Familiarity with the famous galop from Orphée aux enfers and the finale of La Vie parisienne
has tended to obscure Offenbach's early career. Failing to see the wood
for the trees, we have all too often forgotten that before creating the
French opéra bouffe, Offenbach was one of the greatest cellists of his
day, and that far from restricting himself to making his Parisian
audiences laugh, he was also an impassioned Romantic gifted with an
astonishing melodic vein. His grand opera Die Rheinnixen, the delicate Fantasio, Les Contes d'Hoffmann
of course, as well as the works included in the present release should
be enough to convince listeners of this claim's validity.
Thanks to his almost fiendish virtuosity, Offenbach was known to his
contemporaries as the "Liszt of the cello". Indeed, he even appeared on
the same concert platform as Liszt, as well as with Anton Rubinstein and
Friedrich von Flotow, both in Paris and in his native Germany. It was
Offenbach, too, who introduced Beethoven's cello sonatas to France. But
above and beyond the pleasure that he took in performing the music of
others, his true passion was composition, and from a very early age he
produced an impressive corpus of works for his favourite instrument,
writing not only many shorter pieces but also countless studies and
fantasias and a number of larger orchestral works, chief among which are
a Danse bohémienne, a Grande Scène espagnole and, above all, the tremendous Concerto militaire, here recorded complete for the first time.
Offenbach himself gave the first performance of the concerto's opening
movement at the Salle Moreau-Sainti in Paris on 24 April 1847 - it is
unclear why the remaining movements were not performed at that time. It
is likely that Offenbach played the work on a number of later occasions,
although the only fully documented performance took place in Cologne on
24 October 1848. The work then fell into obscurity and it was not until
a century later that the composer's grandson, Jacques
Brindejont-Offenbach, unearthed it and entrusted the autograph score of
the opening movement, together with a number of surviving piano
sketches, to the cellist Jean-Max Clément. Clément prepared a new
edition of the score based on these various sources, reserving for
himself the right to perform the piece in the concert hall. He did what
he could to reconstruct the second and third movements, which he
orchestrated on the basis of the original piano sketches, while taking
certain liberties with the material. In particular, he cut a number of
passages in the opening movement that he judged to be too difficult.
In fact, both Clément and Jacques Brindejont-Offenbach were unaware that
autograph copies of the Andante and final movement were lodged in the
family archives, in both cases completed and orchestrated by Offenbach
himself. Admittedly, neither manuscript was meaningfully headed and the
introductions to both movements had been substantially developed and
changed when compared to the piano sketches, so that it is difficult to
detect any connection between the different pieces in the jigsaw without
a detailed study of the sources.
The present recording begins and ends with two works - the rhapsodic overture to Orphée aux enfers (1874) and the "Snowflake Ballet" from Le Voyage dans la lune
(1875) - that both bear witness to one of the most successful periods
in Offenbach's life. By now he had become director of the Théâtre de la
Gaîté, one of the most beautiful halls in Paris, and he finally had at
his disposal a full-size orchestra with a proper pit and a genuine corps
de ballet. He now revised two of his earliest successes - Orphée aux enfers and Geneviève de Brabant
- to take account of these magnificent new surroundings and to offer
his astonished audiences an entirely new type of opera, the opéra-bouffe féerie,
a fairytale light opera in which nothing was too sensational - a work
designed to fill his audiences with a sense of genuine wonderment.
Pictorial poetry and Bacchian euphoria are combined in these snowflakes,
which suffice to prove that the composer had no need of a
pseudo-cancan, of a Gaîté parisienne or of assiduous arrangers to
create orchestral magic. May the present recording contribute to the
revival of an authentic Offenbach. (Jean-Christophe Keck)
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