Jacques Offenbach

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Jacques Offenbach died on the 5th of October 1880, just months before the premiere of the opera he had spent years trying to finish. He was heard saying to his dog, Kleinzach, "I would give everything I have to be at the premiere." He never made it. The Tales of Hoffmann opened at the Opera-Comique on the 10th of February 1881, its orchestration completed by others, and it has remained in the standard operatic repertory ever since.

  That poignant ending might tempt you to see Offenbach as a tragic figure. But the story of how he got there is something else entirely. Born Jacob Offenbach in Cologne in 1819, the seventh of ten children of a synagogue cantor who moonlighted playing violin in cafes, he arrived in Paris at the age of 14 with his brother Julius, two letters of introduction, and enough talent to stop the notoriously strict conservatoire director Luigi Cherubini mid-audition. "Enough, young man," Cherubini said, "you are now a pupil of this Conservatoire."

  From that moment, the questions multiply. How does a foreign-born cellist who gets bored and drops out after a year become the dominant force in Parisian musical theatre for two decades? How does a man whose operettas satirised Napoleon III end up granted French citizenship by Napoleon III personally? And why, after his world collapsed in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, did the most celebrated targets of his mockery keep coming back for more?

  10139799

• 2. The Cantor's Son

  ›

  Isaac Juda Offenbach Eberst was born in 1779 and had abandoned bookbinding for music. He took his surname from his native town, Offenbach am Main, and settled in Cologne in 1816, where he became a teacher of singing, violin, flute, and guitar while serving as the permanent cantor of the local synagogue.

  The household was musical from the start. When Jacob was six, his father taught him the violin. Within two years the boy was composing songs and dances. At nine he took up the cello, and three years after that the biographer Gabriel Grovlez records that the boy was giving performances of his own compositions whose "technical difficulties terrified his master", the cellist Bernhard Breuer. Jacob, his brother Julius on violin, and his sister Isabella on piano played as a trio at local dance halls, inns, and cafes, performing popular dance music and operatic arrangements.

  Isaac saw that the provincial musical scene of Cologne would not contain his sons. With support from local music lovers and the municipal orchestra, with whom the brothers gave a farewell concert on the 9th of October, Isaac accompanied Julius (then 18) and Jacob (then 14) on a four-day journey to Paris in November 1833. He had letters of introduction to Luigi Cherubini, director of the Paris Conservatoire, but Cherubini needed persuading even to grant Jacob an audition. The boy's age and Prussian nationality were both obstacles; Cherubini had, several years earlier, refused the twelve-year-old Franz Liszt on similar grounds. The audition ended with Jacob admitted on the spot.

  The conservatoire's roll of students recorded against Jacob's name: "Struck off on the 2nd of December 1834 (left of his own free will)." He had found academic study unfulfilling and simply walked out after a year. Isaac, who had failed to secure employment in Paris, returned to Cologne. Julius stayed, graduated, and eventually became premier violin in his younger brother's orchestra. Jacob, now Jacques, was left to make his own way.

  1314151617

• 3. Virtuoso and Schemer

  ›

  James Harding, one of Offenbach's biographers, notes that after leaving the conservatoire, he was "free, also, to starve". A few temporary theatre orchestra jobs kept him going until a permanent appointment as a cellist in 1835. He was no more diligent there than he had been at the conservatoire. He regularly had his pay docked for pranks: on one occasion he and the principal cellist played alternate notes of the printed score; on another they sabotaged colleagues' music stands to make them collapse mid-performance.

  His orchestral wages funded lessons with the celebrated cellist Louis-Pierre Norblin. The composer and conductor Fromental Halevy took notice and gave Offenbach lessons in composition and orchestration, writing to his father in Cologne that the young man was going to be a great composer. The fashionable conductor Louis-Antoine Jullien played some of his early pieces. In 1839, the Theatre du Palais-Royal commissioned him to write songs for the play Pascal et Chambord.

  Parisian theatrical management, however, remained closed to him. With the help of Friedrich von Flotow, whom he collaborated with in 1839 on works for cello and piano, Offenbach built a parallel reputation composing for and performing in the fashionable salons of Paris. At one of these, from 1839, he met Herminie d'Alcain, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Carlist general. They became engaged in 1843, but he could not yet afford to marry her.

  To extend his fame and income, he toured France, Germany, and in 1844 England, where he was immediately engaged alongside Felix Mendelssohn, Joseph Joachim, Michael Costa, and Julius Benedict. The Era praised his London debut: "His execution and taste excited both wonder and pleasure, the genius he exhibited amounting to absolute inspiration." The Illustrated London News reported a command performance at Windsor before Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, the Emperor of Russia, and the King of Saxony. He returned to Paris with his reputation and his bank balance both substantially improved.

