Lecture at a forum of the Department of French Culture, 2/06/2026
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Good afternoon.
Today, I would like to offer a musical perspective on the can-can—on the famous can-can music itself—and to share a few thoughts about sophistication and artistic complexity when one is trying to reach a broad audience. That last point, of course, is relevant far beyond the realm of music.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who is at the center of today’s event, was one of the clearest examples of the need artists often feel to pursue two goals simultaneously. The first was the creation of art for art’s sake: non-functional art aimed at a supposedly “high” audience, an exclusive public. The second was the creation of functional art—art that is not created for its own sake but serves a particular purpose, such as a poster or an advertisement. This type of art is ostensibly aimed lower, toward a broader common denominator and a larger target audience.
The history of art is full of examples of artists whom we celebrate for their great masterpieces, yet who also produced, usually for financial reasons, works that were not particularly great. Not every advertising jingle written by Leah Goldberg for the Tnuva food company, nor every four-hand piano dance published by Franz Schubert or Johannes Brahms, was intended to be a work of art. As consumers of art, we are often somewhat uncomfortable with such works—but that is not the issue I want to address today.
What, then, should we make of great works of art that also become popular hits among the general public? Or, conversely, of works that are almost provocatively simple yet come to be embraced by connoisseurs as fully fledged works of art? Are there inherent characteristics that enable a work to function simultaneously as both functional art and “high” art?
Today I can offer only a partial answer. I will speak about the can-can itself, about the galop dance from which the famous musical number actually derives, and, through an analysis of the work, I will move toward broader reflections on the categories of “high” and “low” in musical culture. More specifically, I will consider the relationship between these categories and the scale, the dimensions, of musical form. The conclusions I propose can also be applied to other artistic fields, so that all of us can leave here today with some thoughts about whatever artistic form interests us. After all, not everyone is obliged, as I apparently am, to spend every waking moment thinking about music.
Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880) is generally regarded as the greatest French operetta composer of the nineteenth century. He came from a German-Jewish background. In fact, for scholars of Jewish music, Offenbach is often “the son of” rather than a major composer in his own right. He was the son of Isaac Judah Offenbach, a cantor responsible for an important manuscript source of Ashkenazi cantorial music from the early nineteenth century.
Jacques, Isaac Judah’s second son, was born in Cologne in 1819 and soon displayed remarkable musical talent, which was directed toward the cello. He played in a trio with his older brother Julius on violin and his sister Isabella on piano. Yet perhaps contrary to what we might expect from our familiarity with figures such as Felix Mendelssohn or Joseph Joachim—musicians who entered the broader musical world through its highest spheres of Western musical culture—Offenbach’s integration into musical life took place across every possible channel and at every social level.
He would indeed become a cellist of the highest caliber, but he also sang in the synagogue choir, and the siblings’ trio performed in the taverns of Cologne. In other words, already during his formative years, Offenbach became familiar not only with musical production but also with musical consumption across a wide social spectrum. He knew the culture of the not-so-lofty end of the musical world. He probably understood the audience that came simply to enjoy itself just as well as he understood the audience seeking some kind of artistic transcendence, or the congregation gathered to pray in the synagogue.
Offenbach understood audiences. In a sense, he seems almost born to help us examine the question of art for art’s sake and its interaction with functional art.
At the age of just fourteen, in 1833, he left Cologne to continue his musical studies in Paris, but not before dedicating his first published composition to his teachers back home. I would like to play you about a short excerpt of that piece (there are very few recordings of it). You will hear that the cello plays the role of the soloist. And although it would be easy to dismiss the work as merely a youthful composition, imagine for a moment that there were a fourteen-year-old sitting here today who could write music of this kind—and, on top of that, perform its solo cello part. I suspect we would not hesitate to describe such a child as a genius. As you listen, please imagine that the cellist is a cheeky fourteen-year-old Jewish boy who has just arrived from Cologne.
[Play an excerpt of Offenbach’s Divertimento on a Swiss Song, Op. 1]
Within six years of arriving in Paris, Offenbach not only studied, but soon also began to teach, and secured employment as a musician at the Opéra-Comique. He also received his first commission for stage music—a vaudeville, that is, a light theatrical genre, not yet a full-scale operetta.
Paris was a paradise of musical theatre. In addition to the Opéra-Comique, there were institutions such as the Opéra National and the Comédie-Française. Yet success as a theatrical composer in a major city requires more than talent; it demands social skills, networking, and a certain ability to elbow one's way forward. These were not qualities Offenbach possessed immediately. After all, the principal asset he brought with him from home was his training as a cellist.
