Jacques Offenbach was a French composer and cellist of the Romantic era with German-Jewish descent and one of the originators of the operetta form. He was one of the most influential composers of popular music in Europe in the 19th century, and many of his works remain in the repertory. While his name remains most closely associated with the French operetta and the Second Empire, it is his one fully operatic masterpiece, Les contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), that has become the most frequently performed of Offenbach’s works.
