Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture

Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, Massachusetts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His numerous books include the award-winning Gordon Craig's Moscow 'Hamlet' (1982), The Age and Stage of George L. Fox (1988), The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre (2000), and The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance (Cambridge, 2000).

'At long last someone has written a brand new Offenbach book - in English. And what's even better, it's a great book full of historical facts mostly overlooked (or ignored) by the English language operetta world … Laurence Senelick paints a much more 'gritty' and 'sexually charged' picture of the genre and how it started in Paris and Vienna in the 1850s, asking what made operetta so revolutionary - and what made Offenbach so incredibly successful.' Kevin Clarke, The Operetta Research Center

• Introduction; 1. The French connection; 2. Wagner, Nietzsche, and the polemics of opera; 3. Tales from the Vienna stage; 4. Against the Victorian grain; 5. The discovery of America; 6. Caviar with the champagne; 7. Doing the Continental; 8. South of the equator, east of Suez; 9. A Max Reinhardt production; 10. Red stars; 11. French without tears; 12. English as she is spoke; 13. Rebirth from the ruins; 14. Conclusion: taking Offenbach seriously.