Jacques Offenbach (1819 – 1880): Orpheus in the Underworld
Although a musical giant of mid-nineteenth century France, Jacques Offenbach was surprisingly tiny in person. A spindly, bird-like figure, seldom weighing more than forty-five kilograms, he was “the least imposing man in appearance one could imagine” according to an American music critic.
Before finding fame as a composer of comic operetta, he worked as a ‘cello virtuoso. During performances he would hide much of his minuscule frame behind the bulky instrument, often creating the illusion that the ‘cello had sprouted arms and legs. But still his playing could make a dazzling impression.
Such an image is also suggestive of Offenbach the man, a twinkly-eyed but elusive presence behind his bold and colourful scores. From the Mona Lisa smirk to the pince-nez and Bohemian facial hair, there is an enigmatic quality to many of his surviving photos. Does he want to be taken entirely seriously, or indeed known too well?
Often regarded as the most quintessential of Parisians, even by his friends, Offenbach was in fact a German-speaking Jew from Cologne. His father Isaac Eberst had grown up in nearby Offenbach-am-Main (now a suburb of Frankfurt), initially working as an itinerant synagogue cantor during the day and tavern violinist in the evenings. Isaac later changed his surname to Offenbach, following a Napoleonic decree that ordered all Jews to take a more “definitive” name, supposedly to integrate better into European society. Having married the daughter of a local money-changer named Marianne Rindskopf, Isaac settled down as a music teacher, composer of light operetta and occasional author of treatises on the Jewish faith.
Of Isaac and Marianne’s ten children, it was their younger son Jacob who would prove to be a little out of the ordinary, showing unusual promise as a musician. By the age of eight he was already composing prolifically and soon after had eagerly taken up the ‘cello, an instrument he would eventually play to a very high standard. Jacob would often perform locally as a piano trio with his older brother Julius (violin) and sister Isabella (piano), even if at this stage he was already regarded as the star of the three.
Offenbach senior eventually saved enough money to be able to pack Jacob and Julius off to the Paris Conservatoire in 1833, an institution still under the (sometimes) draconian directorship of Luigi Cherubini. Despite his own émigrée status, Cherubini had a strict policy for not admitting foreign students, and when Isaac turned up with his two sons, the old master initially refused to consider their application. When he was finally persuaded to hear Jacob play, his habitual grimace relaxed just slightly until he finally growled, “enough young man – you are now a pupil of the Conservatoire!” He then extended the same welcome to Julius.
But while the young Jacob remained undoubtedly brilliant, he was also easily distracted, and particularly in his teens he would often threaten to torpedo his progress with a mischievous sense of humour. He had no time for academic studies and would doodle on his Conservatoire textbooks. Within a year he had dropped out of his course and a somewhat piqued Cherubini tightened the rules on foreign students – even if the more steady Julius was thankfully allowed to remain*.
*After graduating Julius became a successful teacher and conductor, while later serving as principal first violin in one of his brother’s orchestras.
Still only fifteen years old, Jacob’s education was at an abrupt end and he was suddenly forced to fend for himself. But whatever challenges lay ahead he would tackle with great resourceful and durability. It helped that he already had something of a life-plan mapped out: to stay in Paris (for which he had already changed his name from Jacob to the much more French-sounding Jacques), and to find fame and fortune writing music for the stage.
The latter objective would however take longer to realise. For the next decade, Offenbach largely made his living as a professional ‘cellist. One of his first jobs was playing in the orchestra of the Paris Opéra-Comique, where the young man showed himself equally adept at winding up professional musicians as he had been with Conservatoire professors. During concerts he would attempt to distract the conductor with deliberate wrong notes, while music stands in his vicinity developed a mysterious habit of collapsing during quieter moments. Offenbach sometimes had his pay docked for such pranks and he was probably fortunate not to get the sack.
But he could also be very charming when he wanted. Having attended a performance of an opera by Fromental Halévy and afterwards expressed due appreciation to the composer, the latter rewarded him with some free lessons in composition and orchestration. Halévy was helpful in other ways too, writing to Offenbach’s parents back in Cologne to reassure them their son was going to be a great composer. Recognizing his precocious talent, the directors of the Comique sometimes asked their young ‘cellist to compose short musical interludes to break up some of their longer productions.
