63 Facts About Jacques Offenbach

Jacques Offenbach was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario of the Romantic period.

Jacques Offenbach is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann.

Jacques Offenbach was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss Jr.

Jacques Offenbach's ambition was to compose comic pieces for the musical theatre.

In 1858, Jacques Offenbach produced his first full-length operetta, Orphee aux enfers, which was exceptionally well received and has remained one of his most played works.

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Jacques Offenbach became associated with the Second French Empire of Napoleon III; the emperor and his court were genially satirised in many of Jacques Offenbach's operettas.

Jacques Offenbach re-established himself in Paris during the 1870s, with revivals of some of his earlier favourites and a series of new works, and undertook a popular US tour.

Jacques Offenbach was born Jacob Jacques Offenbach to a Jewish family, in the German city of Cologne, which was then a part of Prussia.

Jacques Offenbach's birthplace in the Großer Griechenmarkt was a short distance from the square that is named after him, the Offenbachplatz.

Jacques Offenbach was generally known as "der Offenbacher", after his native town, Offenbach am Main, and in 1808 he officially adopted Offenbach as a surname.

Jacques Offenbach was no more serious there than he had been at the conservatoire, and regularly had his pay docked for playing pranks during performances; on one occasion, he and the principal cellist played alternate notes of the printed score, and on another they sabotaged some of their colleagues' music stands to make them collapse in mid-performance.

Jacques Offenbach made a favourable impression on the composer and conductor Fromental Halevy, who gave him lessons in composition and orchestration and wrote to Isaac Offenbach in Cologne that the young man was going to be a great composer.

Jacques Offenbach returned to Paris with his reputation and his bank balance both much enhanced.

Jacques Offenbach had already published many compositions, and some of them had sold well, but now he began to write, perform and produce musical burlesques as part of his salon presentations.

Jacques Offenbach hastily took Herminie and their recently born daughter to join his family in Cologne.

Jacques Offenbach thought it politic to revert temporarily to the name Jacob.

Jacques Offenbach went back to working as a cellist, and occasional conductor, at the Opera-Comique, but was not encouraged in his aspirations to compose.

Jacques Offenbach's talents had been noted by the director of the Comedie Francaise, Arsene Houssaye, who appointed him musical director of the theatre, with a brief to enlarge and improve the orchestra.

Jacques Offenbach composed songs and incidental music for eleven classical and modern dramas for the Comedie Francaise in the early 1850s.

Between 1853 and 1855, Jacques Offenbach wrote three one-act operettas and managed to have them staged in Paris.

Jacques Offenbach found more encouragement from the composer, singer and impresario Florimond Ronger, known professionally as Herve.

Jacques Offenbach pressed ahead with plans to present his works himself at his own theatre and to abandon further thoughts of acceptance by the Opera-Comique.

Jacques Offenbach had chosen his theatre, the Salle Lacaze in the Champs-Elysees.

Jacques Offenbach cast about for a suitable venue and found the Theatre des Jeunes Eleves, known as the Salle Choiseul or Theatre Comte, in central Paris.

Jacques Offenbach entered into partnership with its proprietor and moved the Bouffes-Parisiens there for the winter season.

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Jacques Offenbach followed it with 15 more one-act operettas over the next three years.

When Jacques Offenbach asked Rossini's permission to revive his comedy Il signor Bruschino, Rossini replied that he was pleased to be able to do anything for "the Mozart of the Champs-Elysees".

Jacques Offenbach had an ambition to present Mozart's neglected one-act comic opera Der Schauspieldirektor at the Bouffes-Parisiens, and he acquired the score from Vienna.

Jacques Offenbach declared that the first work worthy to be called opera-comique was Philidor's 1759 Blaise le savetier, and he described the gradual divergence of Italian and French notions of comic opera, with verve, imagination and gaiety from Italian composers, and cleverness, common sense, good taste and wit from the French composers.

Jacques Offenbach concluded that comic opera had become too grand and inflated.

Jacques Offenbach's disquisition was a preliminary to the announcement of an open competition for aspiring composers.

