Jacques Offenbach

Jacques Offenbach was a German-born French composer, cellist, and impresario whose Broadway credits include Helen Goes to Troy, The Happiest Girl in the World, The Love Song, The Magic Melody, and Tales of Hoffmann. Born Jacob Offenbach on 20 June 1819 in Cologne, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia, he died on 5 October 1880. His father, Isaac Juda Offenbach, was a synagogue cantor and itinerant musician who had adopted the surname Offenbach after his native town of Offenbach am Main.

Offenbach demonstrated musical ability from an early age. His father introduced him to the violin at age six, and within two years the boy was composing songs and dances. At nine he took up the cello, studying under the cellist Bernhard Breuer. Alongside his brother Julius on violin and his sister Isabella on piano, he performed popular dance music and operatic arrangements at local venues in Cologne. In November 1833, Isaac traveled with Julius and Jacob to Paris, having secured letters of introduction to Luigi Cherubini, director of the Paris Conservatoire. Despite obstacles related to the boy's age and nationality, Cherubini admitted him after hearing him play. Both brothers adopted French forms of their names, Julius becoming Jules and Jacob becoming Jacques. Offenbach found academic study unrewarding and left the Conservatoire after a year; the institution's records note he was struck off on 2 December 1834 of his own free will.

From 1835 onward, Offenbach earned his living as a cellist, initially securing a permanent position at the Opéra-Comique. The composer and conductor Fromental Halévy gave him lessons in composition and orchestration during this period. Offenbach also collaborated with Friedrich von Flotow in 1839 on works for cello and piano, and built a reputation performing in Parisian salons. His ambition, however, was to compose for the musical theatre. Finding the management of the Opéra-Comique uninterested in staging his works, he leased a small theatre on the Champs-Élysées in 1855, where over the following three years he presented more than two dozen of his own small-scale pieces.

In 1858, Offenbach produced his first full-length operetta, Orphée aux enfers, which featured the celebrated can-can and became his most frequently performed work. Throughout the 1860s he composed at least eighteen additional full-length operettas, among them La belle Hélène in 1864, La Vie parisienne in 1866, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein in 1867, and La Périchole in 1868. The combination of risqué humor, gentle satire, and melodic facility made these works internationally successful, with translated productions staged in Vienna, London, and the United States. Offenbach became closely associated with the Second French Empire of Napoleon III, who granted him French citizenship and the Légion d'honneur. Following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the fall of the empire, Offenbach faced disfavor in Paris due to both his imperial associations and his German origins, though he continued to find success in Vienna, London, and New York.

During the 1870s Offenbach re-established himself in Paris through revivals of earlier works and new compositions, and he undertook a tour of the United States. In his final years he worked to complete the opera The Tales of Hoffmann, but died before its premiere. The work entered the standard opera repertory in versions completed or edited by other musicians. Over the course of his career Offenbach composed nearly 100 operettas, and he exerted a significant influence on later composers of the genre, including Franz von Suppé, Johann Strauss II, and Arthur Sullivan. His works continued to be revived throughout the twentieth century and remain in production in the twenty-first.