Word: offenbacher
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...George Gershwin of France's Second Empire was mutton-chop-whiskered Jacques Offenbach. Stuffy politicians, high-toned artists, bombastic literati winced at his satirical songs. All Paris, from the Empress Eugénie to the trollops of the Quartier Latin gobbled up his tunes as fast as they came. He wrote nearly 100 operettas, which drew delighted applause in every pleasure-loving city from St. Petersburg to New Orleans...
...pince-nezed, gouty Offenbach was not satisfied with being the most popular light-weight composer in the world. All his life he nursed an ambition to write a serious opera. He fulfilled his ambition just before he died, in the fantastic, melodious Tales of Hoffmann. Today Composer Offenbach's operettas are mostly forgotten. But Tales of Hoffmann still holds the boards in most opera houses, and the famous Barcarolle from its third act is still played by restaurant & café orchestras all over the world...
Last week Nazification of Vienna's State Opera House left Composer Offenbach's lone opera on the shelf of verboten masterpieces. Reason: Composer Offenbach was a Jew. But yesterday's operetta-loving Vienna would have been a very different place without Composer Offenbach's influence. It was Composer Offenbach who invented and introduced to Vienna the kind of operetta that helped make Vienna famous...
Though genial Offenbach's operettas were no great shakes individually, they set style that influenced practically every Popular composer of the 1870s, '80s and '90s. Most prominent of his followers were Vienna's Johann Strauss (Die Fledtrmaus), Oscar Straus (The Chocolate Soldier, and Franz Lehár (The Merry Widow) Strongly influenced also were England' s Gilbert & Sullivan (Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, etc.), Irish-American Victor Herbert (The Red Mill, Naughty Marietta...
Personally, Composer Offenbach was a Parisian among Parisians, a gay, bespectacled, cane-toting boulevardier, a wit, a capricious poseur. Musically, he was a past master of delightful superficialities. Published last week was his first adequate biography in English,* a carefully documented but humorless and solemn book by ex-Journalist Siegfried Kracauer...