Jacques Offenbach (20 June 1819, in Cologne – 5 October 1880, in Paris) was a French composer and cellist of the Romantic era and one of the originators of the operetta form. Of German-Jewish descent, 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. Offenbach's numerous operettas, such as Orpheus in the Underworld, and La belle Hélène, were extremely popular in both France and the English-speaking world in the 1850s and 1860s. They combined political and cultural satire with witty grand opera parodies. His popularity waned in the 1870s after the fall of the Second Empire, and he fled France, but during the last years of his life, his popularity rebounded. 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

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