Jacques Offenbach

French composer

• Born: June 20, 1819
• Birthplace: Cologne, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: October 5, 1880
• Place of death: Paris, France

Offenbach composed one hundred operettas and a major opera that virtually defined this form of musical theater through his characteristic mixture of gaiety, spontaneity, and infectious melody and thus became the first great influence in the process of internationalizing the operetta.

Early Life

One of the greatest figures in the history of operetta, Jacques Offenbach (O-fehn-bahk) was born Jacob Eberst, the second son of a peripatetic Jewish cantor and music teacher. His father, Isaac Eberst, was a poor man who, when not singing in the synagogue of his hometown, Offenbach-am-Main, Germany, supplemented his income as a music teacher by playing the fiddle in local cafés. Called “the Offenbacher” on his travels, Isaac thus adopted “Offenbach” as his legal surname.

Jacob clearly inherited more than his father’s name, for the boy, along with his brother Julius, early showed a marked talent for music. Offenbach himself noted that he had learned to play the violin by the time he was seven, but by age ten he discovered the cello and it was with this instrument that the young man became a professional musician. Frail and thin throughout his life, Offenbach belied his appearance by playing the cello with the same high-spirited vivacity that was to characterize his music.

Offenbach’s talent was in need of greater nourishment than that which could be obtained in Cologne, so in October, 1833, Isaac arranged for his son to go to Paris to enroll in the conservatoire, the pinnacle of musical opportunity. The story goes that Offenbach was at first denied admission on the grounds that he was not French, upon which he took up his cello and began playing a piece at first sight. The admissions committee did not let him finish but took his hand and welcomed him as a pupil. Offenbach began to study the violin, but within a year the young man left the conservatoire, probably from the need to earn a living. At fifteen, Jacob, now Jacques, Offenbach secured a job as cellist in the orchestra of the Opéra-Comique.

The business of music in Paris of the late 1830’s was primarily a theatrical enterprise. Composers often conducted their own works and promoted them as well, and it was not uncommon for a composer of waltzes and social music to lead a sixty-piece orchestra in cafés along the boulevards. The young Offenbach submitted several of his waltzes to the leading composer-impresarios of the day, and one of his first, “Fleurs d’hiver” (“Winter Flowers”), was a popular success. By January, 1839, Offenbach, at the age of nineteen, gave his first public concert. Soon thereafter, he was asked to write the music for a vaudeville, Pascal et Chambord . Produced in March, 1839, the piece was a failure.

Undaunted, Offenbach continued to perform as virtuoso cellist and to teach. Over the next few years, he composed a number of cello works and performed in Germany and before the queen of England. Thus, the salon and the drawing room—not the theater—dictated both the setting and the style for the compositions of Offenbach during the 1840’s. His music was light, simple, generously diverting, and, above all, well crafted. The ballads and songs of this period are interesting in at least two respects. First, they often contain the melodic germs of his later work, for Offenbach had a lifelong practice of recasting earlier material. For another, they often contain elements of humor—such as the cello simulating a kazoo—that were to make his great operettas so distinctive.

It was, indeed, just this element of humor bordering on impertinence that—more than even the local musical politics—probably kept Offenbach from serious notice. Though he was known throughout the 1840’s as a cellist and minor composer of songs and other salon pieces, his own ambition to write a musical work for the Opéra-Comique was spurned by the management of that theater. Meanwhile, Offenbach converted to Catholicism and married Herminie d’Alcain in 1844.

Life’s Work

The revolutions of 1848 that made France, nominally at least, a republic precipitated Offenbach’s departure to Germany. The father of a young girl, he was as poor as a freelance composer of dance music could be, but he continued to pursue his ambition of writing for the musical stage and had his first work of this kind produced in Cologne. The work went virtually unnoticed. Now approaching thirty, Offenbach returned to Paris to see Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon I, installed as emperor of France. The so-called Second Empire had begun and with it the rising fortunes of Offenbach.

During his career as cellist and salon composer, he had met the director of the Théâtre-Française, the serious theater for all state-approved tragedies and comedies. In 1851, the director appointed Offenbach conductor of the house, hoping that the young cellist’s musical abilities and vivacious personality would bring back the audiences lost to administrative and artistic chaos. As conductor, Offenbach presented not only the music of other composers but also, more pertinent to his own career, his own compositions. Before long, his own incidental music to plays and his entr’actes (music played during the intermissions) began to gain attention.

