“Che disgrazia! to think that I am the only sovereign unable to
attend this Grand Duchess [of Gerolstein]!” 1
—APOCRYPHAL COMMENT ATTRIBUTED TO POPE PIUS IX
“Piff, Paff, Pouff.” 2
—GENERAL BOUM’S SONG AND RESPONSE TO THE WORLD IN THE GRAND DUCHESS OF GEROLSTEIN
Despite some savage cuts by the state censor, on the freezing evening of Saturday, December 17, 1864, dozens of elegant carriages stopped one after another in the Rue de Montmartre before the Théâtre des Variétés for a very special event: a new Offenbach production, La Belle Hélène. Now, at the age of fifty-one, Offenbach was a household name, synonymous with musical extravaganza, elegant French comedy, and a new form of music, opéra bouffe (comic, or light opera), beginning with his witty Ba-Ta-Clan back in 1855. But there had been no new major production by this small caricature of a man—“a skeleton sporting a pince-nez,” an otherwise humorless Edmond de Goncourt called him3—since his successful Orpheus in the Underworld six years earlier. And more than one jealous fellow composer was ready to write him off, beginning with the outspoken Hector Berlioz, not to mention writers and politicians, including a presumptuous, musically illiterate Émile Zola—“that wily Italian,” Goncourt called him, who had never met him but who dismissed Offenbach as “a public enemy” and “a monstrous beast!”4 A young professor of philology at Basel, Friedrich Nietzsche, disagreed with these critics, however, calling Jacques Offenbach “an artistic genius,” and Rossini, Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Rimski-Korsakov fully concurred, praising “this Mozart of the Boulevards.”5 But even Offenbach’s close friend and principal librettist, Ludovic Halévy, had to admit he found the great man, like so many gifted and successful artists, an egotistical tyrant and “the most badly brought up man I know,” when rehearsing his cast.6 If Offenbach was no paragon of the social graces, he was a notoriously soft touch for any musician who had fallen on hard times. He also encouraged promising students and even established composers, including Vienna’s Johann Strauss, recommending his return to writing full-length operettas once more. As for the premier of La Belle Hélène tonight, it would either ensure Jacques Offenbach’s position as the grand composer of this new musical form, or mark his downfall.
The lobby was filling with bejeweled ladies of the court and bearded gentlemen in silk top hats intrigued, even excited, with anticipation about the latest work of this extraordinary Offenbach. Why had the state censors taken such chunks out of this piece when the emperor, Napoléon III, and his lovely consort Eugénie were themselves here in the Imperial Loge also anticipating the grand event? It was said that a reference to Eugénie’s friend, Pauline von Metternich, wife of the Austrian ambassador, and certain political innuendos had been removed. And the same applied to the sensual attractions of Hélène, played tonight by the great lady of the theater, Hortense Schneider—the former mistress of both Offenbach and Louis Napoléon—which had to be toned down. But even the good-humored Louis Napoléon could not help smiling later during the premiere of the La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein, in which Offenbach openly satirized the army.
Curiosity, a fascination for gossip and intrigue, and above all a genuine passion for and an addictive delight in Offenbach’s melodious, rollicking, frequently outrageous works now brought them to the theater once again, including the tone-deaf imperial couple—Empress Eugénie and Louis Napoléon, the latter openly laughing at his own ignorance and insensibility to beautiful music, painting, and literature, his total lack of appreciation of the arts. “It’s like gout, don’t you see, it skips a generation,” he quipped. “But perhaps my son will like them!” Back in 1855 during the first international exhibition, Auguste de Morny as president of the Jury of the Salon des Tableaux of the new painters, was acting as Louis Napoléon’s guide when they stopped before a panoramic canvas of mountains centered around Mont Blanc. A serious Louis Napoléon looked at it disapprovingly. “The painter should have indicated the altitude of each of the peaks.” And when on another occasion the emperor was attending a benefit for the arts, he turned to his hostess, Madame Delessert, and asked: “What can I do to support the arts?” She curtseyed and replied, “Sire, you have to appreciate them first.”7
* * *
Offenbach was the living caricature of what the composer of this new “outlandish” music should be, wrapped in a voluminous fur coat with an enormous collar almost engulfing his diminutive body—balding prematurely, with straggling long, thin blond-gray hair hanging from the sides and back of his head, his eyes hidden by a gold pince-nez attached by a dangling silk ribbon, his mutton-chop whiskers descending down to his clean shaven chin, and a smelly Havana cigar that never seemed to leave his mouth. Like the chain-smoking Louis Napoléon, who had to have a large fire in every room rendering his wing of the Tuileries almost tropical, he also suffered from gout, and the slender, dapper Offenbach—shorter even than Louis Napoléon—was always cold, wearing his famous fur coat inside the house and theaters, even in summer, and inevitably gesticulating with his cane in one hand and a score or cigar in the other.
