Jacques Offenbach

He had a lively, enthusiastic way of speaking and a quick and easy smile.  This gifted son of a poor Jewish cantor, music teacher and violinist, was born Jakob Offenbach in Cologne, Germany, in June of 1819.  The seventh of ten children, Offenbach studied the violin with his father and began composing songs at an early age.  The boy switched from violin to cello, thought to be more suitable for a child of delicate health and when he was just ten years old, Jakob startled family and friends by sitting in for an absent player in a performance of the Haydn quartet. 

In 1833, his father accompanied him to the Paris Consevatory, which had a policy against admitting foreigners, and pleaded for an audition.  Although Jakob, now calling himself Jacques, was allowed to attend, he was desperately unhappy and quit within a year.  In 1844, he made a very happy marriage (and they had five children in rapid succession) with the stepdaughter of an English concert agent.

To earn a living, Offenbach played in numerous orchestras (where he played so many pranks that his entire salary was often garnered to pay his fines) and in fashionable salons.  He became a favorite among the cultured class for his beautiful cello playing.  In 1855, he opened his own theater, Bouffes Parisiens, to take advantage of an influx of visitors to the World Exhibition of that year.  The venture was a smashing success even before his production of Orpheus in the Underworld three years later.  A string of successes followed and the great Rossini himself declared Offenbach “the Mozart of the Champs-Elysées.”

Outrage and debate over his works sparked interest in England and America, but as his fame grew, the Second Empire of Napoleon III disintegrated and, with it, Offenbach’s fortunes.  He toured America during the 1876 Centennial Celebration, performing in New York and Philadelphia.  The Franco-Prussian War had made the German Offenbach, with his thick and obvious accent, an unwelcome figure in his adopted country.

As interest in operetta waned and his health deteriorated, Offenbach began to have serious regrets that he had expended all his energies on the frivolous genre and yearned for a composition that would provide him with a respectable legacy.  He found it in the Romantic works of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, better known as E.T.A. Hoffmann, a German author and composer.

Offenbach collapsed and died several months before The Tales of Hoffmann premiered at the Opéra-Comique and took Paris by storm in February of 1881.