Now in a position to write the kind of light, witty theater music that he perceived as lacking on the French stage, he dedicated himself unceasingly to the task. From this period of the early 1850’s, Offenbach began to compose an astonishing number of “little operas.” In 1855 alone, he produced no less than twelve one-act operettas. This was the year in which he left his official post at the Théâtre-Français and opened his own theater, the Bouffes-Parisiens. Restricted now only by his own cleverness, Offenbach flourished. By his own admission, his major vice now and throughout the rest of his life was work. He wrote incessantly, steadily, and quickly. In 1856, eight operettas came from his fecund pen, and in 1857 seven more. These early operettas, such as Ba-ta-clan (1855), La Bonne d’enfants (1856), and Les Deux Pêcheurs (1857), possess a lyrical charm and freshness that characterize much of the composer’s best music, but they fall victim to clumsy and dated librettos and are thus seldom heard or performed.

After producing almost thirty operettas in five years, Offenbach composed what was to be his first, and perhaps best-known, major work. Unlike his previous compositions, Orphée aux enfers (1858) is more ambitious in scope (two acts), more serious in the variety of musical types, and, above all, more witty in its parody of some of French society’s most cherished traditions. Offenbach’s chief librettist for the work was Ludovic Halévy, who, along with Henri Meilhac, was to write the book for Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875). Together, they provided Offenbach with the librettos for his finest operettas.

Offenbach’s love of satire and parody infused the music of Orphée aux enfers with the sparkling wit and innocent naughtiness that became the composer’s hallmark and a distinctive element of French operetta for the remainder of the century. Taking the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as its source, the operetta pokes fun at the pantheon of gods who talked not like Greek divinities but Second Empire boulevardiers, ladies and gentlemen of mid-nineteenth century French society. Along the way, there are musical parodies of Christoph Gluck, composer of the 1762 serious version of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, and of scenes from Italian opera. The finale consists of the famous cancan, during which the gods and goddesses cavort in a frenzied bacchanal.

Orphée aux enfers made Offenbach famous and rich, though money was never his constant companion. His generosity, love of luxury, and overall beneficient prodigality always kept the composer within view of his creditors. However, his prodigality of money was at least equaled by his prodigality of genius as one after another operetta reached the stage. Between Orphée aux enfers in 1858 and his next great operetta, La Belle Hélène of 1864, Offenbach composed another twenty-eight works, including a ballet, Le Papillon (1860), and a three-act parody of medieval France, Geneviève de Brabant (1859). The latter contained a famous section that was later adapted by the United States Marine Corps for its well-known hymn.

When in 1860 the Opéra-Comique at last commissioned a work from him, Offenbach offered Barkouf . A ridiculous libretto about a dog that becomes head of state was coupled with music that the public, for once, did not understand. The work drew the disdain of music critics and composers such as Hector Berlioz, who attacked Offenbach’s use of strange and awkward harmonies. Barkouf represents one of the few times Offenbach overextended himself and clearly illustrates the fatality of musical stage works in thralldom to a bad libretto. Offenbach was not to make the same mistake again. La Belle Hélène is regarded by many as his most brilliant operetta. For his source, the composer once again returned to Greek mythology, this time to the legend of Helen of Troy. Although conservative critics condemned the work for its blasphemy of Homer, the public knew better. With La Belle Hélène, Offenbach reached the zenith of his career. His orchestration now bore a richer chromatic harmony, evidence of Richard Wagner’s influence, and the music sparkled with a brilliant libretto.

La Belle Hélène was followed by a series of witty and gently mocking operettas. Offenbach had become the darling of the Second Empire, even as he gaily laughed at it. With the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, however, the Second Empire tottered, and when it fell Offenbach’s own success and the quality of his work soon also declined. He continued to write operettas, but he began imitating himself, revising earlier productions and depending increasingly on the spectacular and the impressive rather than on spontaneity.

