Essential Offenbach
German-turned-Frenchman; humourist, showman and supreme cello virtuoso; Jacques Offenbach is still best-known as the composer who effectively invented 19th-century operetta. His legacy can be heard from Vienna to Broadway but his own masterpieces, including 'Orphée aux Enfers', 'La belle Hélène' and 'La vie parisienne', continue to draw full houses as some of the freshest, funniest and most tuneful scores in the operatic repertoire.
Read more…The teenage Jakob Offenbach moved from Cologne to Paris and quickly became Europe’s most dazzling cello virtuoso. But his real ambitions lay in the theatre, and as Jacques Offenbach he made (and more than once, lost) his fortune as composer and promoter of nearly 100 comic operas, or opérettes. Initially these were short, farcical one-acters, but after the triumph of 'Orphée aux Enfers' (1858) – the first modern full-length operetta – they grew in both scale and success. Offenbach’s sexy, satirical plots mocked the hypocrisies and celebrated the hedonism of France’s Second Empire, but his music had an international appeal: an effortless, irresistible stream of sparkling melody, supercharged by dance rhythms and warmed by a deeply Romantic spirit. That spirit surges to the fore in his last work, his one great "serious" opera 'Les contes d’Hoffmann'. But Offenbach’s real legacy can be heard in every subsequent operetta and musical, from Gilbert & Sullivan to Leonard Bernstein, and in the enduring popularity of the man they called "the Mozart of the Champs-Élysées".