A German-Jewish musician, a cellist, all of 19, makes his way to Paris to begin a virtuoso career. He’s not a commanding personality, but he has a lot of wit, and after playing in various Parisian orchestras for a few years and absorbing the life of café-dwelling men about town (the flaneurs, as they were called), rents out a theater and begins to produce little comedy shows with his own music. They’re not operas, really, not even full-scale staged works. But they begin to draw crowds to the theater.
This is the story of today’s birthday boy, Jacques Offenbach, who became one of the most popular theater composers of the 19th century. He is beloved because of his brilliant operettas, a string of hits that began with Orpheus in the Underworld, and continued with The Beautiful Helen, Parisian Life (La vie parisienne) The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, La Périchole, Les Brigands, and many more. His influence extended to Vienna, where Johann Strauss Jr. took up operettas with huge success, and the Englishmen W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (who themselves exerted a huge creative influence on later English and American musical theater) were also indebted to Offenbach.
Offenbach also left behind, unfinished, one more far-reaching work, the opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which is now playing in revival at the San Francisco Opera. Check out SFCV’s biography, videos, playlist, links, and much more at Offenbach’s Composer Gallery page