To Save a Mockingbird

There is something faintly absurd about most operatic revivals. However lovingly a long-forgotten work may be recreated, to contemporary audiences the result usually seems more redolent of old mothballs than Old Master. Yet the brightest hits of the current music season in West Germany are two small relics of 100 years' neglect that have been resurrected by the sophisticated, experimental Hessische Landestheater in industrial Darmstadt. Germany's new discovery: Jacques Offenbach.

Feline Charm. Even in his own day, Offenbach was hardly avantgarde. But to Landestheater Director Gerhard Hering, the offbeat choice of Offenbach has a "secret significance" for Angst-ridden Germany. The "aimless and exaggerated prosperity" of mid-19th century Paris, he explains, "seems to bear certain ominous parallels to the Wirtschaftswunder of today." If Offenbach's exuberant music seems "fresh and enchanting," it is because of the swaggering self-assurance with which France's Second Empire "danced over the volcano."

A German Jew who settled in Paris as a ten-year-old cello prodigy and later studied composition with Cherubini, Offenbach churned out musiquettes galore for his beloved Bouffes-Parisiens. The two works that Darmstadt saw, The Transformed Cat and Daphnis and Chloe, are quintessential Offenbach. One, resembling a Freudian treatment of La Fontaine, tells of a cat's metamorphosis into a woman of feline charm who turns at night into a rooftop mehitabel; the other shows Pan thwarted in a sneaky attempt to teach Chloe the art of love--and ends with a riproaring, garter-snapping cancan. The ideal musiquette combined an ironic exposition of human foibles with a lusty, busty display of wenches who did not earn their keep by dancing. Offenbach, after all, was addressing a culture whose upper class was embarked on a carnival that lasted a whole generation. He had the good sense to refrain from homilies.

Beaming Burghers. Perhaps only a truly melancholy man could generate such frivolity. His melodies are delightful and earthy, but they are also the work of a composer who somewhat pitifully liked to be known as "the Mozart of the Champs-Elysees." In his last years, Offenbach struggled to complete his one entirely serious opera, but when he died in 1880, only the piano score for Hoffmann was finished. He was popular in his lifetime, but he accepted his acclaim with some bitterness. "I am happy to have my small place," he said acidly. "I know I'm not a nightingale, merely a little finch."

Today Offenbach seems more the mockingbird. Even in his early works, disenchantment flickers at the edges of gaiety, and in Germany perhaps it seems the dignifying element of his work. Though Darmstadt re-creates his musiquettes with utter fidelity, the result is sometimes closer to strudel than souffle. The orchestra plays impeccably, but without the elan that Paris gave to Offenbach, and he to it. Though every seat at every performance is filled with beaming burghers, the cancan line has not a single roguish wink for admiring males. Darmstadt is well pleased nonetheless. Landestheater Director Hering said last week that he plans to revive two more Offenbach works each year. At that rate, there'll be cancan for the burghers at least through the year 2000.

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