Offenbach rented his own theatre when the Paris opera ignored him
Jacques Offenbach, a cantor's son from Cologne, wanted to write comic musical theatre, but the Opéra-Comique showed no interest. So in 1855 he leased a tiny theatre on the Champs-Élysées and staged his own work. Three years later Orpheus in the Underworld, with its famous can-can, launched nearly 100 operettas and a whole genre.
He was born Jacob Offenbach on 20 June 1819 in Cologne, then in Prussia, the seventh of ten children. His father Isaac, a bookbinder turned itinerant cantor and café violinist, was nicknamed after his home town, Offenbach am Main. Isaac taught the boy violin at six; by eight he was composing, and at nine he took up the cello, studying with Bernhard Breuer and soon playing his own fiendishly difficult pieces. With a brother and sister he played in a family trio in local inns and dance halls.
At 14 he won a place at the Paris Conservatoire, found it dull and left after a year, but stayed in the city. Between 1835 and 1855 he supported himself by conducting and by playing the cello, becoming famous across Europe for it. His small Champs-Élysées venue presented more than two dozen of his short pieces before his first full-length hit in 1858.
The 1860s brought at least eighteen more full-length operettas, including La belle Hélène and La Vie parisienne. Their risqué humour, gentle satire and irresistible tunes travelled to Vienna, London and beyond. Napoleon III, whose court the operettas teased affectionately, granted Offenbach French citizenship and the Légion d'honneur. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 and the empire fell, his imperial ties and German birth left him out of favour in Paris, though he stayed popular in Vienna, London and New York.
He rebuilt his Paris career in the 1870s with revivals and new pieces and made a successful tour of the United States. His final years went into an ambitious serious opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, still unfinished when he died on 5 October 1880; it remains in the standard repertoire. His influence shaped later masters of light music, notably Johann Strauss II and Arthur Sullivan.
Source: Jacques Offenbach
