Jacques Offenbach

The son of a Cologne cantor and music teacher, Jacques Offenbach came to Paris as a boy cellist, spent a year at the Conservatoire and left it for the orchestra pit and the salons. At the Bouffes-Parisiens, the theatre he founded in 1855, he developed operettas combining dialogue and dance rhythms: Orphée aux enfers, La belle Hélène, La vie parisienne, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, La Périchole. His operettas used political and social satire. Johann Strauss the younger and Sullivan were influenced by him. Les contes d'Hoffmann, left unfinished at his death in 1880, reached the stage the following year. Between 1835 and 1855 he earned his living as a cellist and conductor, known well beyond Paris, and he composed nearly a hundred operettas, Orphée aux enfers following in 1858. Napoleon III, whose court he had gently mocked, granted him French citizenship and the Légion d'Honneur; after the war of 1870 that association and his German birth told against him in Paris, though his works continued to be performed in Vienna and London, and he later toured the United States.