Now on this Saturday evening the seventeenth, every seat of the Variétés was taken, with overflowing crowds outside on the pavement. Offenbach’s lovely, long suffering, much admired wife, Herminie, whom even the usually acid-tipped pen of Edmond de Goncourt found “sympathique” and “spirituelle,” was in her loge. Around the imperial box were to be seen a veritable who’s who of the Second Empire, while backstage the composer’s two talented librettists, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, were going through the inevitable last-minute changes.
For the sleepless, compulsive-worker Offenbach personally, much was riding on this latest three-act opéra bouffe, the form he had created, but he had produced only lesser works, including Le Papillon, Barakouf, and Monsieur Choufleur (with lyrics by one M. de Rémy—Morny), since Orpheus.8 This extravaganza, La Belle Hélène, into whose production he had invested his last centime, could make or break his reputation as well as his pocketbook.
Many of the serious music critics claimed his career had already peaked, and that he was in effect burnt out. Indeed the management of his usual theater, the Bouffes-Parisiens, had had a falling out with the composer, hence the scandalous change of venue tonight. And of course his future triumphs, including La Vie Parisienne with its famous can-can, and the enchanting Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein, had yet to be written. But this dynamic little man gesticulating in a cloud of cigar smoke also needed a success tonight to pay off production costs and hobbling gambling debts here in Paris, at Ems, Baden-Baden, Nice, and Monte Carlo. Then there were the expenses of maintaining his large apartment in the Boulevard des Capucines and supporting his beautiful forty-three-year-old wife, Herminie, and five children, including four daughters who would soon require important dowries worthy of such a celebrity. Nor was the expense of maintaining his latest mistress, Zulma Bouffar, and their two illegitimate children insignificant. In addition, his imposing family seaside resort home at Etretat, the Villa Orphée, with its separate staff, also continued to drain his hemorrhaging purse. Thus a successful box office with a long run of weeks and months was critical. But none of those anxieties could be discerned by watching the imperturbable maestro with his sardonic “Mephistophelian smile” as the curtain was about to go up tonight.
Perhaps even the phenomenal Jacques Offenbach had reached too far, too high, and misjudged his own abilities. And yet today’s middle-aged composer had already become a national figure, a legend, indeed almost the very personification of this soaring, energy-infusing, new Second Empire. The whole of Europe, even the English, was in awe of this remarkable creation, of Louis Napoléon’s new France, as they witnessed a totally transformed Paris, in the explosive growth of the Bourse and the economy, in the blossoming new literature and arts of the nation, and in the millions of international visitors drawn to the first Universal Exhibition of 1855. And this “skeleton sporting a pince-nez,” with his heavily German-accented French—like Louis Napoléon himself—was the very symbol of this entirely new world, he and Louis Napoléon, two characters stepping right out of an Offenbach production.
* * *
Paris was the musical capital of Europe. Every major musician and composer had to present his credentials here at some stage, including Meyerbeer, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Verdi, and Wagner. Therefore why not this musical genius? But the great difference distinguishing Offenbach from Wagner, Verdi, and Schumann was his unique ability to find something intrinsically French in his music that appealed to, and touched, the very soul of the people, not to mention his mischievous mocking of state authority, the nation’s political leaders and generals. It was quite extraordinary that this Rhineland Jewish cellist could step into French society and understand it so instinctively, so intimately, as to be able to produce a very French ambiance. Similarly, a German-speaking Frenchman had arrived from the wilds of Switzerland, taken a Spanish wife, created a new empire, and then dismantled the entire heart of the French capital and rebuilt it stone-by-stone in his own image. French history was standing on its head! No wonder Jacques Offenbach seemed to be so natural a part of the Second Empire, indeed it was hard to imagine it without him.
As it turned out, the premier this Saturday, the seventeenth of December, 1864, was to prove a financial and musical success far beyond all expectations, the contagious “crazy” enthusiasm continuing the following nights and months thereafter. One ecstatic contemporary witness aptly summed up the essence of Offenbach’s unique music and the contribution made by La Belle Hélène: “It is our world today that he presents here, it is our society, it is us, it is our beliefs, tastes and sense of joy.”9
Jacques Offenbach would have been as utterly inconceivable during the incessant military campaigns and in the Salle des Maréchaux [Tuileries] of Napoléon I’s reign as he would have been under the grim arch-aristocratic Bourbon reign of the severe, witless Louis XVIII and Charles X. There was only one moment in history when an exotic Offenbach could have suddenly appeared out of nowhere and thrived, and it was under Louis Napoléon’s Second Empire. Offenbach was “the king of comic opera,” L’Univers Illustré declared with the successful launching of La Belle Hélène.10 In this new production one found “Rossini-esque hijinks,” the inherent soul of the French people, satire, a nostalgia, tenderness, wit, and vivacity, touching their deepest basic feelings while at the same time introducing the most elegant melody all culminating in a uniquely Offenbachian “rhythmic frenzy,”11 casting its spell over the audience, leaving the theater gripped and intoxicated. Such was the magic of Offenbach, which he himself summed up as the la vie Parisienne, the soul of Paris, that his magical spell quickly swept over the whole of Europe from Berlin, to Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Ems, Baden-Baden, Gilbert and Sullivan’s London, and eventually New York’s Broadway.
