Patrick Bade
Manet and Offenbach

Patrick Bade | Manet and Offenbach | 08.01.21

- [Moderator] All right, Patrick, it’s three past. I think we should get started. And just a big old welcome to everybody. Thank you so much for joining us on this Sunday.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

• Yes, thank you very much. Yes, what you see on the screen is a map of the new Paris. It was sometimes called the New Babylon, that had been created on the orders of the Emperor Louis-Napoleon by Baron Haussmann in the 1860s. In fact, I’m speaking to you from just behind the Gare de l'Est. You can see a long, straight diagonal boulevard going through the centre. At the top is the Gare de l'Est. I’m right behind that. So it’s Baron Haussmann really determined the appearance of modern Paris.

I’ve been having great fun going around Paris, exploring Paris by bus. It’s so much nicer than by Metro. And you go down these wide boulevards, and you look to left and right, and behind the very restrained and formal facades of the Haussmann buildings, you see all the side streets, which is the old higgledy-piggledy mediaeval street plan. And a lot of the ancient Paris still survives behind these facades. But this is where you can say the modern world was born. The modern urban sensibility was created in Paris in the 1860s. So many things that we take for granted.

This is actually a painting from the 1870s by Gustave Caillebotte that shows these new streets created by Baron Haussmann. And today, I’m going to look at two great artists, Edouard Manet and Jacques Offenbach, who in their different ways represented aspects of this new modern urban sensibility. Each, in their way, was cutting edge. And they were, Offenbach created an entirely new art form, the operetta, and Manet too was seen by everybody as, whether you liked him or not, lots of people hated him, of course, as the beginning of something entirely new in Western art. Here they both are. Offenbach is the older of the two. He’s born in 1819, as you can see.

Now, that’s a bizarre coincidence to think of. Offenbach and Queen Victoria being born in the same year. Certainly very different characters. He was born, he wasn’t French, he was Parisian. There’s a big difference between being French and being Parisian. Lots of French people don’t actually like the Parisians. They see them as a race apart. It’s like being a New Yorker. You know, if you’re a New Yorker or you’re a Parisian, you’re really a citizen of the world. But he was born to a family of a poor cantor in Cologne in Germany. Never lost his German accent. And he used to refer to himself jokingly as O. de Cologne.

Manet is half a generation younger, born in 1832. Very different circumstances. You can see he’s a dandy. He was a smart man, and he was a handsome man. I think Offenbach has a wonderful face, I love his face. So full of expression. It’s a very Jewish face, I suppose. But you wouldn’t really say that he was handsome in a conventional way. Manet was born into the upper bourgeoisie. They certainly knew each other. There is this very famous painting, which I shall talk about more in, I think, my next-but-one session. It’ll be a week today. It’s called “Music in the Tuileries Gardens,” and it was painted in 1862, really to illustrate the ideas of Baudelaire, about what the modern artist should, the role of the modern artist.

Shouldn’t be hiding away in an ivory tower, he should be mingling with the crowd, he should present himself to the world as a kind of dandy. And I suppose both Manet and Offenbach did precisely that. And you can see them both in this painting, in fact. Here on the left, on the extreme left, there is Manet as the embodiment of a dandy, with a shiny top hat and a cane and a very well-manicured beard. And Offenbach, also wearing a top hat, and wearing a little pince-nez, with a moustache, you can see in front of the tree, to the left of centre here.

So Offenbach… Paris was such a magnet, really, particularly for Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. It was almost the promised land. I’m going to finish today talking about a composer-conductor called Manuel Rosenthal. His mother, towards the end of the 19th century, walked from Russia to Paris. Paris was just this incredible magnet. So, and you know, I’d like to, it’s like New York was in the 20th century. And if you could make it in Paris in the 19th century, you could make it anywhere. And so this ambitious young man, he arrived in Paris, he studied, he got some help from the composer Fromental Halévy, and he entered the Conservatoire. But he was always a rule breaker.

This was not for him. And he soon left it. And he actually started his career as a virtuoso cellist. And then he began to make a bit of extra money by writing incidental music for the theatre. And his big break came with the first Paris World Exhibition. We’ll see, for both Manet and Offenbach, these world exhibitions were really very important events in their careers. First ever world exhibition, as I’ve mentioned several times, London, 1851, the Crystal Palace. And then Albert died, and the Brits kind of lost interest in it. And it was the French who really took up the idea.