By the early 1840s, Offenbach’s playing had developed to the point where he was able to forge something of a solo career. Although this was initially centred around the fashionable salons of Paris, he was soon making tours of France, Germany and England, and performing with the likes of Felix Mendelssohn, Joseph Joachim, Arthur Rubinstein and Franz Liszt.
Although not quite the Paganini of the ‘cello, Offenbach nonetheless had a charisma and showmanship that elevated him above the norm – even to the point where more conservative audiences found him vulgar. During performances, he would frequently go off script and fall into all kinds of inventive extemporisations, incorporating uncanny imitations of other musical instruments (including the bagpipes) or even animal noises. This was eventually too much for one critic who complained that Offenbach made his instrument sound like almost anything other than a ‘cello.
Such was the success of Offenbach’s early performing career that by the age of twenty-five he had attained the means to wed a young woman named Hérminie d’Alcain, the daughter of a rich hostess friend. The marriage, which produced five children, would prove a largely happy one, with Hérminie providing much support and encouragement to her husband in the years ahead. According to one friend, Hérminie “gave him courage, shared his ordeals and comforted him always with tenderness and devotion”, while another praised her for blessing Jacques “with a happy and genial home, where his heart has expanded at ease in the midst of a charming, joyful and spirited home.” Even during his most successful years, Offenbach would always hate to be away from his family. He constantly solicited Hérminie for her musical advice, and whenever she didn’t like anything he had composed he would dutifully re-write it.
But even as Offenbach tasted success and a certain material wealth by the mid-1840s, he was not yet where he wanted to be. He still longed to make his name as a composer – even if he still had so comparatively little to show for himself. Redoubling his efforts, he produced a well-received, satirical burlesque on Félicien David’s symphonic ode Le Désert. This was quickly followed by a public concert of newly composed “operatic fragments”, to which he invited several high-profile critics. Such was the success of the latter, that several of the critics twisted the arm of Opéra-Comique director, Alexandre Basset, to allow Offenbach to stage a one-act vaudeville he had written called L’Alcôve (now officially regarded as the first of his 98 operettas). Although it was a modest commission, even this proved too much for the reluctant Basset who then prevaricated, mysteriously disappearing into thin air every time the composer came near his office, until eventually Offenbach gave up and organised a concert version of the work at La Salle de la Tour d’Auvergne instead.
But this too created ripples of appreciation. And one impressed audience member was ballet composer Adolph Adam, who immediately asked Offenbach to write something for his newly created Théâtre Lyrique. Just when the young composer appeared on the edge of a major breakthrough, disaster struck: in the spring of 1848, revolution broke out across Paris and the last king of France, Louis-Philippe, was the forced to abdicate. All the theatres were closed while the city streets briefly flowed with blood.
Offenbach briefly fled back to Cologne with his young wife. But even when they returned to Paris a year later, all the grand salons, which had been his lifeblood in the past, remained closed. Not wishing to return to his old career as a ‘cellist, he found a valuable lifeline after being appointed musical director of the Comédie-Française theatre. Although his main duty was to improve and expand the orchestra there, Offenbach was also able to write songs and incidental music for several of the dramatic productions he organized. Independently of this, he also managed to compose three new operettas and have these performed at minor theatres. But still none of the main opera centres were showing interest, with the Opéra-Comique (his likeliest venue) continually turning down his offerings. In 1854 he was lamenting to his sister “the golden future I have dreamed of gets no nearer.”
Eventually he took a bold decision: if none of the major theatres wanted him, then he would simply create one for himself. As he later recalled:
During this period I often thought of the possibility, although it always seemed impossible, of founding a theatre, I told myself that the Opera-Comique was no longer the home of true comic opera, that really gay, bright spirited music-in-short, the music with real life in it was being forgotten. Composers working for the Opera-Comique were simply writing small ‘grand’ operas. I felt sure that something could be done for young composers like myself who were being kept waiting in idleness. In the Champs-Elysees, there was a little theatre to let, built for the physicist Lazaca, but closed for many years. I knew that the [1855 Paris Exposition] would bring many people into this locality. By May, I had found twenty supporters and on June 15th I secured the lease. Twenty days later, I gathered my librettists and I opened the Theatre de Bouffes-Parisiens.
