Laurence Senelick: Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture

Abstract

Toward the end of Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture, Laurence Senelick makes an intriguing attempt to explain the marginal position that Offenbach’s oeuvre occupies in contemporary theater and imagination. In Chapter 13, “Rebirth from the Ruins,” Senelick takes the reader to Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II. There, he discovers Walter Felsenstein, recently arrived from his wartime refuge in Zurich, at work to re-establish opera and musical theater in the ruined city. Improbably, or ironically, Felsenstein’s first Offenbach production in Berlin was Pariser Leben, performed in the gelid Hebbel-Theater, which was operating without heating in December 1945. On this occasion, acting and music were to provide much-needed warmth by offering “a convincing and truthful expression of human feeling” (274). A few years later, Felsenstein, then director of the newly reopened Komische Oper, staged the same work, again in less-than-ideal circumstances. This time, he had a larger group of actors and singers at his disposal, but their competences and singing voices, Senelick tells us, did not exactly fit those required by the work. There were other serious problems as well: theft was endemic in the theater as elsewhere, shortages were the rule, and food was scarce in the city, making the arduous work of rehearsal punishing (276). The Pariser Leben he staged was invitingly idiosyncratic. It “recover[ed] the intimacy between audience and players that had existed in his postwar production at the Hebbel-Theater” (275), but it pushed the envelope of theatrical mimesis in unexpected ways: an Offenbach look-alike led the orchestra, and actors “resort[ed] to lip-synching to offstage or in-the-orchestra-pit vocalizations,” producing an unusual sense of shadowing and dislocation. Amid all this, the opulent life of the Second Empire took on a bygone, ghostly appearance. Offenbach’s work, this time, became an occasion to remember and lament what had been lost.