I mean, they wanted to assert Paris, not London, as the capital of the civilised world. And presenting these world exhibitions pretty well every decade was a means of doing that. So this is 1855. This is the opening ceremony for the World Exhibition. Now, Offenbach, as well as a composer of genius, had a very entrepreneurial streak in his character. And he thought, “Aha, World Exhibition. There are going to be millions of people attracted to Paris. Yes, they’ll be at the Exhibition during the day, but what are they going to do in the evening? They’ll need entertaining.”

So, very hastily, he managed to construct a small theatre in the area to the west of the centre of Paris, near the Champs-Elysées, which was where the exhibitions took place. And very rapidly, he put together everything, really. He was in charge of everything. He had to write the music, of course, he had to get hold of costumes, sets, performers, and so on. He had to arrange absolutely everything. And indeed, it was a tremendous success and he made lots of money.

And it was such a success, and there was a continuing demand for the kind of entertainment that he offered, that at the end of the year, when the Exhibition closed, he moved back into Paris, and he took this theatre, which still exists. It’s the Bouffes-Parisiens, a tiny little theatre. And he continued to present these operettas. They were short one-act operettas. This is a caricature of what the audience looked like. Very different from the kind of audience who would be going to the nearby Paris Opera House.

That would’ve been a five-minute walk from the Bouffes-Parisiens. In this, you see it’s a rather noisy, rowdy audience, definitely out to have a good time. You can see a caricature of Offenbach. It’s interesting, Offenbach must have been one of the most caricatured composers of the 19th century. And you could make an interesting analogy with Disraeli, who’s also, he was probably the most caricatured British politician of the same period. And in both cases, the caricatures always have a slight, they really, really emphasise the Semitic features of both.

But not, I would say, in either case, in a hateful way. I think the caricatures of both Disraeli in England and Offenbach in France, are by and large affectionate caricatures. So his first tremendous success in the winter of 1855 in the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens was a short piece called “Ba-ta-clan.” Has a kind of surreal humour. The story is of five French people in China, all pretending to be Chinese. There’s a wonderful moment later in the operetta, when they all discover that they’re actually French. There’s a kind of wonderful nonsensical ensemble, you know,

♪ Je suis français ♪ ♪ Il est français ♪ ♪ Nous sommes français ♪

and so on, and so on, and so on.

But here, this is from “Ba-ta-clan” with these fake Chinese people. And again, you can see a caricature of Offenbach on the right-hand side. And I’m going to play you a chorus in fake Chinese. Of course, there are no real Chinese words. They’re just sounds. And it was a little, it’s not a chorus, it’s an ensemble. But one of the first points I want to make about Offenbach, I mean, he’s the funniest composer. People genuinely laugh in good Offenbach performances.

And he shares something, I think, the only other composer, I think, who has this is possibly Rossini, sometimes maybe Mozart, that the actual sounds are funny. He can squeeze humour just out of sounds. And I’m going to demonstrate this with my first excerpt.

♪ Music plays ♪

Another thing that Offenbach and Manet share is a kind of ambiguous attitude towards tradition and the past. That they, both of them, make use of tradition, but both of them can be outrageously irreverent in their parodies. And in the same piece, “Ba-ta-clan,” towards the end, there’s a big battle. And Offenbach uses the same hymn tune of the most famous hymn tune written by Martin Luther, which is “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,” which was of course used by Bach, and it’s used by Mendelssohn in the “Reformation Symphony.”

And it’s used by Meyerbeer in the final act of “Les Huguenots,” when the Parisian Protestants are slaughtered, mown down by the Catholics, and they all die singing this solemn tune, “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.” So, oof, he’s being quite risqué, Offenbach, by doing a mock battle scene, with more of these kind of funny noises in between, And the characters singing the tune of “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.”

♪ Music plays ♪

In the earlier part, from 1855 until 1858, he’s producing these very short one-act operettas with a very limited cast. And the reason for this was French red tape and regulation. We all know that the French love regulation, and this is something that goes right back to Louis XIV, in the 17th century, and Colbert. And of course, very, very important for Napoleon. Think the Code Napoleon. Everything has to be codified, everything has to be regularised. It’s still a somewhat irritating feature, I can tell you, of French life, although it has its good points, too. And so there were all sorts of rules, that, apart from, you know, there were different types of opera that had to be a certain length, and had a certain number of acts.

