"Salut aux opérettes de M. Jacques Offenbach!" This is how effusively the great Parisian music journal Le Menestrel greeted the newly opened Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens under the direction of the composer Jacques Offenbach in 1855: "Here is the showcase of Mr. Jacques Offenbach's products." Here, on the outskirts of the city at the time, is an ideal location for a new theatre opening - after all, the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens is located directly opposite the main entrance to the World's Fair, with which the French Empire astonishes the world in the summer of 1855. People from all over the world flock to Paris and bring the Emperor Napoleon III, but also the composer Jacques Offenbach, magnificent successes. And this month, cpo offers two more operetta one-acts by Jacques Offenbach, which were also intended for the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens on the Champs-Elysées, and which are presented in historical performance practice by renowned soloists and the Cologne Academy on instruments of the period: Le Violoneux and Le 66. On 31 August 1855, the curtain rises on Le Violoneux, according to its subtitle a "légende bretonne", the libretto penned by Eugène Mestépès and Émile Chevalet. Le Violoneux entertains the World's Fair audience in the best possible way. A young Hortense Schneider enraptured the audience with her innocent performance as Reinette, and only a few years later she became the undisputed queen of operetta, with roles that Offenbach always wrote to fit her perfectly. After the end of the Universal Exhibition, Offenbach's success continued, but now in winter quarters in a hall in the Passage Choiseul, where the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens is still located today. The summer venue, however, remained the house on the Champs-Elysées - and it was there that an "opérette" to a libretto by Philippe Pittaud de Forges and Laurencin with the unusual title Le 66 was premiered on 31 July 1856. Here, too, Offenbach liked to make use of a certain local musical colour. If the tumultuous dance rhythms in Le Violoneux sounded more Breton and peasant than in Brittany, the Tyrolienne in Le 66 refers to the musical ideas that people in 19th century France had "de l'Allemagne" - to paraphrase Madame de Staël. In fact, even pieces as "close to home" as Le Violoneux and Le 66 are permeated by a musical exoticism that had a lasting influence on French music theatre of the 19th century. And it is perhaps exciting in this context that some of the melodies in Le Violoneux, for example, are reminiscent of synagogue chants from the environment of the Cologne cantor Isaak Offenbach, the composer's father. But it was probably Gioacchino Rossini who paid the inventor of the operetta perhaps the greatest compliment in this sense - for him Offenbach was simply the "Mozart of the Champs-Elysées".
