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 — tha…