And a musical play or an operetta was not allowed to be more than one act, and you couldn’t have more than a certain number of people on the stage at a certain time. And in the late 1850s, this regulation was undone. And in 1858, for the first time, Offenbach was able to write a full-length operetta, with as many people on the stage as he wanted. And the result was his first great masterpiece, “Orpheus in the Underworld,” “Orphée aux Enfers.” Such an amazing, ebullient, incredible score. And again, completely outrageous. It’s sort of blasphemous in so many different ways.

First, and of course in France as well, there’s this reverence for the classical world, for classical education, classical mythology. Think of all those artists at the Salon, even if their pictures were sleazy and naughty, but they were painting Venuses, they’re painting Greek gods, they’re painting Roman history, and taking it very, very seriously. So here in “Orpheus in the Underworld,” Offenbach and his librettist set everything on its head. Everything is sort of, all the traditions, in a way, are undermined.

So here we have the goddess Diana. Diana is the goddess of chastity. And the most famous story concerning Diana is with Actaeon. He was a poor bloke who was out in the woods, and by mistake happened to see her bathing without her clothes on. And he comes to a very bad end. She turns him into a stag, and he’s torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. So it’s a horrible story. But in this version, actually, Diana is having a secret love affair with Actaeon. And so when he disappears, she’s actually very upset. And this is what she’s singing about in this. Notice that there’re lively galloping rhythms, because she’s a huntress.

The painting you see here is by Renoir. It’s an early painting by Renoir, which shows the goddess Diana. But like Offenbach, like Offenbach’s goddess, Renoir’s goddess is a very real Parisian woman without her clothes on. She’s hardly a Greek goddess. And she was actually painted, of course, from his girlfriend at the time.

♪ Music plays ♪

Offenbach was a kind of court jester, and he could get away with things that nobody else could get away with, with his humour and his charm and his wonderful tunes. And so people knew when they went to “Orpheus in the Underworld,” that he wasn’t just taking the mickey out of the classical world and the classical tradition. He was also aiming potshots at the Emperor Louis-Napoleon himself. Everybody recognised that the character of Jupiter in “Orpheus in the Underworld” was based on Louis-Napoleon, who was, of course, very famous for his numerous infidelities.

In the middle, we have one of his mistresses, who I’ve mentioned before in a couple of lectures, the very interesting Comtesse de Castiglione, who was sent by the Prime Minister of Savoy as a kind of secret weapon to seduce the French Emperor, and she succeeded brilliantly. And on the right-hand side is the Duc de Morny, who was the half-brother, the illegitimate half-brother of Louis-Napoleon. Very brilliant man. He was effectively the prime minister, and clever, and many people think that if he hadn’t died unexpectedly, the Second Empire would have survived, that Louis-Napoleon wouldn’t have fallen into the clutches of Bismarck.

But unfortunately, he came to, I suppose, a very Parisian end. They think he died of an overdose of aphrodisiacs. But he was a great friend and patron and protector of Offenbach. So I’m going to play you a scene from Act Two of “Orpheus in the Underworld.” As you know, in Greek mythology, Jupiter has this very convenient ability to transform himself into whatever animal he wants to be, a swan or, you know, a bull or whatever, or any form, in order to seduce mortal women. So in this version, Eurydice has been kidnapped by Pluto, and he’s kept her down in the Underworld. And Jupiter thinks, “Mm, I’ll have some of that.”

So he transforms himself into a fly, and he gets through the keyhole and he seduces Eurydice in the form of a giant fly. And this is the duet of seduction, where they’re both having, quite literally, a little zizz together.

♪ Music plays ♪

And the most famous piece, of course, which you all know, is the “Galop Infernal,” the climax of the last act, the famous can-can, which has become so synonymous with the pleasures of Paris. You know, in any American movie, if they want to tell you you’re in Paris, they’re likely to play this music. And it is such exuberant music. It’s irresistible. I remember going with some of my students once, I was on a field trip to Amsterdam, and some student said to me, “Oh, let’s go to a nightclub. We can’t be in Amsterdam without going to a nightclub.”

So we went into, it was probably a bit early, we went to a nightclub, and it was funereal. You know, people were sitting around, looking like they all wanted to slash their wrists. And there was this sort of heavy rock in the background. It was kind of depressing and awful. And then somebody had the bright idea of going to the jukebox, or whatever it was, and putting on this music. And suddenly the whole place exploded, and people were literally dancing on tables. And that’s what this music does to you.

