Offenbach's - Can Can - Double Bass Solo

#CanCan#TESEO#DoubleBass
Francesco Tesei plays Jacques Offenbach's Can Can.
Offenbach born Jacob (Cologne, June 20, 1819 - Paris, October 5, 1880) was a naturalized French German composer and cellist.

He is considered the father of operetta. He was also one of the most influential composers of popular music in nineteenth-century Europe.

In 1833 Jacob's father took him to Paris and had him admitted as a cello student to the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris. Financial difficulties forced Jacob to leave his studies at the end of 1834. After some odd jobs, in 1837 he found a place as cellist in the orchestra of the Opéra-Comique. He soon became known as an instrument virtuoso, appearing alongside famous pianists such as Anton Rubinstein, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and more often with Flotow. In 1844 he married Herminie d'Alcain; in 1848 he moved to Germany to escape the revolutionary violence in France, where he will return shortly after.

In 1850 he became conductor at the Théâtre Français, in which he found hostility regarding his musical production of him. Then he rented, in the Expo season, a small theater in the Champs-Élysées, to which he gave the name of Bouffes Parisiens, and the following winter he took a larger theater in rue Monsigny / Passage Choiseul, where he began a career of great success for the representation of his operettas. At the beginning, the musician limited himself to composing works in one act with a few singers, only starting from 1858 did he put an end to this limitation, composing his first large opera, Orpheus in hell.

From 1855 to 1861 he directed the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens and from 1873 to 1875 the Théâtre de la Gaîté in Paris. In 1856 he invented the name operetta for his La Rose de Saint-Flour. Offenbach wrote at least 100 "operettas", some of which were very popular then, and continue to be today. The best of these combine political and cultural satire with the wit of the "great work". Among the works for which he is remembered (a catalog of over ninety operettas) are Orpheus in Hell, La bella Elena, La Vie Parisienne, La Grande-duchesse de Gerolstein, Blue Beard and La Périchole.

Offenbach was very attached to his adopted country, and many of his works have a patriotic flavor. But this did not help him when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, as he was qualified by the German press as a traitor, and by the French press as a spy for Bismarck, facts, these, so serious as to induce him to move with his family in Spain. When he returned to Paris after the war, his irreverent operettas by him were successfully received by the public, and marked, in conjunction with political and military events, the end of Napoleon III's Second French Empire from which he had received the Legion of Honor. . Going bankrupt in 1875, the following year he recovered most of his losses on a tour in the USA, where he gave 40 concerts in New York and Philadelphia on the occasion of the Centennial Exhibition of Arts, Manufacture and Products of the Soil and Mining. of Philadelphia (1876).

Offenbach gained further popularity with Madame Favart (1878), a fantastic construction on the life of the French actress Marie-Justine Favart, and La fille du tambour-major, a work of great musical fantasy. Some experts judge his latest work, The Tales of Hoffmann (Les contes d'Hoffmann) (taken from 3 short stories by ETA Hoffmann), his masterpiece, unfinished due to his death in 1880 and completed by his friend Ernest Guiraud and given to the public in 1881.