Always pressed for money because of lavish spending, Offenbach accepted an offer to conduct concerts in the United States as part of the centennial celebration of 1876. During a three-month tour, he played excerpts from his work in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Despite some critical reserve at the naughtiness of some of his operettas, Offenbach impressed many by his personality, and the tour was an ultimate success. His impressions of his American experience were published in Paris the following year.

By the late 1870’s, however, two conditions had altered Offenbach’s life, one physical, the other artistic. Afflicted by gout for a number of years, Offenbach was enduring more continuous pain as his ailment wracked his already frail body. Additionally, his dream of being taken seriously as a composer now manifested itself in his determination to write a masterwork of opera. He had been making sketches for a work based on stories by the German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann since 1875, but he wrote with uncharacteristic deliberation, signifying a more serious commitment rather than a decline in creative powers.

By 1880, Offenbach completed the score of his masterpiece, Les Contes d’Hoffmann . By October of that year, however, the disease precipitated heart failure, and Offenbach died on October 5, 1880. The orchestration of his great opera was completed by a family friend, Ernest Guiraud. Offenbach’s masterpiece was thus performed in 1881, after his death, at the Opéra-Comique, the very theater in which he first dreamed of being recognized.

Significance

Though Jacques Offenbach did not actually invent the operetta, he did infuse the form with those elements of gaiety and good-natured fun that became the model for subsequent works of the kind. His influence on later masters such as W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan and the Viennese composer Johann Strauss—whom Offenbach first urged to write operettas—is indelible; Offenbach must thus be regarded as a seminal figure in making operetta an international art form.

Gioacchino Rossini, himself an operatic master, referred to Offenbach as “the Mozart of the boulevards.” The similitude is apt not only because Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was Offenbach’s idol—Offenbach kept a book of Mozart’s music always by his bedside—but also because, like Mozart, Offenbach had a unique gift for melody and for lucidity of style. Like Mozart’s, Offenbach’s music is almost always perfectly suited to the context in which it is placed and which it thus defines. His melodies are among the most infectious ever written.

The connection with Rossini, who lived in Paris during Offenbach’s greatest triumphs, is also pertinent in an artistic sense. Like Rossini, Offenbach understood the dramatic excitement generated at the end of a scene by the use of a galloping rhythm combined with a crescendo. His use of brass instruments particularly heightened the vitality of the melodic line. Finally, Offenbach’s music epitomizes the saucy, high-spirited, and supremely confident atmosphere of Paris during the middle years of the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Bordman, Gerald. American Operetta: From “H.M.S. Pinafore” to “Sweeney Todd.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Contains a brief history of the popularity of Offenbach in the United States, particularly citing his La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) as an influence on later American operetta formats.

Faris, Alexander. Jacques Offenbach. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980. This is probably the best biography in English. Himself a conductor, Faris presents a well-balanced, though often too minutely detailed, study. Includes liberal examples of musical notation and technique. Contains an excellent bibliography, including a complete chart of all Offenbach’s work, published and unpublished.

Hadlock, Heather. Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffman.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. An analysis of Offenbach’s last operetta, describing how the work was created and comparing it to Offenbach’s previous compositions. Hadlock maintains Les Contes d’Hoffman was the culmination of Offenbach’s career and a century of Romantic culture.

Kracauer, Siegfried. Offenbach and the Paris of His Time. London: Constable, 1937. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. A sociological study of the theatrical and artistic traditions within which Offenbach lived and worked. Though accurate, the study tends to emphasize the political and revolutionary aspects of Offenbach’s works.

Lamb, Andrew. One-Hundred-and-Fifty Years of Popular Musical Theatre. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Lamb begins his history of musical theater with a discussion of Offenbach’s operettas. Although chapter 1 focuses on “Paris and the Rise of Offenbach,” there are other references to the composer throughout the text.

Mordden, Ethan. The Splendid Art of Opera: A Concise History. New York: Methuen, 1980. Contains an excellent chapter on musical comedy that credits Offenbach with internationalizing operetta and examines the “remarkably innovative” Les Contes d’Hoffmann.

Offenbach, Jacques. Orpheus in America: Offenbach’s Diary of His Journey to the New World. Translated by Lander MacLintock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957. Offenbach’s memoir of his American concert tour. His breezy prose serves as a revealing correlative to his musical style. Contains an excellent brief biographical introduction by the translator.