During his early twenties, he established himself as a virtuoso cellist. In fact, “virtuoso cellist” hardly does him justice. The trio partners with whom he performed were no longer Julius and Isabella, but rather the violinist Joseph Joachim and the pianist Felix Mendelssohn.
In any case, Offenbach was determined to advance himself as a composer. And he did what one had to do in order to advance within Parisian society. In 1844, at the age of twenty-five, he converted to Catholicism. In 1849, at the age of thirty, he obtained a position as conductor at the Comédie-Française. But notice that recognition as a conductor is not the same thing as recognition as a composer. As we have already seen from the age of fourteen, what Offenbach wanted to be was a composer.
When he felt unable to get his stage works performed in the existing theatres, he took matters into his own hands. In 1855, at the age of thirty-six, he founded his own theatre, the Bouffes-Parisiens. There he staged not only his own works but also those of other composers, including Mozart and Rossini. His freedom of action as a theatre director was considerable. He was free to compose as much as he wished; he could support young composers—and indeed he announced composition competitions; and in 1857 he even took his entire company to London for a two-month residency. Although the licence granted to his troupe restricted productions to a relatively small number of performers, he consistently pushed the limits. Orphée aux enfers (1858), the work from which the famous can-can music is taken, was part of that effort to stretch the boundaries—and it was a tremendous commercial success.
I have assembled some data showing how many large-scale works Jacques Offenbach composed each year from 1853 until his death in 1880. Several things become immediately apparent.
First, in 1855, the year he founded the Bouffes-Parisiens, he composed like a man possessed. I honestly have no idea how anyone writes nine operettas in a single year, while also producing three ballets and incidental music for three plays.
Second, you can see that in 1857 a red segment appears in the graph. This marks the first time Offenbach revived an operetta he had already staged. Le mariage aux lanternes was a revised version of Le trésor à Mathurin, a work dating from 1853, before he established his own theatre. Yet for more than a decade he continued producing new works at an astonishing pace. Only after he had become firmly established did he allow himself to revive earlier pieces—something that happens in 1867, 1868, 1873, 1874, 1875, and 1878.
You can also see that something changes in 1870. That, of course, is the year of the Franco-Prussian War, which brought with it a shift in public taste in Paris. In any case, it marks the first year since 1853 in which Offenbach did not compose a major stage work—and this comes after he had already written more than seventy operettas.
After his death, three additional works were performed, completed by colleagues from unfinished materials. Among them was Les Contes d'Hoffmann, often regarded as his greatest achievement.
More generally, one might say that his international success—in places such as London and Vienna—together with his reputation as a virtuoso cellist and his ability to undertake concert tours, including a tour of the United States in 1876, helped soften the financial losses he began to suffer in the early 1870s. Despite the late masterpiece The Tales of Hoffmann, which is in some sense his one truly “serious” grand work, his reputation rests primarily on the smaller operettas.
Now, let us listen to the can-can music itself—but let us do so actively, because all of you have heard this music before. Our goal is to map out its musical structure.
We will do this twice. The first time, we will simply try to identify the principal musical themes. Later in the lecture, we will return to the piece and attempt a more detailed analysis.
[Listen: 2:30 minutes, arrive at structure ABCC ACC]
We will come back to it later. But first, a clarification. If you had asked Jacques Offenbach, “Play us your can-can,” he would not have known what piece you were referring to. The famous tune was adopted by Parisian nightclubs—most notably the Moulin Rouge—only a decade after Offenbach's death. Only then did it become associated with the can-can dance: the dance we know today for its provocative choreography, swirling skirts, and flying legs.
The title Offenbach actually gave the piece was Galop—as you can see from surviving manuscript copies made only a few years after the premiere. The galop was a highly energetic but relatively respectable dance. Couples held one another much as they did in a waltz, but instead of moving in the leisurely one-two-three rhythm of the waltz, they raced around the dance floor according to a predetermined pattern, sometimes in groups of four couples, in what was known as a quadrille.
I will show you an example of a Galop quadrille.
[Present a short video of a Galop Quadrille]
The choreographic implications are enormous. Strauss's The Blue Danube lasts about eleven minutes—almost four times the length of Offenbach's galop, or the galop I just showed you in the video. The reason is simply one of cardiovascular endurance. Dancing a galop is physically exhausting, especially when performed in formal evening dress or in a heavy ball gown, inside a crowded ballroom with no air conditioning. It is essentially a two-and-a-half-minute jog carried out on a summer day inside a gymnasium.
