Word: offenbacher
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Near the outset, the girls begin to yip like Chippewas and throw their skirts in the air while the orchestra saws out some Offenbach, and they kick up their legs in what can be precisely described as the can't-can't. Georges Ulmer, the man who wrote the ballad Pigalle and who acts as M.C., tells a joke: "The Folies-Bergère is an old institution, nearly 100 years old. Of course, lately we have changed some of the girls." He does not say which ones, and without radioactive carbon it is absolutely impossible to tell...
Feline Charm. Even in his own day, Offenbach was hardly avantgarde. But to Landestheater Director Gerhard Hering, the offbeat choice of Offenbach has a "secret significance" for Angst-ridden Germany. The "aimless and exaggerated prosperity" of mid-19th century Paris, he explains, "seems to bear certain ominous parallels to the Wirtschaftswunder of today." If Offenbach's exuberant music seems "fresh and enchanting," it is because of the swaggering self-assurance with which France's Second Empire "danced over the volcano...
...German Jew who settled in Paris as a ten-year-old cello prodigy and later studied composition with Cherubini, Offenbach churned out musiquettes galore for his beloved Bouffes-Parisiens. The two works that Darmstadt saw, The Transformed Cat and Daphnis and Chloe, are quintessential Offenbach. One, resembling a Freudian treatment of La Fontaine, tells of a cat's metamorphosis into a woman of feline charm who turns at night into a rooftop mehitabel; the other shows Pan thwarted in a sneaky attempt to teach Chloe the art of love-and ends with a riproaring, garter-snapping cancan. The ideal...
Beaming Burghers. Perhaps only a truly melancholy man could generate such frivolity. His melodies are delightful and earthy, but they are also the work of a composer who somewhat pitifully liked to be known as "the Mozart of the Champs-Elysées." In his last years, Offenbach struggled to complete his one entirely serious opera, but when he died in 1880, only the piano score for Hoffmann was finished. He was popular in his lifetime, but he accepted his acclaim with some bitterness. "I am happy to have my small place," he said acidly. "I know...
...Today Offenbach seems more the mockingbird. Even in his early works, disenchantment flickers at the edges of gaiety, and in Germany perhaps it seems the dignifying element of his work. Though Darmstadt re-creates his musiquettes with utter fidelity, the result is sometimes closer to strudel than soufflé. The orchestra plays impeccably, but without the elan that Paris gave to Offenbach, and he to it. Though every seat at every performance is filled with beaming burghers, the cancan line has not a single roguish wink for admiring males. Darmstadt is well pleased nonetheless. Landestheater Director Hering said last week...