Offenbach initially faced several obstacles with his brave new enterprise. For example, that his adopted theatre on the Champs-Elysées was so small it was nicknamed the Bonbonniere (chocolate box). It could house an audience of just fifty on tiny, uncomfortable seats, while the boxes were so small that you had to open a door just in order to take off your coat.
Another problem for the newly created Bouffes-Parisiens was that the French government (now headed by emperor Napoleon III after the final fall of the old Bourbon monarchy) had installed tight performing restrictions on many of the theatres in Paris. The upshot was that Offenbach was limited to producing one-act works, with a maximum of three characters, five dancers and an orchestra of no more than thirty.
But Offenbach would also rise magnificently to meet such challenges, and in retrospect his work at the Bouffes-Parisiens probably represents his finest hour. Now taking on a myriad of roles, including that of business manager, stage director, impresario, conductor and in-house composer, Offenbach would demonstrate all his entrepreneurial skills at their very best.
He would partly offset the problems of the Lacaza theatre’s size and location by renting the larger Salle Choiseul in central Paris during the winter months, moving his entourage there at the end of each summer before returning to the Lacaza the following spring.
As for the performing restrictions, Offenbach would quickly show his adaptability and flair at writing small-scale operatic works even if, as he admitted himself, it was “very difficult to conceal faults and inexperience [with thirty musicians] which can be hidden by an orchestra of eighty musicians.” As Offenbach biographer Peter Gammond once put it, the composer “was always a genius at turning necessity into an asset.”
It was also during these years that Offenbach would fully work out what kind of opera he was trying to write. Perhaps his frustrating experiences with the Opéra-Comique had left their mark, but he now felt that French comic opera (such as what they put on at the Comique) had become too grand and serious: he wanted to return to the supposedly lighter, more graceful style of eighteenth century comic opera – and also to incorporate more spoken dialogue to keep the action moving. .
Musically speaking, Offenbach’s mature operettas would combine the classical elegance of Mozart or Rossini (Rossini himself would even once describe Offenbach as the “Mozart of the Champs-Elysées”) along with a gift for tuneful or tub-thumping melodies. No musical snob, he was always completely at ease writing for mass audiences.
He may also have paid heed to the words of German poet Heinrich Heine, a long-term resident of Paris, who observed of French theatre at this time:
It is excitement that draws the Frenchmen to the theatre, and the last he wants is calm. If the author leaves him a single moment for contemplation, he might be liable to summon Rover – in other words, whistle. The important thing for the dramatic poet in France is to make sure that the audience neither becomes disengaged nor has time to breathe, that emotions come one after the other, that love, hatred, jealousy, ambition, pride and honour – all the passionate feelings already raging in the Frenchmen’s real life – explode on the boards with even greater intensity!
Offenbach certainly kept his audiences engaged. Nor did he allow his creative momentum to falter for a second during these years, Between July 1855 and April 1858 he would turn out over two dozen new operettas for the Bouffes-Parisiens, the highlights including Les Deux Aveugles (The Two Blind Men) and the chinoiserie musicale Ba-ta-clan, both of which, irrespective of their now rather politically incorrect themes, helped popularise his name and company further.
Distinguished visitors to the Opera-Bouffes included Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (who didn’t mind seeing his own operas parodied as it was all good publicity), the English novelist William Thackeray (who declared Offenbach “has decided humour and peculiar talent”) and a young Camille Saint-Saens. The latter was most impressed of all, declaring the theatre was the kind of place
where one could laugh with waist unbuttoned. It was all charming and the public found it a great joy… The facility of Offenbach and the rapidity of his production were incredible… Great fertility, melodic gift, harmony that was often distinguished, much wit and invention, great dramatic skill… everything and more that was necessary for success.
But the Bouffes-Parisiens could have its detractors too, not least on moral grounds when the general ambience of some of the performances – and clientele – could get a bit racy. Not that it ever bothered Offenbach: he was the kind of man who positively thrived on a rowdy atmosphere, not just while operating as an administrator but also as a creative artist. Rather like the young Rossini, he not only composed his music at an astonishing rate, but also appeared to enjoy working even while surrounded by noise and lively conversation. He liked nothing better than knocking out an aria or two at a party, and if ever the guests attempted to hush their voices so as not to distract him, he would look up in bemusement and demand to know who had died.
