Jacques Offenbach

Born in Cologne in 1819, the son of a synagogue cantor, Offenbach arrived at the Paris Conservatoire at 14, left after a year, and spent two decades as a cellist and conductor. Finding the Opéra-Comique uninterested in his comic pieces, he leased a small Champs-Élysées theatre in 1855 and staged more than two dozen of his own works in three years. Orphée aux enfers arrived in 1858 with its celebrated can-can and exceptional reception; through the 1860s he delivered at least eighteen full-length operettas - La belle Hélène, La Vie parisienne, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, La Périchole - that traveled to Vienna, London, and New York on the strength of melody and sexual intrigue lightly satirizing Napoleon III's court. The Franco-Prussian War and the empire's fall in 1870 left him out of favor in Paris for his German birth and imperial ties, but he remained successful abroad and re-established himself in the 1870s with revivals and a US tour. He died in 1880 before finishing The Tales of Hoffmann, which entered the repertory in versions completed by others.