♪ Music plays ♪

We’ll get more of that later. So back to Manet. That was 1858. Five years later, there is the famous Salon des Refusés, when Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l'Herbe” and Whistler’s “Symphony in White, No. 1” and many other paintings were rejected from the official Salon. There was such a fuss that the Emperor decreed that there should be a special salon of refused pictures. And the most notorious picture of all was this. And it’s a kind of symbolic starting point for modern art. When I studied, I think I told you this before, when I was a student at the Courtauld Institute, the course on modern art that I took started in 1863. And it’s because of the Salon des Refusés, and because of this picture.

So this picture was, it was outrageous in many ways that Offenbach is outrageous. Of course, the subject is actually a quite traditional one, as the composition, you can see, is actually borrowed from that most revered of classical artists, Raphael. You can see on the right-hand side of the print of the Raphael, the posing of the figures is the same as with Manet. And also you can see a majolica plate on the right-hand side. Same composition of three figures. But like Offenbach, Manet has updated this Old Master subject. He’s turned it into something modern. And it was the same with this picture, actually painted in 1863, but not exhibited till 1865.

Perhaps his most scandalous and outrageous picture, “Olympia,” ‘cause “Olympia” makes it sound vaguely classical, but actually it shows a modern French prostitute. And when you stand in front of this picture, you are her customer, and you have just arrived, and you’ve bought her a bunch of flowers, which are still in their paper wrapping. Again, it’s a sort of updated, slightly parodistic version of a very famous Old Master, the Titian “Venus of Urbino.” And that’s the most piquant detail. The most naughty detail, really, is the transformation of the little sleeping puppy into this very wary, challenging-looking black cat, which is, you’re fixed with the stare, both of Olympia herself, and that of the cat.

And the cat, also, this is a very Offenbachian detail, it had rather scurrilous connotations. “Chat” in French, I checked this with my friends at my favourite restaurant the other day. I said, “Does 'chatte’ still have the same meaning that it had for Manet in the 19th century?” And they said, “Yes it does.” And the vague equivalent would be the word in American slang, “pussy,” for the female sex. And this is some, it was something that, a joke I suppose, that continues in French art to the end of the century.

This is Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster for May Belfort. And she was actually an English performer who had a brief vogue in Paris. And I suppose she pandered to all the worst French prejudices about English prudishness and hypocrisy. She came on stage dressed as a little English schoolgirl in her nightdress, and holding, I presume it was a stuffed cat rather than a real one. And singing a song in English, in a little piping, little girl’s voice. It’s actually a song that my granny used to sing to me when I was a child. But I’m sure she didn’t understand the connotations it would have had for a Parisian audience in the 1890s.

And the words go,

♪ Daddy won’t buy me a bow-wow, a bow-wow ♪ ♪ I’ve got a little cat ♪ ♪ I’m very fond of that ♪

And of course the entire audience was chortling with laughter at this. This is the Théâtre des Variétés, built in 1808. As you can see, when it was first built, it sort of towers over the buildings around it. Now it looks tiny, next to all the surrounding buildings. And Offenbach took over this theatre in the 1860s. I very often do walks in this area. It’s a wonderful area to walk around. It’s the area of the Passage in Paris. And I always, I never made anybody actually do it, but I always say to my group, “Well, you know, now we’re in front of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. we should all get down and kiss the pavement. We should kneel in front of this building.”

‘Cause not only was it the theatre where Offenbach presented his greatest masterpieces, it had such an important history. It has such an important role in the history of French theatre. Sarah Bernhardt had many of her greatest successes also in this theatre. Here is the interior. It’s, again, it’s quite small. And unchanged. And 1864, probably Offenbach’s greatest masterpiece is “La Belle Hélène.” And it brought together a team that continued until 1869.

These five years, Offenbach produced his greatest masterpieces. And the team consisted, obviously Offenbach himself, who wrote the music. On the left is Degas’s portrait of Ludovic Halévy. He was a member of the very important Parisian Jewish dynasty that included the composer Fromental Halévy. And he was, until the Dreyfus Affair, he was Degas’s closest friend. And on the right you can see Henri Meilhac. So Henri Meilhac, Meilhac and Halévy were a team. They also wrote, I mean, they’re amongst the most important librettists in the history of opera, because they also wrote the libretto for Bizet’s “Carmen.”