  The last obstacle to marrying Herminie was the difference in their religions. Offenbach converted to Roman Catholicism, with the comtesse de Vaux as his sponsor. The wedding took place on the 14th of August 1844. The bride was seventeen; the groom was twenty-five. The marriage lasted the rest of his life, and by all accounts was happy despite some extramarital affairs on his part. After his death, a friend said that Herminie "gave him courage, shared his ordeals and comforted him always with tenderness and devotion".

  3839404243

• 4. The Theatre He Built

  ›

  Offenbach first staged his own operetta, the one-act L'Alcove, in 1847 at the Ecole lyrique. The 1848 revolution swept him temporarily back to Cologne, where he changed his forename back to the German Jacob for expedience while the city was in the grip of nationalist upheaval. Three hundred and fifty people were killed in Paris within three days.

  Returning to Paris in February 1849, he found the grand salons closed. He worked again as a cellist and occasional conductor at the Opera-Comique, but the management there had no interest in staging his compositions. His friend Claude Debussy later suggested why: 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."

  Arsene Houssaye, director of the Comedie-Francaise, gave him the post of musical director in 1850. Offenbach composed songs and incidental music for eleven classical and modern dramas there. Houssaye later wrote that Offenbach had done wonders for his theatre. But the Opera-Comique remained unmoved.

  In 1855 Offenbach chose a different path. He discovered a small, disused theatre on the Champs-Elysees, next to the site of the Great Exhibition that was about to fill Paris with visitors from across France and the world. By May of that year he had found twenty financial backers. He later described the sequence himself: "By May, I had found twenty supporters and on the 15th of June I secured the lease. Twenty days later, I gathered my librettists and I opened the." The theatre held at most 300 people. Under the prevailing licensing laws he was limited to three speaking or singing characters per piece. He opened the Bouffes-Parisiens on the 5th of July 1855, having spent less than a month equipping it, recruiting actors and orchestra, finding writers, and composing the opening programme.

  Among those he recruited at short notice was Ludovic Halevy, nephew of his composition teacher Fromental Halevy. A rising civil servant with a gift for dialogue and verse, Ludovic went on to collaborate with Offenbach in 21 works over 24 years. One of their earliest joint productions was a comedy about two beggars feigning blindness, Les deux aveugles. During rehearsals some worried the public might find it tasteless. It became the hit of the season in Paris and was quickly playing successfully in Vienna and London. That same year, a young woman of 22 named Hortense Schneider auditioned for Offenbach. He engaged her on the spot. She remained a key figure in his companies for much of his career.

  5868715566

• 5. Orpheus Causes a Scandal

  ›

  In 1858, the government lifted the licensing restrictions on the number of performers, and Offenbach could finally stage full-length works. His first, Orphee aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld), opened in October 1858. He spent freely: scenery by Gustave Dore, a cast of twenty principals, lavish costumes, a large chorus and orchestra.

  The company was short of money after a failed Berlin season and needed a hit urgently. At first the production seemed only a modest success. Then Jules Janin, the critic of the Journal des debats, published an outraged review condemning the piece for irreverence to Roman mythology. The real target of the satire was generally understood to be Napoleon III and his government, but Janin attacked on classical grounds. Offenbach and his librettist Hector Cremieux joined the public debate in the columns of Le Figaro with evident relish. The indignation made the public desperate to see the work. Box office takings were prodigious.

  The piece ran for 228 performances. At the time, a run of 100 nights was considered a success. Albert de Lasalle wrote in his 1860 history of the Bouffes-Parisiens that the piece closed in June 1859 not because audiences had tired of it but "because the actors, who could not tire the public, were themselves exhausted". Napoleon III himself commanded a performance in April 1860. Among the reasons the biographer Peter Gammond cites for the work's enduring success is 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".

  The comedy Genevieve de Brabant, which premiered in the 1859 season to only mild initial success, contained a duet for two cowardly gendarmes that later became a favourite in Britain and formed the basis for the Marines' Hymn in the United States.

  7677788392

• 6. The Great Decade

  ›

  Napoleon III granted Offenbach French citizenship by personal command at the beginning of 1860. The following year Offenbach was appointed a chevalier of the Legion d'honneur, a distinction that scandalised those members of the musical establishment who resented such an honour for a composer of popular light opera.

  Between 1864 and 1868 he wrote four of the operettas for which he is chiefly remembered: La belle Helene (1864), La Vie parisienne (1866), La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein (1867), and La Perichole (1868). All four were written with his librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, whom he called "Meil" and "Hal". Of the three of them, Offenbach said: "Je suis sans doute le Pere, mais chacun des deux est mon Fils et plein d'Esprit" - loosely translated as "I am certainly the Father, but each of them is my Son and Wholly Spirited."

