Fantaisie facile sur l’Opéra de Rossini “Le Barbier de Séville”

Jacques Offenbach, son of a Jewish cantor, was born in Cologne on 20.6.1819; he died in Paris on 5.10.1880. In 1833 his father took his fourteen-year-old son to the Paris Conservatoire, where the director Luigi Cherubini was impressed by his cello playing and accepted him as a student, even though foreign candidates were not normally admitted there. Offenbach then changed his first name ‘Jacob’ to ‘Jacques’. From 1835 he worked as a cellist at the Paris Opéra comique, making ends meet by teaching and performing. From 1850 to 1855 he was Director of Music at the Théâtre Français. He then found his own theatre to rent in Paris and put on highly successful productions of his operetta Orpheus in the Underworld (1858) and other stage works. During his lifetime he had twenty cello compositions published by Schott, among them the tutorial method Cours Méthodique de Duos pour deux Violoncelles op. 49 and various operatic arrangements for cello and piano based on themes by Bellini, Donizetti, Mozart and others - including this Fantaisie facile sur l’Opéra de Rossini: Le Barbier de Seville op. 71 in 1856 (plate no. 11461).