Just as Mozart conjures up the ancien régime, so Offenbach’s wild yet slightly melancholy gaiety conjures up the Second Empire. Napoleon and Eugénie attended the first run of several Offenbach operettas, and from the 1850s until the end his music was heard at every court reception.
The emperor ordered a command performance, Les Deux Aveugles, at the Tuileries to entertain the statesmen attending the Congress of Paris, and Eugénie encored the bolero. However, the empress soon began to disapprove of Offenbach’s operettas, even if she quite enjoyed the music. What she disliked were the ‘immoral’ plots, full of sly jokes about the régime. Her husband laughed at them uproariously, but they offended her Catholic puritanism and Spanish dignity. In 1855 Offenbach met a comic genius, a young civil servant called Ludovic Halévy who, with Henri Meilhac, supplied him with hilarious scripts.
If Eugénie had no objection to Les Dragées du Baptême, celebrating the birth of the Prince Imperial (Halévy did not write the words), she was horrified by Orphée aux Enfers, which came out at the Bouffes-Parisiens in October 1858. The philandering, bacchanalian life led by the gods on Mount Olympus – ‘tired of nectar, ambrosia and virtue’ – was clearly a skit on the Second Empire court, while the lustful Jupiter wore a beard and waxed moustaches just like the emperor. Nor can she have been amused by Pluto, disguised as a fly, seducing Eurydice. Far from being displeased, Napoleon sent the composer a bronze figure inscribed, ‘L’Empéreur à Jacques Offenbach’, saying that he would never forget how much he had enjoyed Orphée aux Enfers. He approved his application for French citizenship, later making him a member of the Légion d’honneur.
Offenbach’s next triumph was not until 1864, with La Belle Hélène. Nothing could have shocked Eugénie more. All about sex, its climax was a seduction scene, while for lewd minds the dream duet sung by Paris and Helen, ‘C’est le ciel qui m’envoie’, verged on pornography. Helen was played by Hortense Schneider, a well-known courtesan as well as a diva. (She had had a son by the late Duc de Gramont-Caderousse, who once made an aquarium by filling a piano with champagne.) When she sang, ‘Tell me, Venus, why do you enjoy making my virtue come cascading down?’, young men in the boxes would yell, ‘Cascade, Hortense, cascade!’ ‘An immense bacchanal, Venus turning the hellish hurdy-gurdy’, grumbled Agamemnon, ‘Pleasure and sensuality reign supreme’ – everyone knew he meant the imperial court. The ludicrous march of the Greek kings echoed the march by Meyerbeer that had been played at Eugénie’s wedding.
The empress failed to see that when the Greeks sang, ‘It can’t go on much longer, you know, it can’t go on much longer’, meaning the Second Empire, they did so to tease, not from disloyalty. Offenbach and his scriptwriters were not being satirical but merely laughing at the government to add to the fun, which Napoleon III understood very well.
The composer’s combination of levity and immorality disgusted her. He always attended the Bouffes-Parisiens escorted by a troop of pretty actresses and rumour said that he slept with them. Ironically, Offenbach was in love with the empress, worshipping her from afar. On the one occasion he met her, presented after a performance at the Bouffes-Parisiens, he lost his nerve and could only babble that he had been born at Cologne, not at Bonn like Beethoven. No one could have been a more loyal subject.
In 1866 La Vie Parisienne poked less fun at the régime than usual, apart from describing Paris as ‘the modern Babylon’, and had a less ‘immoral’ libretto – if one ignored the heroine being a high-class tart or the extra-marital romps of the Swedish baron and his baroness. Had the empress seen it, she would have been outraged by a spectacular revival of Orphée aux Enfers in January 1867 in which the most famous grande horizontale in Paris, Cora Pearl (born Emma Crutch) appeared in pink tights as Cupid. She could not act, mouthing a few lines, but the men loved her legs, while her cockney accent brought the house down – ‘Je souis Kioupiddon’. Everybody in the audience knew that Cora was Plon-Plon’s current mistress and that he had taken an apartment for her next to the theatre.
La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein came out at the Théâtre des Variétés in April 1867 in time for the Exposition Universelle, the Second Empire’s zenith, and was a dazzling success. ‘Gerolstein’ is a mythical German principality ruled by a lovely, capricious Grand Duchess (Hortense Schneider) who adores soldiers. She falls for a simple fusilier whom she immediately promotes to commander-in-chief, only to demote him when he rejects her advances.
Next year La Périchole tried to flatter the empress. It contained a beautiful song with the words ‘He’ll grow up tall because he’s a Spaniard’, alluding to the Prince Imperial’s Spanish mother – but it was sung by Hortense. If the plot was based on a play by Eugénie’s friend Mérimée, its plot about a viceroy who falls in love with a street singer and makes her a marquise reminded rather too many people of their emperor’s private life, as did the ‘cachot de maris recalcitrants’ (a prison for uncontrollable husbands).
When Offenbach’s promotion to a senior grade in the Légion d’honneur was suggested during Eugénie’s regency in 1870, she refused, making the thin excuse that he had been born a German. Her disapproval is understandable, however: he genuinely shocked the nineteenth century. In 1876, when he arrived in the United States for a concert tour, The New York Times commented that La Belle Hélène was ‘simply the sexual instinct expressed in melody…. Priapism is put on a level with music.’
The irony is that the operettas of Jacques Offenbach recapture better than anything else the charm and allure of Eugénie’s empire.