Despite the Bouffes-Parisiens continually playing to full houses and making a huge turnover, Offenbach now began to display an unhelpful tendency for spending slightly more than he had coming in. He splashed out lavishly on each production, often refusing to re-use scenery or costumes from previous performances, and he was nothing if not generous with his after-performance entertainments. Largely thanks to his excesses, the Bouffes-Parisien accounts had, against all odds, fallen into the red by early 1858. Matters got so bad at one point that Offenbach took to hiding in hotel rooms to avoid debt collectors.
Just as his wonderful, inspiring enterprise looked in danger of collapse, the composer was hit with a very timely piece of luck, when Napoleon III decided to lift the remaining performing restrictions on Parisian theatres. After years of being restricted to small productions, Offenbach was finally free to widen his palate, and he did so with style. The result was his first full-scale opera, a two-act parody on an ancient Greek myth, entitled Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld). It was the work that would change his life.
“He did not seek what was artistic” wrote a London critic about Orphée twenty years later, “but what was amusing, and endeavoured to raise not admiration but unadulterated merriment.” There has always been a temptation to sum up the work in this way, but it would also be an injustice to both Offenbach and his librettists, Hector Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy. While Orphée is certainly very funny, it is also a highly accomplished work. And just because Offenbach could make the music seem so effortless and simple does not mean anyone could have done it. Offenbach not only keeps the music moving at a breathless pace, with one good tune after another, but shows a mastery of ambience, humour and dramatic timing. Finally there is the skill and inventiveness of his scoring, imbuing even the least remarkable passages with light and colour.
The subject matter of Orphée was of course quite another matter. As former director of the Comédie-Française theatre, Offenbach felt he had overseen enough dreary productions devoted to stiff and pious Greek heroes. He and his librettists planned a highly subverted retelling of the old myth involving the musical Orpheus travelling bravely into the Underworld to rescue his beloved wife Eurydice. In Offenbach’s version, Orpheus and Eurydice cannot stand each other (with Eurydice wincing and covering her ears every time he plays his violin). When Eurydice is spirited down to Hades, Orpheus is not grief-stricken but relieved (“free at last!”) Only after a mysterious character called “Public Opinion” appears and orders him to go and rescue her does he reluctantly exert himself.
The opera really takes off when we cut to Olympus, the world of Jupiter and his various assistant Gods. Rather than a mood of divine solemnity, they are depicted as a comically arguing rabble. At one point, Jupiter upbraids Cupid, God of love, for “staying out all hours, shooting at random, stirring up mischief, and letting the ambrosia burn.” He threatens to take away his “flying privileges”.
But Jupiter himself is portrayed as the ultimate moral hypocrite, lecturing his divine entourage of the “honour of mythology… My children, the mortals have their eyes on us! Let’s keep up appearances at least!” When accused of having multiple affairs by his wife, he protests “but no my dear, it’s all tittle tattle… it’s the journalists… they put about rumours!”
His fellow gods are however fed up with all the fake etiquette and pretence. They rise up in rebellion and start to sing:
To arms, gods and demi-gods!
We must bring down this tyranny. This regime is boring!
It was soon obvious to contemporary audiences that all of this lampooning was less about Greek gods and more about France’s current regime, Emperor Napoleon III, and his imperial court. But if the third Napoleon ever cottoned on to the non-too-subtle inferences, he did not seem to mind. He and Offenbach would remain on very good terms throughout the 1860s, while the composer would even benefit from his support and patronage.
The opera ends riotously with all the gods now partying in the Underworld (where they are allowed to drink alcohol) to the strains of the famous Infernal Dance. Contrary to popular belief, this melody was not set as a Can-Can in the original opera – it was only adopted as the celebrated high-kicking dance by the Moulin Rouge (a cabaret founded in Paris in 1889) at the end of the nineteenth century.
Orphée caused such a sensation in Paris that it ran to an initial 228 performances, only finally closing after the singers and performers declared themselves exhausted. The huge profits not only allowed Offenbach to clear his debts, but also to build himself and his family a country house at Etretat. Official recognition quickly followed from his adopted country: in 1860 he finally gained full French citizenship and the following year was awarded the Légion d’Honneur.