Meilhac wrote the libretto for Massenet’s “Manon.” And Strauss’s “Fledermaus” is also based on the play by Henri Meilhac. And so the fourth member of the team was Hortense Schneider, who you see in the middle, as Helen of Troy. And she was a nice Jewish girl from Bordeaux. She was the daughter of a tailor. But I’m sorry to tell you that even nice Jewish girls sometimes go to the bad. But as Saint-Saëns said, girls who’ve gone to the bad are not without their charms. And she certainly was not without charms.

She was for a while, I suppose, the top, what you call, grande horizontale in Paris. She was a great courtesan. She was a wonderful performer on stage, and presumably offstage as well. The trouble with her was that it was quite hard for Offenbach to persuade her to get out of bed in the morning, because she could, her earnings in bed were a great deal more than her earnings turning up for rehearsals and performing on stage. But she had all Paris at her feet. Everybody was in love with her.

So again, the “La Belle Hélène,” I’ve just seen a wonderful semi-staged performance here in Paris, about two weeks ago. A fantastic score. It’s bubbling like a glass of champagne. It’s full of gorgeous tunes. And again, it’s a very outrageous parody of Greek mythology. And so here is the famous “Judgement of Paris,” painted so often by Old Master painters, Rubens here at the top, as described by the shepherd Paris himself in Offenbach’s “Belle Hélène”.

♪ Music plays ♪

The peak year of Offenbach’s career, and I would say actually, pretty well of Manet’s career too, is 1867, which was the next great Parisian World Exhibition. Manet took a leaf out of the book of Courbet in 1855. Courbet was the first artist ever in Paris to set up his own one-man exhibition, which he had outside, just outside the area of the official Exhibition. And Manet did the same in 1867. And he took the opportunity to re-exhibit the “Olympia” and present new pictures like the “Femme au Perroquet” that you see on the right-hand side.

And Offenbach, as I said, he’d got a very entrepreneurial side to him, and he really pulled out all the stops to take full advantage of the Paris World Exhibition of 1867. At one point in that year, there were five theatres simultaneously playing different works by Offenbach. The first was “La Vie Parisienne,” which actually was presented in November '66, and it ran through the year 1867. And it was meant to hold up a mirror to all the pleasure seekers coming to Paris for the World Exhibition.

So it’s a modern-life operetta. And it actually begins, as we’ll see in a minute, at a railway station, with all the international visitors arriving in Paris. On the right-hand side, you see Offenbach’s mistress at the time, Zulma Bouffar, who, she looks rather plain in this photograph, but she was considered very sexy and very charming. And she plays the jolly, the pretty glovemaker in the performance. So as I said, the first scene is in a railway station. You have people coming from all over the world. Railway stations, of course, very much cutting-edge. Really, that’s the symbol of modernity at the time, very interesting to Impressionist painters.

This is Saint-Lazare, painted by Monet. And the insert is Manet, a woman and her daughter just outside the station, looking at the railway tracks. And in the first scene we have a man of the world, an elegant dandy, who wants to have an affair with an aristocratic, or an elegant lady, 'cause he’s tired of paying huge sums of money to a grande horizontale who treats him very badly. And her name in the operetta is Métella. That’s also a very, very rude pun. I’m not sure I’m going to explain it to you. Métella, well, you can look “mettez,” you can look it up, and find out for yourself what the double meaning of that name is.

But so in the first scene, there’s this man, he’s pretending to be a guide, and he meets a Swedish baron and a baroness. And he says, I always say this to my visitors, , “I’m going to be your guide in the splendid city.” And he asks them what they want to do. And the Baron says, “I want to meet chorus girls and actresses and courtesans.” Like, this is Manet’s painting of a courtesan, “Nana.” “And I want to go to naughty places where rude songs will be sung, and you can pick up girls.”

There’s Degas on the left-hand side. And the Baroness, she says, well, she wants to shop of course, but she says she wants to see Adelina Patti at the opera, singing “Don Pasquale.” And there you have a little photograph of Adelina Patti. So here is the trio of the tourist guide from “La Vie Parisienne.”

♪ Music plays ♪

So the biggest success of 1867 was an operetta called “La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein,” “The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein.” And the success was an enormous personal success for Hortense Schneider. Here you see her as the Grand Duchess, and critics just couldn’t find the words to describe how wonderful she was in this role. They said it’s impossible to describe her singing, it’s beyond description. And that every single man in the audience felt personally seduced by her.

