Isaac Offenbach

Isaac Offenbach (born around 1779/1781 as Isaak Juda Eberst, Eberscht or Eberstadt in Offenbach am Main ; died April 26, 1850 in Cologne ) was a cantor of the Jewish community in Cologne , poet , composer and father of ten children, including Jacques Offenbach .

Life

Isaak Juda Eberst was born at that time in Offenbach am Main, part of the Isenburg principality (from 1806 to 1816 capital of the sovereign Principality of Isenburg (Rheinbund) ), now part of Hesse . Information on his date of birth vary between October 26, 1779, March 1780, and the year of birth 1781, which is usually officially mentioned. His parents were the patron Jew Juda Eberstadt, a teacher, and his wife Terz (or Terez, Therese); of two siblings, a sister named Sara is proven.

Isaak was trained as a printer in a Jewish printing company and worked there until 1799, in addition to learning synagogue singing and some musical instruments, including the violin . In the following years he was a traveling musician - as " Chasan and Lezan ", ie as synagogue prayer leader and secular minstrel ( Klezmer ) - in various Jewish communities. Around 1802 he came to Deutz on the right bank of the Rhine before Cologne , whose restaurants and entertainment facilities employed many Jewish musicians. Here, where there was - unlike in Cologne - a fairly large Jewish community, he officially settled as a bookbinder , but continued to work as a minstrel and occasionally as a choirboy in the synagogue. In the meantime he was known in Deutz as "the Offenbacher".

In 1806 he married Miriam or Marianne Rindskopf, daughter of a money changer and lottery taker, who was initially against his daughter's connection with a musician, as his daughter Julie Grünewald reported in her memoirs in 1901. The first of the couple's ten children, daughter Therese, was born in 1807.

Presumably since a Napoleonic decree of 1808, which obliged Jews to adopt a fixed surname , the family was called Offenbach. In 1816, Cologne was now Prussian, the family settled in Cologne on the Great Greek Market at Am Krummen Büchel 1. Son Jacob was born there in 1819 as the seventh child. During this time, Isaac Offenbach was - more or less successful and the only one in Cologne - active as a freelance "guitar, flauto, violin and single teacher". He became a member of the Cologne Musikverein, which was founded in 1812, and seems to have had contact with members of the Cologne concert and theater orchestra.

In the course of the 1820s, he was also given a permanent job as a chasan at the Jewish community in Cologne, which was still being established, which is why the family was later able to move into a service apartment at Glockengasse 7 - in the vicinity of the synagogue. Within the community he stubbornly stood up for the reputation (and thus also the remuneration) of his profession as a lead singer. He also acted as a rabbi. The first decades of the 19th century were a time of upheaval - not only politically, but also within the Jewish community, liturgical reforms, enlightenment and possibly too much adaptation to the Christian environment, for example through the use of organs in the liturgy.

Gravestone of Isaac Offenbach in the Jewish cemetery in Cologne-Deutz

Two of the ten children, Marianne and Isaac, died at a very young age. The father took care of the education of the surviving children himself, but also let them attend the Jewish school. Most of all, Isaac personally promoted the musical talents of all of his children. Three of the children - Julius, Isabella and Jakob ("Köbes") - contributed to the family income at an early age by singing, making music and giving concerts in inns and at parties.

When it became clear that Julius and the highly gifted Jakob would not find any further funding opportunities for their musical abilities in Cologne, Isaac personally brought his sons to Paris in 1833. During a three-month stay put it through that Jacob against initial resistance of the high school principal Luigi Cherubini at the Paris Conservatoire as a cello student at the Paris Conservatoire and Julius - as a violin student of - at least briefly Paganini was adopted.