* * *
Jacques—originally Jacob—Offenbach had been born in the Jewish ghetto of Cologne in 1819, in the nearly impoverished home of a musically endowed father, a part-time cantor at a local synagogue, and music teacher—guitar, piano, flute, and violin. Jacques was one of five siblings with unusual musical abilities of varying degrees who formed their own chamber group. A child prodigy by the age of seven, Jacques was an accomplished violinist who then turned to the cello, for which he would later become famous in Paris.12
Thanks to a dedicated father, Jacques and his brother Jules were brought to Paris in 1833 and enrolled in the prestigious Conservatoire de Musique de Paris, under the direction of the seventy-three-year-old Luigi Cherubini, a prolific composer of chamber and sacred music as well as operatic works in his own right (e.g., Eliza and Médée). Considered cantankerous and notoriously difficult to please, he recognized great talent in the brilliant, wayward, and already independent Jacques as a cellist and composer, and was decidedly disappointed when the boy resigned from the Conservatoire one and a half years later. At the age of fifteen the boy was very determined to go his own way. He wanted to earn a living, and got a series of part-time jobs as a cellist in the orchestras of theaters and the opera, and by the age of twenty-one emerged as a well-known cellist of the concert stage. He was bursting with songs and scores, music pouring out of him like a musical fountain, sometimes melodious and sensuous, sometimes puckish and mischievous, conveyed by an endless stream of highly original, entrancing rhythm and themes. Impatient for success, he composed for hours at a time, day after day, when he was not giving concerts or playing in orchestras. Almost tortured by the new, unrelenting ideas, melodies, and scores swirling in his head, he slept and ate little. At eighty-five francs a month, at least the young musician could pay his bills, and fortunately had not yet become an addicted gambler, like so many men in the arts. Thanks to his relationship with the family of Léon Halévy and later his son Ludovic, and Leon’s father, the celebrated handsome composer Fromental Halévy (remembered for his opera La Juive), doors were opened, easing the pace of his entry into the Paris musical world as a concert cellist.
The regulations and laws controlling theaters, dramatic and musical presentations under the Second Empire were still very primitive and restrictive as to the number of performers and the type of theatrical or musical production. By his twenties a driven Offenbach was composing as fast as he could write, but unable to find outlets for his full-length productions requiring a large orchestra and a cast of singers that defined his new art of comic light opera.
It was in the 1840s that the flâneur, nightly habitué of the music halls, the opera, and of the coulisses du ballet, Auguste de Morny, encountered Jacques Offenbach, seven years his junior. Ignoring the traditional rigid French class and religious barriers separating Christians and Jews, Morny was attracted to Offenbach through the composer’s captivating new music and devilish sense of humor, and thus they became friends. Above all he respected his wonderful talent and determination to succeed. As Morny became more familiar with the difficulties Offenbach was encountering due to the still severe government restrictions on theatrical productions, he intervened on occasion through Louis Napoléon—who had also met Offenbach occasionally at musical productions—and his officials to ease the way for the composer.13 By 1855, at the age of thirty-six, a much frustrated Offenbach was determined to leave his cello and the classical concert stage behind in order to compose full-time and produce his own works, and for this he required a permanent theater of his own.
It was at this time during the Universal Exhibition of 1855 that Offenbach found a building, the Carré Marigny near the Palace of Industry. But when he applied to the state minister in charge, Achille Fould, a license was refused. The famous tragedian, Rachel, currently Fould’s mistress and previously Offenbach’s, was now prevailed upon to intervene on his behalf. More important, the highly influential Morny in his capacity as a member of the Opera Commission, governing the administration of the city’s theaters, also stepped into the picture.14 Although best known for his financial scandals, the emperor’s brother did not ask for or take a single centime for all the work he did for Offenbach.
Thanks largely to Morny’s perseverance and unique position at court, Offenbach duly opened his new Bouffes-Parisiens on December 19, 1855, with the premier of his riotous one-act Chinese musical, Ba-Ta-Clan, to be followed subsequently over the years by the premiers of more than four dozen new works here. Morny, himself an amateur librettist, made this great breakthrough in Offenbach’s career possible, and that musician never again appeared on the concert stage with his cello.