Within Orphée aux enfers, the galop appears in the fourth and final tableau.
The operetta's plot is itself a lesson in French cultural history. It is a parody of the lofty narratives of classical mythology, and the fact that Offenbach chose to target Orpheus in particular is highly significant. The myth of Orpheus is, fundamentally, the ultimate Greek myth about the power of music.
Orpheus is the legendary musician whose wife, Eurydice, dies and descends into the underworld. He follows her there and, through the power of his music, succeeds in lulling Cerberus—the three-headed hound of hell—to sleep and persuading Hades to release Eurydice and allow her to return to the land of the living.
Because this myth is fundamentally about the power of music, it became central to attempts to recreate ancient Greek tragedy. That, after all, was what the members of the Florentine Camerata were trying to do at the end of the sixteenth century—and, quite accidentally, they ended up inventing opera. They were not trying to create opera at all; it simply emerged from the experiment.
Thus, Euridice, performed in Florence in 1600, was one of the earliest experiments in this revolutionary genre. The work was associated with both Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, and in the end two different operas bearing the title Euridice emerged from the joint experiment: one by Peri and one by Caccini.
Then came L’Orfeo in Mantua in 1607, the first true operatic masterpiece—a favola in musica, a story in music—written by the undisputed musical genius of Italy at the time, Claudio Monteverdi.
Much later, Orfeo ed Euridice became the greatest operatic achievement of Christoph Willibald Gluck. It was first produced in Italian in Vienna in 1762 and later in a French version in Paris in 1774. In fact, only a year after Orphée aux enfers, the great Hector Berlioz staged Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice once again in Paris, in French, incorporating his own revisions and updates.
So the myth of Orpheus, and its importance to music, had a very long history. More importantly, it was a history that remained entirely current in Offenbach's Paris. Indeed, Offenbach directly quotes one of the most famous arias from Gluck's opera within Orphée aux enfers.
What does Offenbach do to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice? If, in the original myth, it is overwhelming love that triumphs over death, then here Orpheus does not even love his wife. In fact, they want to separate. Orpheus would not have bothered to rescue her from the underworld at all if it were not for the allegorical figure L’Opinion publique—that is, public opinion, or “what will people say.” It is only because of “what will people say” that Orpheus attempts to bring Eurydice back.
While he is already weary of her, both Pluto (the ruler of the underworld) and Jupiter (the father of the gods) desire Eurydice. And in fact, Jupiter himself tries to help Orpheus, also because of “what will people (or gods) say.” He is facing opposition from the other gods: it begins with Jupiter saying, essentially, “what will people say if that shameless Pluto takes a young woman for himself and her husband does nothing to bring her back?” But then the other Olympian gods turn against him and point out that he himself, Jupiter, has repeatedly taken mortal women in highly immoral ways. So he is effectively forced to comply as they tell him: “Now you will do the moral thing, and you will ensure that Eurydice returns to her lawful husband.” And of course, when Jupiter sees Eurydice in the underworld, he himself desires her. And as in the classical myths about him, he undergoes metamorphosis—this time he turns into a fly—and after he and Eurydice consummate their love, there is a wild party scene, which includes that same galop dance. Here, however, the main melody, the C theme, is sung.
So we have already encountered the music, and we have identified its ABCCACC structure. But now I would like us to listen again, and this time to listen with a critical ear. Is this structure really that simple?
For example, the beginning is not really the A section. There is an introduction whose function is to build tension and lead into A—something like the way a galop dance requires an introduction so that all the couples can take their positions correctly.
Since the galop is, at its core, music intended for dancing, what matters most is control over the steps. And control over the steps is, fundamentally, control over duration: how long each section lasts. Time is governed by the number of beats, or by the number of “bars” (groups of beats). Each of the melodies is completely symmetrical. I will count with my hand groups of four beats—one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four to help you orientate. Please note that in dance music, these bars are usually grouped in pairs; and pairs are grouped into groups of four bars; these quartets are grouped into groups of eight bars; and so on.
[demonstrating by singing the A section - 8 bars]
So even the CC section makes perfect sense: it is eight bars grouped into sixteen.
[demonstrating by singing the C section - 8+8 bars = 16 bars]
But while all the main melodies are perfectly symmetrical and easy to whistle, the first thing we hear is the introduction, and I ask you to notice that it does not actually complete a full eight-bar unit; rather, the A section enters already in the middle of the eighth bar. Equally important, before each appearance of C, Offenbach always breaks the symmetry and stretches the ending of what came before it, as if creating a kind of spring—building tension and expectation before it suddenly “resolves,” I would even say “explodes,” into the next section.
