the cello
repertoire. Little of Offenbach's non-operatic orchestral music has
been regularly performed since his death.
Offenbach composed more than 50 non-operatic songs between 1838 and
1854, most of them to French texts, by authors including Alfred de
Musset, Théophile Gautier and Jean de La Fontaine, and also ten to
German texts. Among the most popular of these songs are "" (1843),
dedicated to the young Hérminie d'Alcain as an early token of the
composer's love. An Ave Maria for soprano solo was rediscovered at the
Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2000.
Arrangements and editions
===========================
Although the overtures to and are well known and frequently
recorded, the scores usually performed and recorded are not by
Offenbach, but were arranged from music in the operas by Carl Binder
and Eduard Haensch, respectively, for the Vienna premieres of the two
works. Offenbach's own preludes are much shorter.
In 1938, Manuel Rosenthal assembled the popular ballet from his own
orchestral arrangements of melodies from Offenbach's stage works, and
in 1953 the same composer assembled a symphonic suite,
'Offenbachiana', also from music by Offenbach. Jean-Christophe Keck
regards the 1938 work as "no more than a vulgarly orchestrated
pastiche". In Gammond's view it does "full justice" to Offenbach.
Efforts to present critical editions of Offenbach's works have been
hampered by the dispersion of his autograph scores to several
collections after his death, some of which do not grant access to
scholars. Although Auguste catalogued the sketches and manuscripts
after his father's death, when the composer's widow died the surviving
daughters battled over the papers. Many of his papers may have been
lost in the collapse of the city archives in Cologne in 2009.
Influence
===========
Offenbach had a considerable influence on some later French composers,
although his immediate successor, Lecocq, strove to distance himself
and went out of his way to avoid rhythmic devices familiar from
Offenbach's works. Francis Poulenc in his biography of Emmanuel
Chabrier wrote that as a great admirer of Offenbach, Chabrier took to
imitating him explicitly in some details: "Hence () is directly
derived from in ". Poulenc traces the influence through Chabrier and
André Messager to his own music. The composer and musicologist Wilfrid
Mellers finds music modelled on Offenbach's in Poulenc's .
The musician and author Fritz Spiegl wrote in 1980, "Without Offenbach
there would have been no Savoy Opera ... no or 'Merry Widow'". The
two creators of the Savoy operas - the librettist, Gilbert, and the
composer, Sullivan - were both indebted to Offenbach and his partners
for their satiric and musical styles, even borrowing plot components.
For example, Faris argues that the mock-oriental 'Ba-ta-clan'
influenced 'The Mikado', including its character names, Offenbach's
Ko-ko-ri-ko and Gilbert's Ko-Ko. The best-known instance in which a
Savoy opera draws on Offenbach's work is 'The Pirates of Penzance'
(1879), where both Gilbert and Sullivan follow the lead of (1869) in
their treatment of the police, who plod along ineffectually in heavy
march-time. was presented in London in 1871, 1873 and 1875; before
the first of these, Gilbert made an English translation of Meilhac and
Halévy's libretto.
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. In his first successful operetta, (1874), and
its successors, Strauss worked on the lines developed by his Parisian
colleague. The libretto for was adapted from a play by Meilhac and
Halévy, 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.
In the 'Cambridge Opera Journal' in 2014 the musicologist Micaela
Baranello writes that Franz Lehár's operettas have a strong
Offenbachian element, alongside what she calls a "folksy, imaginary"
one. She cites eight numbers in 'The Merry Widow' as in the Parisian
tradition, including "the percussive nonsense syllables familiar from
Offenbach". 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." 'The New York Times'
shared this view: "That he had the gift of melody in a very
extraordinary degree is not to be denied, but he wrote , and the lack
of development of his choicest inspirations will, it is to be feared,
keep them from reaching even the next generation". 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.
The mid-20th-century critic Sacheverell Sitwell compared Offenbach's
lyrical and comic gifts to those of Mozart and Rossini. 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:
External links
======================================================================
* [http://www.offenbach-edition.de/ Offenbach Edition Keck]
* [http://www.boosey.com/composer/Jacques+Offenbach "Jacques
Offenbach"], Boosey & Hawkes
* [https://atom.lib.byu.edu/obps/search/?adv=person%3Aoffenbach List
of works by Offenbach] at the Index to Opera and Ballet Sources Online
*
* [http://www.offenbachsociety.org.uk/ The Jacques Offenbach Society
(UK)]
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=========
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