Well, there are two singers on record, 'cause we have no records, sadly, of Hortense Schneider. She died before recording. Well, no, she was retired before recording was invented. I’m going to play you two singers, who, for me, have qualities that I think she must have had. And the first is the great operetta star, musical star Yvonne Printemps. And she, in fact, played the role of Hortense Schneider in a movie of the 1940s called “La Valse de Paris.” And if you can get hold of it, I strongly recommended it. And you can see bits of it on YouTube.

And so here she is, singing a song where the Grand Duchess has noticed a handsome young soldier, and she wants him in her bed. And she makes that very, very clear to him. So, Yvonne Printemps singing this, I remember one critic talking about this and saying that you couldn’t notate what she’s singing. You couldn’t write down the notes. Well, partly 'cause she’s never on the note, she’s going up to it or she’s coming off of it, or she’s all over the place. And Colette, the great French writer, she said about Yvonne Printemps, “She doesn’t sing. She breathes melodiously.” I think that’s a wonderful description of what she does in this piece.

♪ Music plays ♪

She conquered not just Paris, but most of the crowned heads and heirs to the thrones of the Western world, and not just the Western world, the Shah of Persia, 'cause they were all in Paris for the World Exhibition. And they all walked down this little passageway on the left-hand side, where I always take my groups, the Passage des Panoramas. And they turned left, as you can see, where it says “Entrée des Artistes.” And they were entertained by Madame Schneider in her loge.

Here you see it on the right-hand side. And then she invited them back to her place. Now, this whole area, of course, is the area of the Passage, these passageways. And she gained the rather scurrilous nickname of Le Passage des Princes. There was a natural passageway called the Passage des Princes, but it means “the passageway of princes.” So they all went back to her apartment, and a spurned angry lover took the apartment opposite hers. And when the King of Sweden, or the Crown Prince of Prussia, or the Prince of Wales arrived to visit Hortense Schneider, this angry man would unfold the relevant flag of his country to embarrass him as he went in.

Now, this top right shows you the dismantling of the World Exhibition of 1867. And in 1868, the great collaboration of this brilliant four people, Halévy, Meilhac, Schneider, and Offenbach, came to an end with one final masterpiece, “La Périchole.” And this is where I’m going to play you the other singer who I think, for me, has qualities that sound like the ones critics described of the great Hortense Schneider.

This is a Russian singer called Claudia Novikova. And she is singing a song, she’s a poor street singer in Peru, and she’s starving, and she has agreed to sell her body for a good meal. And at this point she’s had a fantastic meal, a really, really good meal, and she hasn’t yet had to pay the price. And I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear, she never actually does pay the price in the operetta.

But so you’ll hear what a good meal it has been in this performance. Now, it’s sung in Russian, and some of you, we have Russian speakers in the audience, so you’ll be at an advantage. But she’s such a communicator that I don’t really think you need to actually understand the individual words to know what she’s on about.

♪ Music plays ♪

And when I was a child, I remember somebody saying to me, “It’s better to Bach often than to Offenbach.” It’s the sort of thing that sticks in the memory of a child. But I want both, often. In fact, if I was on a desert island, and I was just restricted to the music of two composers, I’d be very happy with Bach and Offenbach. 'Cause I reckon, between the two of them, you really, as the American say, you’ve got your bases covered. There’s every aspect of human experience is covered by one or other, or both.

Now, I want to finish by telling you a story about this man. This is Manuel Rosenthal. Now, how many of these lectures have I done? It’s well over 150 since I started lecturing for Wendy. And if there’s one thing I could have done in all these lectures to really make you happier and to improve your lives, it’s what I’m going to tell you now, is that you should really buy a CD, it’s on the label of Naxos, you’ve got the details, Judy sent them to you, of a piece called “Gaîté Parisienne.”

And it’s the score, I mean, I’m never without it. I have copies of it in Paris and London, and I have it on my computer, and it’s my feel-good music, and if I really need cheering up, it always works for me. And it had an amazing genesis. It was a score commissioned by the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo in 1938 by the great Russian dancer, Léonide Massine, who you see on the right-hand side. And he wanted Manuel Rosenthal, who was a minor composer, charming minor composer, favourite pupil of Maurice Ravel, protégé of Ravel. And he commissioned him to put together a ballet score entirely from musical material composed by Offenbach.

