On a spring evening in Paris, a boy from Cologne stood before Luigi Cherubini, the stern director of the Paris Conservatoire. The year was 1833, and the rules were clear: no foreigners. But Jacques Offenbach, born in the Prussian Rhineland in 1819, played his cello so persuasively that Cherubini broke his own regulation and admitted him. The boy had arrived in the French capital with his father and older brother, chasing a musical education that a Prussian synagogue cantor could never provide at home. Paris would become the city that made him, and eventually the city that buried him. Jacques Offenbach died on October 5, 1880.
From cellist to theatre owner
Offenbach did not stay long at the Conservatoire. He left after about a year, preferring to earn his living as a cellist and conductor in the city's busy theatres. For two decades he built a reputation as a performer, but the real gamble came in 1855, when he opened his own theatre, the Bouffes-Parisiens, on the Champs-Élysées. The venture was a risk: he was a foreigner, a former child prodigy, and now a theatre owner in a city that devoured ambitious men. But the little theatre gave him something no one else could offer: a stage where his own music would be heard.
Three years later, the restrictions on his theatre were lifted, and Offenbach seized the moment. He staged his first full-length operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld, a cheeky retelling of the Greek myth that mocked the gods and the respectable people who worshipped them. The Parisian public adored it. The piece made him famous across Europe, and he followed it with a string of successes: La Belle Hélène, La Vie parisienne, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, La Périchole. By the end of the 1860s, Offenbach was the undisputed king of operetta, a genre he had practically invented.
War, bankruptcy and a new direction
Then the Franco-Prussian War tore his world apart. In 1870 his theatre was closed and turned into a hospital, and the newspapers on both sides of the Rhine turned on him. French journalists accused him of secretly supporting Germany; German writers called him a traitor to his homeland. The man who had made Paris laugh was now a target. Five years after the war, the financial strain became unbearable, and Offenbach was forced to declare bankruptcy. The composer who had once filled theatres on two continents was ruined.
But Offenbach refused to disappear. He toured the United States, where audiences still loved him, and returned to Paris to write again. In his final years he began work on something different: a serious opera based on the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German writer of dark, fantastical tales. He wrote the entire piano score and orchestrated the prologue and the first act. The second act remained unfinished. On the fifth of October, 1880, a sudden attack of suffocation killed him in his Paris home. He was buried in Montmartre Cemetery, and the opera he had poured his last energy into was left incomplete.
On the fifth of October, 1880, a sudden attack of suffocation killed him in his Paris home.
His friend Ernest Guiraud took on the task of finishing The Tales of Hoffmann. Guiraud inserted several fragments from Offenbach's earlier works, including the famous Barcarolle, a melody that would become one of the most recognisable tunes in all of opera. The premiere took place in 1881 at the Opéra-Comique, less than a year after the composer's death. The audience heard something they had never heard from Offenbach before: a work of dark romanticism, full of longing and loss, far removed from the satirical sparkle of his operettas.
The opera entered the standard repertoire and has been performed continuously ever since. A composer who had spent his career making people laugh had left behind a final work of haunting beauty. The boy from Cologne, who had charmed Cherubini into breaking the rules, ended his life as one of the most performed opera composers in the world. His grave on Montmartre looks out over the city that gave him everything and then took it away. And somewhere in a concert hall, on any given night, the Barcarolle is still being sung.