In 1840 the youngest son Michel and Isaac's wife Marianne died. The daughters Netta and Julie stayed in their hometown. He spent a rather lonely and still characterized by low income retirement age in Cologne; Julius and Jakob were only rarely able to visit him from France. After several weeks of illness, Isaac died on April 26, 1850 in Cologne of an intestinal ulcer. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Deutz . The epitaph is bilingual, Hebrew:

"Here is buried: friend R 'Izhak, called Isaac Offenbach, who praised the [...] and delighted with his voice in the Holy Congregation of Cologne about 30 years before he went into his eternal world. He died in good name at the age of seventy, the 15th of Ijar, and was buried on Monday the 17th of the same in the year 5610 of the Little Era . May his soul rejoice in eternal life. ” And in German: “ The best of all fathers, Mr. Isaac Offenbach, rests here for 30 years Cantor zu Cöln, née. 1779, died April 26, 1850. "

Works

Cover sheet of the composition Hagadah or Tale of Israel's Exodus from Egypt

With a few exceptions, Isaac Offenbach began his compositional work around 1820. He wrote a large number of liturgical pieces of music and songs in the Biedermeier style . From the family there is a songbook for household use with compositions by Isaac and the sons Julius and Jakob. The fact that Isaac's works in the shadow of his famous son later received little attention in Cologne and Germany gives the Offenbach Society in Cologne reason to suspect that this was one of the reasons why they did not completely go under during the Nazi era .

Josef Heinzelmann emphasized in a short biography of Isaac Offenbach that his liturgical music testifies to "eclectic skill and memorable invention", his secular compositions from the "diversity of Biedermeier musical culture and assimilation to the German environment."

The musicologist Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller , who has examined an extensive microfilmed collection of manuscripts left behind, hears Offenbach's melodies "unmistakable echoes of the opera music of that time" and "of Christian church music."

The opera director and author Jacobo Kaufmann, who in 1998 wrote an extensive biographical work with a catalog raisonné and numerous copies of Isaac Offenbach's surviving manuscripts, sees the climax of Offenbach's poetic output with the general prayer book . The German translations are "not only exceptionally good", but also offer "a poetic form [...] which is characterized by the clarity of the ideas and which also appears extremely praiseworthy from an educational point of view."

In a review of the Kaufmann biography in the FAZ in 1999, Ellen Kohlhaas wrote : "Offenbach's texts [...] are not poetic masterpieces, but rather functional literature with an enlightenment-educational purpose, but of not inconsiderable cultural historical value." It remains to be investigated to what extent the paternal influence can be found in the musical work of Jacques Offenbach.

Selection of titles

XIV Practice Pieces for the Guitar; (2 booklets)
The carpenter in his workshop; Singspiel, first performed in Deutz in 1811
Esther, Queen of Persia; Purim game, 1833
Haggadah translation, 1838
General prayer book for the Hebrew youth, Hebrew and German; 1839
Humorous poem by a Polish Seforim
Humorous poem by an antiquarian

Sound carrier

Chants from the Synagogue / Chants of the Synagoge, Isaac & Jacques Offenbach. Koch-Schwann 1997. Participants: Moshe Haschel (cantor), Raymond Goldstein (organ, piano), Philharmonic Choir Siegen , Ensemble Cantemus, Herbert Ermert (conductor). Recorded on May 28, 1997 in the Cologne synagogue .

Web links

Commons : Isaac Offenbach - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Entry on the grave of Isaac Offenbach at the Jewish cemetery in Deutz (grave of Isaac Ben-Juda Eberts (also Isaak Juda Eberst, Eberstadt or Eberscht)) in the database " KuLaDig " of the Rhineland Regional Association , accessed on December 12, 2018.