He had to weave it together into a continuous score, and he had to orchestrate it. And when it was finished, Rosenthal showed it to Massine. Massine inexplicably didn’t like it, and rejected it. And in this case, the deus ex machina, the person who saved the situation, oddly enough, was Igor Stravinsky, because Rosenthal showed it to him. Stravinsky, who you probably know was, you know, virulently anti-Semitic, and not really a very warm, loving person towards other composers anyway, loved the score and said, “Look, you can’t reject this, it’s a masterpiece.”

So Massine put it on in 1938, and it was an instant huge, huge success. And the ballet has been in the repertoire, you know, of most ballet companies ever since. And the score is of course a standard concert piece. And it should have been a very happy ending for Rosenthal. I mean, he should have been assured of wealth and security for the rest of his life. But unfortunately, Adolf Hitler had other ideas. And of course, France was invaded in 1940. Rosenthal didn’t get out, I think probably because of his aged mother.

And in that terrible exodus from Paris, described by Irène Némirovsky in “Suite Française,” his mother, who was by that time a very old woman, as I said earlier on, she had actually walked from Russia to Paris, she was one of those people who died in the chaos of the exit from Paris. And he spent the rest of the war in penury and hiding, while his score was going from strength to strength around the world. It was filmed twice in America. I mean, I hope that the royalties were really piling up in the bank for him, for the day when he could claim them at the end of the Second World War.

So he himself recorded the piece, or, conducted the piece on record three times. With the last version, he was 94 when he conducted. I’m going to play you two excerpts from this recording. And it’s such, well, the lyrical bits I’m going to play you, start up with a lyrical bit. It’s so warmhearted, it’s so relaxed, it’s so elegant, so straightaway when I hear this, I’m already in a good mood.

♪ Music plays ♪

And of course, I can’t finish a talk on Offenbach and Manet in any other way than showing you Manet’s final masterpiece, his final depiction of modern life in Paris, and this very famous music by Offenbach, conducted by the 94 year old Manuel Rosenthal.

♪ Music plays ♪

So I think this is where I’m going to check into our, is it Chat or is it? I’m going to get this right.

• [Moderator] It’s the Q & A, Patrick.

Q&A and Comments

• Good, yes. Good. All right. “Not just Parisians, New Yorkers, but also Londoners. Never lived anywhere else, though much travel. I’ve never thought of myself as English or British.” Yeah, I, yes, of course, I think, I don’t think of myself as English really, but I do think of myself as a Londoner. Totally agree with you, Suzanne.

“A dog and a cat arrive at the Albert Hall in full evening dress, and ask at the till for two tickets for the concert. 'Who do you think you are?’ said the sales clerk. ‘This is for humans, not dogs.’ ‘Don’t you know?’ replied the dog. ‘I’m Offenbach, and this is Debussy.’ Ha ha.” Thank you.

Q: “This depicts Jews with large noses. Was that accepted?” A: Yes, I’m afraid it was. But it was, as I said, because of what’s happened since, obviously we are very, very sensitive about these things. But I think at the time, ask Trudy what she thinks about all the caricatures of Disraeli, whether she thinks there was a hostile intent. I think mostly there wasn’t.

Yes, Offenbach was the son of a cantor. That’s right.

“What was the relationship between…” Toulouse-Lautrec was quite younger. Toulouse-Lautrec was a younger generation. He’s 1890s, and Offenbach had died in the early 1880s. So they didn’t come across one another. But I think Lautrec has very much of the same spirit. Certainly there’s this kind of spiritual connection.

“Name of this piece?” I don’t know which piece. Perhaps it was “Ba-ta-clan.” That was the first piece I played.

Q: “What was Jupiter in the other picture, as a fly?” A: Well, I showed two pictures. One was the original production of 1858, and the other one was a recent Parisian production. I think those are both meant to be flies.

Yes, I know, there was a very good, there was of course a very funny Orpheus production at the ENO, wasn’t there, with sets by Scarfe, and with the character of the Public Opinion that everybody’s terrified of, was a caricature of Margaret Thatcher.

Q: “Are the French as daft over Offenbach as the English with G & S?” A: You know, it’s so rare to find good productions. I was very happy to see, at least musically, the production I heard the other day was a good one. It’s a style which has largely been lost. But I’d say the same is probably true of G & S, too. And probably G & S is more alive and strong in Canada, I would say, than in Britain.

“Actually the word for ‘pussy’ is ‘chatte,’ not ‘chat.’” You’re quite right, yes. With two Ts and an E. Yeah. Yeah. No, they did actually. They did tell me that the other day.

