Famous Operetta Overtures

Description

Famous Operetta OverturesOperetta was essentially a development of the second half of the nineteenth century, a product of Paris, where Jacques Offenbach achieved enormous success with a form of music-theatre that neatly filled the gap between the weightier production of the Opéra-Comique and popular vaudeville. From France the genre was taken up elsewhere, and most notably in Vienna, with the work of Milloecker, von Suppé and Johann Strauss, leading to Kálmán, Lehár, Robert Stolz and others. Fashions were to change and operetta suffered a gradual decline, while the works of its heyday retained their popularity. Johann Strauss and Jacques Offenbach at least still hold the stage, although Suppé may now be better known for the overtures that introduced his music for the theatre.Jacques Offenbach was of German Jewish origin. His father, Isaac Juda Eberst, came from Offenbach-am-Main, moving to Cologne, where he carried on his trade as a bookbinder and served as cantor in a synagogue. It was in Cologne that his second son, Jakob, was born in 1819, and in that city that he began playing the cello in a trio with one of his brothers and a sister. In 1833 he moved with his brother Julius, a violinist, to Paris, studied briefly at the Conservatoire, and embarked on a career as a cellist with the orchestra of the Opéra-Comique. By 1838 he was able to leave the orchestra to earn a living by his compositions and by his performances in the salons of the French capital, and by an increasingly busy career as a virtuoso cellist, appearing with some of the most distinguished musicians of the day.It was not until the year of the Great Exhibition, 1855, that Offenbach was able to begin to make a success of his stage works and three years later he put on the operetta that was to make his name, Orpheus in the Underworld, a parody of Gluck's famous opera. La belle Hélène, written in 1864, with a libretto by Meilhac and Halévy, also won very considerable success, with its similarly satirical treatment of classical legend. His operettas were to dominate Paris and to lead to pirated versions of his work elsewhere, before he was able to direct performances for himself in Vienna, in London and in the United States of America. Towards the end of his life he showed particular concern for another work, which was to become a valued part of operatic repertoire. This was The Tales of Hoffmann, which was left incomplete at the composer's death in Paris in 1880.Franz von Suppé was born in Dalmatia in the town of Spalato, now known as Split, in 1819, the son of a Belgian father in the service of the Austrian government, and a mother from Vienna. He was christened, with a certain extravagance, Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo and bore the title Cavaliere and the surnames Suppé Demelli. In Vienna, where he moved with his mother after his father's death in 1835, he was to be known more simp