Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (review)

For nearly half a century, a new Offenbach biography has appeared almost every two or three years. Although the centenary of the composer's death in 1980 (which saw the publication of no fewer than four books, by Rissin, Gammond, Faris, and Harding) was followed by a relatively fallow period, the 1990s resumed where the 1970s had left off, with new biographies in 1992 (Dufresne), 1994 (Pourvoyeur), 1998 (Dufresne), and 2000 (Yon). (See David Rissin, Offenbach, ou Le Rire en musique (Paris, 1980); Peter Gammond, Offenbach: His Life and Times (Tunbridge Wells, 1980); Alexander Faris, Jacques Offenbach (London, 1980); James Harding, Jacques Offenbach: A Biography (London and New York, 1980); Claude Dufresne, Jacques Offenbach ou La Gaîté Parisienne (Paris, 1992); Robert Pourvoyeur, Offenbach (Paris, 1994); Dufresne, Offenbach, ou La Joie de Vivre (Paris, 1998); Jean-Claude Yon, Jacques Offenbach (Paris, 2000)). The republication in 2002 of the original English translation of Siegfried Kracauer's Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit—first published as long ago as 1937—requires a certain amount of explanation that its intrinsic qualities do not, at first glance, seem to deserve.

Parts of Kracauer's book were published serially in a number of journals in the first six months of 1937 (Basler National-Zeitung, Das neue Tage-Buch, Pariser Tageszeitung, Marianne, Le Figaro, Weltblick, and Les Nouvelles littéraires) and published in German in the same year. It was simultaneously published in French translation as Jacques Offenbach, ou Le Secret du Second Empire, trans. Lucien Astruc with an introduction by Daniel Halévy (Paris, 1937) and in English as Orpheus in Paris: Offenbach and the Paris of his Time, trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher (London, 1937). The following year it was translated into Swedish as Offenbach och hans glada (Stockholm, 1938), and the English translation was published in the USA without the subtitle as Orpheus in Paris (New York, 1938). Kracauer's book not only cornered the market in Offenbach scholarship for twenty years but also left traces throughout the second half of the twentieth century: it was reprinted in German under the title Pariser Leben: Jacques Offenbach und seine Zeit: Eine Gesellschaftsbiographie, in which Halévy's French preface was translated, in 1962, and again in 1964 and 1980. It appeared in Kracauer's collected writings, which were edited in 1976, and the volume of the Schriften dedicated to Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit was reprinted for the East German market in 1980. Italian (1991) and Polish (1992) translations followed, as did a reprint of the 1937 French edition in 1994.

The significance of the publication under review here is slightly different from that of earlier republications and translations. As an important, but perhaps liminal, member of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, Kracauer has been the subject of a substantial re-evaluation in the last decade or so. Entire issues of journals dedicated to his work have been published (Text + Kritik, 68 (1980); New German Critique, 54 (1991)), as has a collection of essays (Internationales interdisziplinäres Kracauer-Symposion 1989, ed. Michael Kessler and Thomas Y. Levin, Stauffenburg-Colloquium, 11 (Tübingen, 1990)); a conference dedicated solely to his output that took place in Birmingham as recently as 2002, and numerous studies of his work published in the 1990s, are testimony to his growing significance. To assist with placing Kracauer's book on Offenbach, the original English translation is prefaced by an extract from a recent introduction to Kracauer's work (Gertrud Koch, Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction, trans. Jeremy Gaines (Princeton, 2000), 65-74). This is helpful, certainly, but the extract, taken from a chapter that includes discussion of Kracauer's two novels as the basis for the claim that Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his Time is as much novel and autobiography as the novels themselves, is ripped bleeding from its original context, and Koch's account is difficult to rationalize with Kracauer...