Lecocq and Jacques Offenbach took a dislike to one another, and their subsequent rivalry was not altogether friendly.

Jacques Offenbach began the decade with his only stand-alone ballet, Le papillon, produced at the Opera in 1860.

Apart from that setback, Jacques Offenbach flourished in the 1860s, with successes greatly outnumbering failures.

Jacques Offenbach even reverted, for a single evening, to his old role as a cello virtuoso at a command performance before Emperor Franz Joseph.

In 1862, Jacques Offenbach's only son, Auguste, was born, the last of five children.

Jacques Offenbach continued to write most of his works for the company, with the exception of occasional pieces for the summer season at Bad Ems.

Between 1864 and 1868, Jacques Offenbach wrote four of the operettas for which he is chiefly remembered: La belle Helene, La Vie parisienne, La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein and La Perichole .

Jacques Offenbach's now commanded large fees and was notoriously temperamental, but Offenbach was adamant that no other singer could match her as Helene.

Jacques Offenbach returned hurriedly from Ems and Wiesbaden before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

Jacques Offenbach then went to his home in Etretat and arranged for his family to move to the safety of San Sebastian in northern Spain, joining them shortly afterwards.

Jacques Offenbach's operettas were now frequently vilified as the embodiment of everything superficial and worthless in Napoleon III's regime.

Jacques Offenbach decided to go back into theatre management and took over the Theatre de la Gaite in July 1873.

An expensive production of Sardou's La haine in 1874, with incidental music by Jacques Offenbach, failed to attract the public to the Gaite, and Jacques Offenbach was forced to sell his interests in the Gaite and to mortgage future royalties.

At Booth's Theatre, New York, Jacques Offenbach conducted La vie parisienne and his recent La jolie parfumeuse.

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Jacques Offenbach returned to France in July 1876, with profits that were handsome but not spectacular.

Jacques Offenbach had suffered from gout since the 1860s, often being carried into the theatre in a chair.

Jacques Offenbach was heard saying to Kleinzach, his dog, "I would give everything I have to be at the premiere".

Jacques Offenbach left the vocal score substantially complete and had made a start on the orchestration.

Jacques Offenbach's music is as individually characteristic as that of Delius, Grieg or Puccini – together with range and variety.

Jacques Offenbach was a specialist at writing music that had a rapturous, hysterical quality.

Jacques Offenbach reserved the term operette or operette bouffe for some of his one-act works, more often using the term opera bouffe for his full-length ones .

Jacques Offenbach used the term opera-comique for at least 24 of his works in either one, two or three acts.

Jacques Offenbach's melodies are usually short and unvaried in their basic rhythm, rarely, in Hughes's words, escaping "the despotism of the four-bar phrase".

In modulation Jacques Offenbach was similarly cautious; he rarely switched a melody to a remote or unexpected key, and kept mostly to a tonic–dominant–subdominant pattern.

Jacques Offenbach composed for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, piston, trombone, timpani and percussion and a small string section of seven players.

When Jacques Offenbach felt sure the work would be performed, he began full orchestration, often employing a codified system.

Jacques Offenbach mocked Berlioz's "strivings after the antique", and his initial light-hearted satire of Wagner's pretensions later hardened into genuine dislike.

Jacques Offenbach composed more than 50 non-operatic songs between 1838 and 1854, most of them to French texts, by authors including Alfred de Musset, Theophile Gautier and Jean de La Fontaine, and ten to German texts.

Efforts to present critical editions of Jacques Offenbach's works have been hampered by the dispersion of his autograph scores to several collections after his death, some of which do not grant access to scholars.

Jacques Offenbach had encouraged Strauss to turn to operetta when they met in Vienna in 1864, but it was not until seven years later that Strauss did so.

However, Jacques Offenbach's operettas were well established in Vienna, and Strauss worked on the lines established by his French colleague; in 1870s Vienna, an operetta composer who did not do so was quickly called to order by the press.

In Gammond's view, the Viennese composer most influenced by Jacques Offenbach was Franz von Suppe, who studied Jacques Offenbach's works carefully and wrote many successful operettas using them as a model.