“When were his operettas turned into…” Well, no he wasn’t. Well, he wrote ballets. He, of course, there are a number of ballets that he wrote the music for. But Manuel Rosenthal, of course, he was long dead by that time. No he didn’t. Offenbach did not write his own lyrics. And he worked with many different lyricists. But the great masterpieces were the team of Halévy and Meilhac.

“It’s not reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan. They’re reminiscent of him.” They were influenced by him, as you say. Yes.

Q: “How did prostitutes prevent themselves becoming pregnant?” A: Yes, it’s, ‘cause everything was so sort of secretive. I mean, there were condoms, I mean, going right back to the 18th century. So certainly I imagine some used condoms.

I’m not a, I wish I were a singer. I don’t, I’m definitely a listener.

“Did Manet…” No, he, Hortense Schneider, there were several different grandes horizontales. Of course, Nana is a composite character. I mean, her bed is actually a direct, Nana’s bed is a direct description of the bed of a courtesan called Valtesse de La Bigne. And she was very upset, because she was actually a very sophisticated, cultivated woman. Obviously, Nana is a rather crude character. So, no. I think, different. Not Hortense Schneider, I don’t think, but various different courtesans, elements of their characters went into Nana.

Q: “How did Offenbach finance his first productions before he hit it big?” A: As I said, he was very entrepreneurial. My guess is he just took the risk and borrowed the money.

Someone saying that, Ron saying he’s always, “Odd that the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées is not on the Champs-Elysées.” That is true. Very beautiful theatre. If you get a chance, do go and see things there.

“Métella. Matelas. Mattress.” Yeah, no, I don’t, actually that wasn’t. Maybe, that’s another possible meaning of it. Mettez-là, it’s “mettez” is “put.” It’s really “put it in, put it there.” But maybe “matelas” was also intended as a…

“Tales of Hoffmann.” Yes, it’s his greatest masterpiece. Well, actually I’m not sure it is. It is a masterpiece. It’s not really relevant to my theme today, which was really artists of modern life.

Q: “Was the lightness of the music and the light attitude to sexuality reflective of the times?” A: Yes and no. It’s reflective of a certain aspect of Parisian life at the time. But as you know, the 19th century was actually very, very repressive sexually.

I like that. “Sign on the music store door: Bach at 1:00 PM, Offenbach sooner.”

“Title?” I’m not sure what, you say, when you ask me these questions, “Title, please?” 'Cause I don’t know what you’re referring to. The “sh,” the “sh,” I can’t remember, actually, whether I put on the list for you this time either. I think the titles and the dates of the premieres should be on the list. And.

Thank you all for your very nice comments, and I hope Offenbach has made your day. He makes so many days for me. I listen to him constantly.

I don’t think the lady with the parrot is, Victorine Meurent is the model for the nude. And the lady with the parrot actually has a very different face. So I don’t think it’s the same model.

I’d love to do a whole talk on “Tales of Hoffmann.” It’s a piece I really love. But as I said, it didn’t really fit into the theme of tonight’s talk.

“Sue Schneider”? Yes, yes, maybe you are a descendant. Or, actually I’m not sure. It’s really a sad story. Hortense Schneider had one son who was very, very handicapped. So I don’t think she had any descendants beyond him. She was utterly, utterly devoted to her son, and eventually gave up her career to look after him.

How could I leave out “Tales of Hoffmann”? For the same reason that I’ve just said, that it didn’t really fit into the theme of my lecture. Could be another lecture. Let me see.

“Lucky you to live in Paris in 1964.” I came to Paris for the first time in 1963, which I remember.

Somebody saying they remember the production with the character of Margaret Thatcher. “The audience roared with approval.” Yes. Yes. I wonder if there’s any film with that. I loved it at the time.

The title of the CD is, well, it’s on, all the details of that CD are on the list that you were sent. It’s on the label of Naxos, and the piece is “Gaîté Parisienne.”

Somebody saying that, oh, in 2019, and yeah, no, I didn’t know that they’d done it.

Right. Good. I think that’s probably it. Thank you all very, very much.

Next time I’m going to, lots have been asking about all this stuff behind me. So my next talk is actually going to be, not, I’ve taken the opportunity, I want to tell you really how to build up a collection, an art collection, with a very modest income. Mine has been modest through most of my life. I still managed to build up a very nice collection, and I want to give you lots of tips about shopping in Paris. So that will be the theme of my next lecture.

So I think that’s it, everybody. And, see you. I’ll be talking to you from London on Wednesday.