By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Jacques Offenbach was born on June 20, 1819, in Cologne. He was the second son and seventh of ten children of Isaac Yehuda Eberst, later Offenbach, a bookbinder, an itinerant cantor who sang in synagogues, a violinist who played in cafes. Isaac was the author of guitar pieces and compiler of the story that Jews recite at Passover with a parallel text in Hebrew and German.
In 1816 he settled in Cologne, where he began to give lessons in singing, violin, flute and guitar, and to compose religious and secular music. In 1819 he and his wife Marianne had a son, Jakob. From the age of six the boy learned to play the violin, compose songs and dances, and at the age of nine he began to learn to play the cello. When his father got a permanent position as a cantor in the synagogue in Cologne, Jacob began to receive cello and composition lessons from professional musicians.
Recognizing the musical giftedness of 14-year-old Jacob, his father moved him to Paris in 1833. There Jacob became Jacques. Offenbach studied at the Paris Conservatoire in 1833 – 1834 years to play the cello at Cherubini, who took him to the Conservatoire, despite the prohibition to accept foreigners. In parallel with his studies, Jacques played in theater orchestras, in salons, composed sentimental ballads and dance music for balls. After studying at the Conservatoire, he studied composition with Fromental Halévy (1835). He concertized in Germany and England and later played with pianists and composers such as Anton Rubinstein, Franz Liszt, and Felix Mendelssohn.
Offenbach could not find steady work in musical theaters, for he was an unknown composer. Then, together with the German composer and pianist Friedrich von Flotow, he organized a duo that performed successfully in Parisian salons. In 1839 he made his debut as a theater composer at the Palais Royal theater with his music in vaudeville. Offenbach performed extensively in Paris, and in 1840 and 1843 he toured Cologne and, in 1843 – London.
In 1844 Offenbach converted to Catholicism to marry Herminie d’Alcain, the daughter of a Spanish opposition emigrant. The couple lived together for 36 years and had four daughters. In 1847 he became conductor at the Théâtre Franҫais. Offenbach was baptized, like almost all European composers of Jewish descent except Meyerbeer and Halévy. Their baptism did not prevent Richard Wagner from publishing an anti-Jewish article in 1850, Jewry in Music, in which he argued that “European civilization and its art remained alien to the Jews: they took no part in their education and development. […] The Jew can only repeat, imitate, but to create, to create, he is incapable.”
He equally denied the musical talent of the Jew Meyerbeer and the baptized Jew Mendelssohn. Wagner used Offenbach as a prime example of how Jews were polluting the culture and denounced his work as “releasing the odor of manure from where all the pigs of Europe had come to wallow.”
Between 1850 and 1855 Offenbach was a staff composer and conductor at Molière’s theater Comédie Franҫaise, where he wrote music for works by Corneille and Racine. In 1855 the genre of operetta emerged: Offenbach opened the small theater Bouffe Parisienne, where he staged a number of small operettas that were very successful. He was in this theater composer, entrepreneur, stage director, conductor and co-writer of librettists.
Offenbach saturated his works with subtle and sarcastic wit, and sometimes sarcasm. Parisians hummed Offenbach’s melodies. English writer William Thackeray, then visiting Paris, said: “If anything has a future in today’s French theater, it is Offenbach.”
In 1858 Offenbach put on a large-scale production of Orphée aux Enfers, which was a huge success. The operetta, featuring the famous Cancan, was performed 288 times. In 1878, the 900th performance of this operetta took place in Paris. Orphée was followed by about a hundred operettas, among which the best known are Geneviève de Brabant (1859), La chanson de Fortunio (1861, based on a novel by Alfred de Musset), La belle Hélène (1864), La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867), La Périchole (1868), La princesse de Trébizonde (1869).
Offenbach’s operettas were staged all over the world. On his advice, Johann Strauss created a new center of operetta art in Vienna. Offenbach’s success culminated at the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris. The small theater could hardly accommodate numerous guests, monarchs, prominent politicians and celebrities. Rossini called Offenbach “our little Mozart of the Champs-Élysées” because Offenbach’s theater was located on the Champs-Élysées.
In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. The Bouffe Parisienne theater was closed and its building became an infirmary. Offenbach was a very successful musician but found himself an outsider. He borrowed Parisian wit and elegance, but because of his German accent and Jewish features, including a “prominent Jewish nose,” he was an outsider. He was harassed on both sides: French newspapers accused him of sympathizing with Germany, and German newspapers accused him of being a traitor.
The French saw him as a spy for Prussian Chancellor Otto Bismarck, the Germans saw him as a “frivolous Frenchman” and a traitor. Despite his baptism, both saw him as a Jew unfriendly to them. During this war, antisemitism was on the rise in both countries. Offenbach left France for a year and traveled throughout Europe. Upon his return to Paris in 1871, right-wing circles accused him of imposing amorality, undermining the national idea, ridiculing the monarchy, religion, the army and other sacred things, which, in their opinion, contributed to the shameful defeat of France.
In 1875 Offenbach was forced to declare bankruptcy. In 1876 he toured the United States with great success. In 1878 Offenbach’s new operetta Madame Favart was well received by Parisians. Despite declining health and overwork, the composer wrote the operetta La fille du tambour-major, which was successfully premiered on December 13, 1879. It was his last work performed during his lifetime.
He then began work on the opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), based on the works of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. “Hurry up to stage my opera, I don’t have much time,” the composer wrote to the director of the Opéra Comique theater, Léon Carvalho. Offenbach wrote the entire clavier, completed the orchestration of the prologue and the first act, but he did not have time to finish the second act. He died of an attack of suffocation on October 5, 1880. Johann Strauss canceled the tour and came to Paris to say goodbye to him.
Offenbach is buried in Montmartre Cemetery, Paris. His friend, Ernest Giraud, known for editing Bizet’s opera Carmen, completed work on The Tales of Hoffmann, inserting several fragments from Offenbach’s other works into the opera, including the famous Barcarola. The opera premiered in 1881 at the Opéra Comique theater. The Tales of Hoffmann was enthusiastically received by the public and is still performed today.
In the 19th century there lived two outstanding satirists, Heinrich Heine and Jacques Offenbach. Their satirical talent reflected Jewish humor, especially their tendency to ridicule modern fashion and style and to despise state authority. Russian-American composer Igor Stravinsky called Offenbach “the first musical funnyman of Europe.” Offenbach’s operettas, like himself, witty and cheerful, filled with colorful music, either lyrical or cascading, were extremely popular throughout Europe.
The famous Russian musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky wrote: “Offenbach was […] one of the most gifted composers of the nineteenth century. […] He was a brilliant musical feuilletonist, satirist-buff, improviser. […] Thanks to the universal satirical scope, the breadth of grotesque and denunciatory generalizations, Offenbach emerges from the ranks of opera composers – Hervé, Lecoq, Johann Strauss, Lehar – and approaches the phalanx of the great satirists – Aristophanes, Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire and others.”
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 11 books.