Jacques Offenbach - the man who made light of opera

Monteverdi, Telemann, and Haydn all offered their take, while the version of Christoph Willibald Gluck, which premiered in Vienna in 1762, is generally held to be the opera that broke the mould and brought the form out of the Baroque and into the Classical age.

And then, a century later, along comes Jacques Offenbach to shatter the matrix once more.

Offenbach was the son of a German travelling musician whose real name was Eberst, but on the road, he was known as 'The Man from Offenbach', his home town, and the name stuck.

The family moved to France so that the youngster could sign up at the Paris Conservatoire - he was a richly gifted cellist. But the performing didn't last long.

While he scaled some heights - he played at Windsor Castle for Britain's Queen Victoria and the Russian Tsar - most of his time was spent in the orchestra pit at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. There he found the perfect fit for his personality.

He started writing light opera, hired a small theatre to put on his own little shows, and did so well, he had to get himself a bigger venue.

This far - thanks to the licensing laws in Napoleon's Second Empire Paris - he'd been restricted to small-scale shows, music-hall burlesques more or less, one-acters featuring just three singing characters.

When the rules were eventually changed, Offenbach was ready. Collaborating - with delicious irony - with a career civil servant who wrote the satirical script, Offenbach came up with a spoof on the operatic staple. His Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in Hell) was a caustic take on convention, sending up versions like Gluck's, while having a dig at establishment pomposity.

The trials and tribulations of the unhappily married Orpheus and Eurydice come to an end when she is bitten by a poisonous snake. Orpheus is glad to be rid of her, but a character called Public Opinion demands he have her back.

So, with no real enthusiasm, he gets Jupiter to take him down to the Underworld to fetch his wife, but Jupiter - who just happens to have turned into a fly - decides he quite fancies Eurydice.

He tells Orpheus he can take her home, just as long as he doesn't look back on his way out.

That's when Jupiter fires a thunderbolt. The startled Orpheus turns to see what's going on, and the deal is off.

Everybody's happy, except Public Opinion. And they all dance the Can-Can, the most famous number from the production. Being light opera, it was all in the best possible taste, playing for laughs, with no seditious intent.

Orphée aux Enfers made Offenbach's name. He became a worldwide celebrity, big enough to earn himself a fortnight's residency in Philadelphia at the Centennial celebrations of the US independence in 1876. They even named the venue after him. They called the auditorium the Offenbach Garden.

George Hamilton presents The Hamilton Scores on RTÉ lyric fm from 10am each Saturday.