Jacques Offenbach was born in Offenbach and named Jacob Erberst.  His father was a bookbinder and a cantor in a synagogue in Cologne.  When Jacob was admitted into the Paris Conservatory, the family moved there and Jacob changed his name to Jacques Offenbach. He made his musical reputation inventing the genre we now know as Operetta and created some of the most popular and famous operettas of all time. Perhaps his best known musical work, a dance known as Le Gallop Infernal, was composed as part of the operetta, “Orpheus in the Underworld”. This dance was extremely popular in the Parisian dancehalls of the 1830s and ‘40s because it was wild and deemed quite scandalous as it showed the dancers’ petticoats and legs.  Today, we know it as the Can-Can.

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