‘Der mächtigste Tanzmeister des Kaiserreiches’? Offenbach at 200

Abstract

The year 1863 was one of the few in which Jacques Offenbach premièred no major stage work. And while it is true that he contributed music to the comédie by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy entitled Le Brésilien, his public output that year was overshadowed by the establishment by the Académie Française of the Prix Montyon, to be awarded ‘to French authors of works most beneficial for morality and commendable for their elevated and moral utility’.1 Perhaps predictably, the last time the prize was awarded to a work on a subject related to music was in 1948, when it was conferred on Robert Pitrou’sMusiciens romantiques, a book that gave little space to French ‘Romantic’ musicians.2 But in the 1920s, the Prix Montyon was awarded twice to the same author: the music critic Louis Schneider, who received the prize for his biography of JulesMassenet in 1927 and for the first of two books on opérette, his 1923 biography ofOffenbach.3 Schneider’s biography was the