The success of Orphée also appeared to spur Offenbach into the most productive phase of his career. Throughout the 1860s, his music continued to flow and sparkle like a fine champagne throughout Parisian theatres, his satirical plots and singable tunes holding a special appeal for contemporary audiences. One hit now followed another: La Belle Hélène (1864, a Helen of Troy parody), La Vie Parisienne (also from 1864, a satire on contemporary Parisian life), La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867, a sharp critique of imperial militarism) and La Périchole (1868, an exotic love story set in Peru). He also briefly branched out into ballet, and with equal success, with Le Papillon (1860, based on a Circassian fairy-tale). But he could also write the odd stinker, such as Barkouf (for the Opéra Comique in 1860, where one of the main characters is a dog) and an ill-advised attempt to evoke pre-Wagnerian romantic German Opera in Die Rheinnixen (The Rhine Nixies, 1864). But such was his productivity and popular appeal that even the odd misfire could not dent his progress for long. And even when the critics were unconvinced, the public still came flocking eagerly to each production.
While the imperial court of Napoleon III had undoubtedly helped Offenbach’s operettas remain so culturally fashionable for over a decade, when the emperor was eventually deposed, shortly after France’s disastrous war with Prussia in 1870, the composer’s reputation took a similar hit. Now a person of interest for his own Prussian roots and negatively associated with the old regime, Offenbach struggled to regain his foothold in the French capital. Despite some modest successes (and repackaging of old works), he had not lost his spendthrift ways, and after over-stretching his dwindling resources on a disastrous production in 1875, he ended up virtually bankrupt.
By now increasingly ill with gout (which resulted in him often having to be carried into theatre rehearsals from his carriage) Offenbach took to his bed for several days and for the first time in his life seemed out of ideas. But then an invitation to make a lucrative tour of America saved him once more. Despite the physical strain of the long, arduous journey, he conducted and performed in many of the major American cities, and pulled in handsome profits along the way (at one point he was conducting nightly at Madison Square in New York, and pocketing a fee of $1000 for each performance).
He returned to France with his finances replenished but his body exhausted. Sensing his time was short, he now began work on the opera which he hoped would surpass anything else he’d ever written. Like many comics, Offenbach ultimately longed to be taken seriously – still mindful of all those early rejections from reputable Parisian opera houses, he wanted to prove that he could write a “grand” opera that would hold its own with the best of them. “I would like to have more situations to put to music”, as he once put it, “not simply song upon song…” His subject matter would be a fictionalized tale about the German Romantic author, ETA Hoffman (to a libretto by Jules Barbier), incorporating three of Hoffman’s own short stories.
Offenbach made it his final life mission to get Les Contes d’Hoffman (The Tales of Hoffman) finished in time and he all but succeeded. He also had the prescience to realise he was likely to die on the job. “I have one terrible, invincible vice,” he once admitted, “that of working all the time. I’m sorry for those people who do not like my music, for I shall certainly die with a tune on the tip of my pen.” Offenbach’s final collapse, probably from heart failure, duly took place one Sunday afternoon in October 1880 while going through the piano score of Hoffman. Like many other prolific opera composers of the nineteenth century, he had burned himself out a little prematurely, dying at the age of just 61.
Offenbach would thus miss the premiere of Hoffman by just four months (the final preparations and scoring having been completed by his friend Ernest Guiraud), but with its ever fertile melodic invention and majestic scope, it is now generally agreed to be his masterpiece, exactly as he had hoped.
It probably never occurred to Offenbach that even without Hoffman he had already achieved so much with everything that had gone before. Not every composer manages to create a body of works which are hugely sought after in their day and yet can stand the test of time and remain just as popular and fresh-seeming more than 150 years later.
And despite his basically conservative music language, early twentieth century progressives in France like Claude Debussy would subsequently praise Offenbach’s output for its “unromantic” elements – its wit, refreshing lightness of touch and unsentimental satire. Offenbach would surely also have fitted well into the heady atmosphere of 1920s Paris and its age of Jazz, cabaret and street song, its discreet homage to the eighteenth century and its colourful, ironic zeitgeist.
Even Richard Wagner, with whom Offenbach – the ultimate anti-Wagnerian – would publicly exchange pointed barbs across the 1860s and 70s, was eventually won over. “He can do what the divine Mozart did”, Wagner said at the end of his own life, echoing Rossini’s own words. “Offenbach could have been a Mozart.”
You can find a complete performance of Orpheus in the Underworld here.