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 7 .
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Isaak Offenbach. Musician, cantor of the Cologne synagogue community . In: Jürgen Wilhelm (Ed.): Two millennia of Jewish art and culture in Cologne . Greven Verlag, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-7743-0397-3 , pp. 224-227 .
^ Christine von Kohl: Jewish Artists and Writers - Your Contribution to Rhenish Cultural Life. From emancipation to exclusion . In: Konrad Schilling (Ed.): Monumenta Judaica. 2000 years of history and culture of the Jews on the Rhine (manual) . 1963, p. 482 .
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d The Jews in public life in Cologne . In: Zvi Asaria (ed.): The Jews in Cologne from the oldest times to the present . 1959, p. 224 .
^ Anton Henseler: Jakob Offenbach . In: Classics of Music . M. Hesse, 1930, p. 447 .
↑ ^a ^b Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 110-119 .
^ Isaac Offenbach ^ Marianne Rindskopf. In: Family book Euregio. Retrieved April 25, 2018 .
↑ ^a ^b Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 32 .
↑ Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken: Offenbach, Jacques . In: Society for Rheinische Geschichtskunde (Hrsg.): Rheinische Lebensbilder . tape 5 . Rheinland-Verlag, 1973, p. 155 .
↑ Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 58 .
↑ ^a ^b ^c Ellen Kohlhaas: The cantor was a prophet . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . No. 54 . Frankfurt am Main March 5, 1999, p. 48 ( faz.net ).
↑ ^a ^b Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 86-88 .
^ ^A ^b Josef Heinzelmann: Offenbach, Isaac . In: New German Biography . tape 19 , 1999, p. 480 ( online version ).
↑ Cologne Offenbach Society (ed.): Isaac Offenbach - Jew, composer and father of Jacques Offenbach . Press release. Cologne April 26, 2018.
↑ Kirsten Serup-Bilfeldt: Offenbach's upscale treasures. Notes and manuscripts from the Offenbach family of musicians from Cologne were discovered in US archives. Deutschlandfunk Kultur, November 18, 2011, accessed on April 26, 2018 .
↑ Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 68 .

personal data
SURNAME	Offenbach, Isaac
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Eberst, Isaac; Eberscht, Isaac; Eberstadt, Isaac
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Cantor of the Jewish community in Cologne, poet, composer and father of Jacques Offenbach
DATE OF BIRTH	uncertain: October 26, 1779 or March 1780 or 1781
PLACE OF BIRTH	Offenbach am Main
DATE OF DEATH	April 26, 1850
Place of death	Cologne

[:0-1] Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 7 .

[:1-2] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Isaak Offenbach. Musician, cantor of the Cologne synagogue community . In: Jürgen Wilhelm (Ed.): Two millennia of Jewish art and culture in Cologne . Greven Verlag, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-7743-0397-3 , pp. 224-227 .

[3] Christine von Kohl: Jewish Artists and Writers - Your Contribution to Rhenish Cultural Life. From emancipation to exclusion . In: Konrad Schilling (Ed.): Monumenta Judaica. 2000 years of history and culture of the Jews on the Rhine (manual) . 1963, p. 482 .

[:2-4] The Jews in public life in Cologne . In: Zvi Asaria (ed.): The Jews in Cologne from the oldest times to the present . 1959, p. 224 .

[5] Anton Henseler: Jakob Offenbach . In: Classics of Music . M. Hesse, 1930, p. 447 .

[kaufmann2-6] Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 110-119 .

[7] Isaac Offenbach ^ Marianne Rindskopf. In: Family book Euregio. Retrieved April 25, 2018 .

[kaufmann3-8] Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 32 .

[9] Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken: Offenbach, Jacques . In: Society for Rheinische Geschichtskunde (Hrsg.): Rheinische Lebensbilder . tape 5 . Rheinland-Verlag, 1973, p. 155 .

[kaufmann4-10] Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 58 .

[:3-11] Ellen Kohlhaas: The cantor was a prophet . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . No. 54 . Frankfurt am Main March 5, 1999, p. 48 ( faz.net ).

[kaufmann6-12] Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 86-88 .

[:4-13] A ^b Josef Heinzelmann: Offenbach, Isaac . In: New German Biography . tape 19 , 1999, p. 480 ( online version ).

[14] Cologne Offenbach Society (ed.): Isaac Offenbach - Jew, composer and father of Jacques Offenbach . Press release. Cologne April 26, 2018.

[15] Kirsten Serup-Bilfeldt: Offenbach's upscale treasures. Notes and manuscripts from the Offenbach family of musicians from Cologne were discovered in US archives. Deutschlandfunk Kultur, November 18, 2011, accessed on April 26, 2018 .

[kaufmann5-16] Jacobo Kaufmann: Isaac Offenbach and his son Jacques, or, "It is not Purim every day" . In: Hans Otto Horch (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Studies and sources on German Jewish literature and cultural history . tape 21 . Max Niemeyer Verlag , 1998, ISBN 978-3-484-65121-0 , ISSN 0941-5866 , p. 68 .