Morny and Offenbach met frequently over the following years, and it was through him that Morny met his gifted young collaborator, Ludovic Halévy, whom he eventually hired at the National Assembly. The count (later, duke) also cleared the bureaucratic channels in arranging for the granting of the composer’s naturalization as a French citizen in January 1860, followed by his induction as a member of the Legion of Honor the following year. In 1862 Morny served as godfather to Offenbach’s only son, Auguste. In addition he twice arranged for Offenbach’s concerts at the Hôtel de Lassay (National Assembly) in 1861 and 1864, over which he presided. They included two of Morny’s own libretti (under the name of “M. de Saint-Rémy”), Monsieur Choufleur and La Succession Bonnet, written in collaboration with Offenbach. And it was through his patron that Offenbach was invited to the Tuileries and to Compiègne. Jacques Offenbach was shattered by the news of Morny’s unexpected demise less than three months after the premier of La Belle Hélène, at the age of fifty-three in March 1865, and broke down during his burial at Père Lachaise Cemetery.
* * *
In the 1850s and sixties nearly every composer or musician of international repute appeared in Paris; it was obligatory. Meyerbeer, Offenbach’s predecessor, was still very popular here despite maintaining Berlin as his home and musical venue. If Franz Liszt performed here only briefly—as a student he had been refused admission to the Conservatoire—Frédéric Chopin had made France his home and he had always been well received, both in the influential salons of Saint-Germain and on the concert stage. Rossini was another Parisian favorite, but when Richard Wagner, with Louis Napoléon’s unstinted encouragement, produced Tannhäuser here in 1861, he was met by dismay, boos, and total incredulity by the Mozart-loving Parisians.
Although not liking classical music any more than he did “art,” Louis Napoléon, with Eugénie’s help, nevertheless made every effort to support and encourage art, music, and literature, including personal and state sponsorship scholarships and financial help. Most of the major authors of the day were invited to the Tuileries and on occasion to Compiègne. This even included the more “notorious” authors currently being prosecuted in the courts for “immoral” content, ideas, and scenes, e.g., the jolly Alexandre Dumas, fils (for his Dame aux Camélias) and Gustave Flaubert (for his Madame Bovary). Flaubert’s appearance at the Tuileries in particular caused quite a sensation, not because of his “notoriety” so much as because of his reputation as a Norman recluse of Giverny; his visits to Paris were very rare events indeed. For his part Louis Napoléon privately gave the proscribed authors his support with the authorities. In fact, almost in spite of Louis Napoléon’s considerable personal deficiencies, the arts flourished as never before in nineteenth-century France. With the wholesale reconstruction of the city, several of the old theaters along the Temple were transplanted around Châtelet. The enormous new wealth produced by Louis Napoléon’s economic and commercial policies made new demands on entertainment, on the theater, operas, and music halls. New publishers appeared, and the numbers of artists increased for the new illustrated magazines and books, as well as for the portraits of the nouveaux riches. The subdued classical qualities of the Barbizon school of Corot and Courbet gave way to the lighter palette and freer forms of the impressionists represented by Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley, among others—all thanks to the unfettered ambiance of a new liberated Second Empire, an artistic revolution previously so utterly inconceivable under the Bourbon Restoration or even during Louis Philippe’s July Monarchy. New colonial motifs now appeared in their works as well, Algerian and oriental scenes inspiring paintings, literary and travel works, not to mention the interior décor of upper-class Parisian homes. Even Gustave Flaubert found himself captivated, wrenching himself away from his beloved Normandy to sail to Egypt and climb the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
The last vestiges of the eighteenth century were carried away with the rubble from the demolished medieval buildings. A fresh breeze wafted across the French capital, transforming not only the avenues and architecture but the entire attitude and outlook of the people liberated from the restraining values and ideas of the past. Thanks to Louis Napoléon’s emphasis on public education, the working classes were finally taught to read and write, and new book publishers, new newspapers, reviews, and magazines multiplied, bringing literary creation as well as news from across the world and the ever expanding empire.
Broad tree-lined boulevards were terraced with sidewalk cafés where novelists, poets, dramatists, and journalists met daily, expounding their ideas with little fear of an overzealous police, though there were limits. Louis Napoléon employed no Joseph Fouché. Avenue after avenue boasted handsome hôtels particuliers, while elsewhere new department stores, le grands magasins, Bon Marché, Louvre, Printemps, and Samartaine, opened their doors to the middle classes. This phenomenon, the Second Empire, had changed the face of French history, and Jacques Offenbach and his strutting General Boum were an intricate part of the soul of this new world, until one fourth of September in the future, when the spirit of this Offenbachland was destined to vanish forever. The elegant broad avenues would remain, along with Haussmann’s handsome architecture, but the esprit and soul would be lost forever with the sound of the first Krupp cannon and the sight of a strutting Prussian field marshal replacing the gentler General Boum and his “Piff, Paff, Pouff.”