[re-listening, demonstrating the 7½-bar stretch and the “spring” effect]
There is one last aspect I would like you to notice. It is more technical, but still worth paying attention to: the question of key. If you noticed, the first time the C melody appears, it is as if it is in the “wrong” key - it is in the key of G major, and not in D major, which is the key of the piece at large. This idea of arriving in the wrong key is perhaps the most powerful means of creating tension in classical music, and our ear clearly perceives it (even if untrained musicians cannot explicate what it is that their ear hears). Offenbach is therefore using one of the strongest available mechanisms in music to create a “pending unresolved situation” the first time C and C appear, and then resolves the tension when they return the second time—so that we finally get C and C in the home key.
What Offenbach is doing is almost unfair: he takes a piece that is already developing in a surging crescendo and overlays it with a mechanism of tension and release strong enough to sustain a ten-minute symphonic movement. It is a kind of explosive energy machine.
This is the most energetic dance on the ballroom floor: two and a half minutes of crescendo, with three melodies, each more catchy than the last, all built on a tension-and-release mechanism that would normally belong to a much larger musical form—four times its size. And all of this happens immediately after a stage scene of seduction: Eurydice, the desirable maiden, is pursued by the “alpha male” of Olympus disguised as a fly (and believe me, in some productions this scene becomes quite outrageous). And when it is taken away from the explicitness of the scene as it was played on stage, it moves to the Moulin Rouge, and to the flying skirts that leave even less room for imagination.
Toward the end, I would like to suggest that, in my view, the magic of Offenbach’s can-can—and what allows it so easily to be harnessed for such intensely physical entertainment, or for any hybrid form of entertainment—is precisely its ability to compress sophisticated artistic means into a very short span.
And what are these means? Fast rhythm, crescendo, conflict, and moments of “spring-like tension” that unexpectedly delay the expected resolution. Compress all of these into a short duration, and you get a work that can operate simultaneously on both “high” and “low” levels.
These can be the five and a half minutes of the “Cheese Shop” sketch by Monty Python,
or the four minutes and fifty seconds of Shauli’s Civil War monologue.
These can be the three and a half minutes of “Hallelujah” by Hallelujah,
or the two minutes and twenty seconds of the story that Yossi Banai adds as an introduction to “Je ne peux pas t’accepter” by Georges Brassens.
These can be two minutes and ten seconds of the can-can,
or two minutes and five seconds of “Eleanor Rigby” by Eleanor Rigby.
They can be fourteen verses from the story of Elijah at Mount Horeb in Kings I 19,
or 585 words of Kafka’s Before the Law,
or 387 words of Ephraim Kishon’s feuilleton “Stucks”,
or 153 words of “Kochi 3” from Pipelines by Etgar Keret.
All of these are compact forms that unfold in an instant, and can be followed even without access to their hidden layers. They are accessible to the ordinary reader, the naïve listener, or the child who happens to stumble upon Eretz Nehederet. The naïve listener will find something to whistle, and the child will pick up a catchphrase and repeat it with classmates the next day.
And indeed, not every Monty Python sketch is a masterpiece with both a high and a low layer—and not every Beatles song either. Some miniatures are simply pop songs or feuilletons. And some miniature forms are entirely “high,” such as Kafka’s Betrachtung pieces from 1913, or Anton Webern’s string quartet Bagatelles from the same year. But something about the compression of artistic means that normally belong to large-scale forms—and which are precisely what allow orientation within those large forms—something about that compression makes the artistic form communicative.
To conclude, I would propose distinguishing between two types of miniatures.
Those miniatures whose entire form is a subversion of large-scale conventions can be called essential miniatures, because their essence is miniature: they are fundamentally small forms, and extending them beyond a few seconds or lines would cause them to collapse.
And those miniatures that function as scaled-down models of large-scale forms can be called reductive miniatures, because their formal engine is that of a large-scale form, only operating within a much smaller space—apparently a space that does not require such an expansive mechanism.
The inherent mismatch between grand developmental mechanisms and the small dimensions of the form releases such forces of motion that even the non-attuned eye, even the coarse ear, can perceive them.
Offenbach’s galop is such a reductive miniature: the energy-bomb of a composer who, from his youth in Cologne to his status as king of operetta in Paris, knew how to excite an audience. And even after his death, that powerful engine continues to operate, continually recharged with sensual meanings, still running, still generating energy, to this very day.