  For La belle Helene Offenbach insisted on Hortense Schneider in the title role despite her large fees and notoriously difficult temperament. Rehearsals at the Theatre des Varietes were tempestuous. The censor fretted. The theatre manager tried to curb production expenses. Again, Janin intervened with a scandalised notice; liberal critics countered it; the ensuing publicity brought audiences flocking once more.

  La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein, a satire on militarism, had its premiere two days after the opening of the Paris Exhibition of 1867, an even greater international draw than the 1855 exhibition that had launched his career. Among those who saw the piece was King William of Prussia, accompanied by his chief minister, Otto von Bismarck. Halevy, a former senior civil servant who understood the geopolitical situation more clearly than most, 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." He was right. Within three years, the world that had sustained Offenbach's career would be destroyed.

  9395968698

• 7. Empire's End, Exile, Return

  ›

  Offenbach hurried back from Ems and Wiesbaden just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He sent his family to the safety of San Sebastian in northern Spain and followed them shortly afterwards. When Prussia's crushing victory at Sedan brought down the empire in September 1870, his position became precarious almost overnight. He was known as "the mocking-bird of the Second Empire". France was swept by violently anti-German sentiment, and despite his French citizenship and his Legion d'honneur, his Cologne birth and upbringing made him suspect. La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein was banned in France because of its antimilitarist satire.

  In London, John Hollingshead of the Gaiety Theatre continued to present his operettas to large audiences. Between 1870 and 1872, the Gaiety produced fifteen of his works. At the Royalty Theatre, Richard D'Oyly Carte presented La Perichole in 1875. In Vienna, too, his work was regularly staged. The composer supervised Viennese productions and visited England as a guest of the Prince of Wales while war ravaged Paris.

  By the end of 1871 Offenbach ended his voluntary exile and returned to Paris. His new works found modest profits, but lavish revivals of earlier successes did better at the box office. He took over the Theatre de la Gaite in July 1873. A spectacular revival of Orphee aux enfers there was highly profitable. A collaboration with the dramatist Victorien Sardou was not: an expensive production of Sardou's La haine in 1874 failed to attract audiences, and Offenbach was forced to sell his interests in the theatre and mortgage future royalties.

  In 1876 he sailed to the United States for a tour tied to its Centennial Exhibition. He opened with a concert at Gilmore's Garden before a crowd of 8,000 and gave more than 40 concerts in New York and Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, where a local law forbade entertainments on Sundays, he repackaged his operetta numbers as liturgical pieces, advertising a "Grand Sacred Concert by M. Offenbach". "Dis-moi, Venus" from La belle Helene was billed as a "Litanie". The local authorities were not deceived and withdrew authorisation at the last minute. He returned to France in July 1876 with profits that were, as he later said, handsome but not spectacular.

  99100108091

• 8. The Unfinished Opera

  ›

  Since the beginning of 1877, Offenbach had been working on a stage adaptation of Les contes fantastiques d'Hoffmann, a play by Jules Barbier and Michel Carre. He had suffered from gout since the 1860s, often being carried into the theatre in a chair. Now his health was failing more broadly, and he was acutely conscious of time running short.

  La fille du tambour-major (1879) was the most successful of his later operettas and the one the conductor Antonio de Almeida considered the finest of Offenbach's last twenty works. But composing it left him less time for the opera. He left The Tales of Hoffmann with the vocal score substantially complete and the orchestration barely begun. Ernest Guiraud, a family friend, completed the orchestration with assistance from Offenbach's 18-year-old son Auguste. Guiraud also made major cuts demanded by the Opera-Comique's director, Carvalho.

  Offenbach died in Paris on the 5th of October 1880, of heart failure brought on by acute gout, at the age of 61. He was given a state funeral. The Times reported 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 is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.

  The posthumous premiere of The Tales of Hoffmann at the Opera-Comique on the 10th of February 1881 drew 101 performances in its first year. After initial success the work was neglected for a period, until a production by Thomas Beecham at His Majesty's Theatre in London in 1910 restored it to the mainstream operatic repertoire, where it has remained. The Barcarolle that audiences now associate with the opera had a stranger origin: it was adapted by Guiraud from the "Elfenchor" in Offenbach's earlier serious opera Die Rheinnixen (1864), which had been a failure and was not performed again in its entirety until 2002. Alan Jay Lerner, who with Frederick Loewe wrote My Fair Lady and Camelot, later said that Offenbach "was indeed the father of us all."

  9710564