Jacques Offenbach

He was the second son and the seventh of ten children of Isaac Juda Offenbach né Eberst (1779–1850) and his wife Marianne, née Rindskopf (c. 1783–1840).

Isaac, who came from a musical family, had abandoned his original trade as a bookbinder and earned an itinerant living as a cantor in synagogues and playing the violin in cafés.

He was generally known as "der Offenbacher", after his native town, Offenbach am Main, and in 1808 he officially adopted Offenbach as a surname.

In 1816 he settled in Cologne, where he became established as a teacher, giving lessons in singing, violin, flute, and guitar, and composing both religious and secular music.

When Jacob was six years old, his father taught him to play the violin; within two years the boy was composing songs and dances, and at the age of nine he took up the cello.

As he was by then the permanent cantor of the local synagogue, Isaac could afford to pay for his son to take lessons from the well-known cellist Bernhard Breuer.

Three years later, the biographer Gabriel Grovlez records, the boy was giving performances of his own compositions, "the technical difficulties of which terrified his master", Breuer.

Together with his brother Julius (violin) and sister Isabella (piano), Jacob played in a trio at local dance halls, inns and cafés, performing popular dance music and operatic arrangements.

Jacques Offenbach (, also, , ; 20 June 18195 October 1880) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario of the Romantic period.

In 1833, Isaac decided that the two most musically talented of his children, Julius and Jacob (then aged 18 and 14), needed to leave the provincial musical scene of Cologne to study in Paris.

With generous support from local music lovers and the municipal orchestra, with whom they gave a farewell concert on 9 October, the two young musicians, accompanied by their father, made the four-day journey to Paris in November 1833.

Isaac had been given letters of introduction to the director of the Paris Conservatoire, Luigi Cherubini, but he needed all his eloquence to persuade Cherubini even to give Jacob an audition.

The boy's age and nationality were both obstacles to admission.

Cherubini had several years earlier refused the 12-year-old Franz Liszt admission on similar grounds, but he eventually agreed to hear the young Offenbach play.

He listened to his playing and stopped him, saying, "Enough, young man, you are now a pupil of this Conservatoire."

Julius was also admitted.

Both brothers adopted French forms of their names, Julius becoming Jules and Jacob becoming Jacques.

Isaac hoped to secure permanent employment in Paris but failed to do so and returned to Cologne.

From 1835 to 1855 he earned his living as a cellist, achieving international fame, and as a conductor.

His ambition, however, was to compose comic pieces for the musical theatre.

He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann.

He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss Jr. and Arthur Sullivan.

His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st.

The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera repertory.

Born in Cologne, Kingdom of Prussia, the son of a synagogue cantor, Offenbach showed early musical talent.

At the age of 14, he was accepted as a student at the Paris Conservatoire but found academic study unfulfilling and left after a year.

Finding the management of Paris' Opéra-Comique company uninterested in staging his works, in 1855 he leased a small theatre in the Champs-Élysées.

There he presented a series of his own small-scale pieces, many of which became popular.

In 1858, Offenbach produced his first full-length operetta, Orphée aux enfers ("Orpheus in the Underworld"), which was exceptionally well received and has remained one of his most played works.

During the 1860s, he produced at least 18 full-length operettas, as well as more one-act pieces.

His works from this period included La belle Hélène (1864), La Vie parisienne (1866), La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) and La Périchole (1868).

The risqué humour (often about sexual intrigue) and mostly gentle satiric barbs in these pieces, together with Offenbach's facility for melody, made them internationally known, and translated versions were successful in Vienna, London and elsewhere in Europe.

Offenbach became associated with the Second French Empire of Napoleon III; the emperor and his court were genially satirised in many of Offenbach's operettas.

Napoleon III personally granted him French citizenship and the Légion d'Honneur.

With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Offenbach found himself out of favour in Paris because of his imperial connections and his German birth.

He remained successful in Vienna and London, however.

He re-established himself in Paris during the 1870s, with revivals of some of his earlier favourites and a series of new works, and undertook a popular US tour.

In his last years he strove to finish The Tales of Hoffmann, but died before the premiere of the opera, which has entered the standard repertory in versions completed or edited by other musicians.

Offenbach was born Jacob (or Jakob) Offenbach to a Jewish family in the German city of Cologne, which was then a part of Prussia.

His birthplace in the Großer Griechenmarkt was a short distance from the square that is now named after him, the Offenbachplatz.