The story goes that when Mozart was commissioned for his Requiem Mass he was filled with a superstitious dread that he was writing his own funeral music – but then he died before completing the work. Something similar happened with the man Rossini called “the Mozart of the Champs-Elysées”, Jacques Offenbach. Worn out by decades of frantic composition, he fixed on a story about a singer whose unusual malady means she must quit singing or expire. She chooses death – or it chooses her. Offenbach too could not stop the music; he died before the opera was finished. It is a fabulous, fruitful work: a man finally writing what he wanted after 20 years as Paris’ performing monkey. His operettas had embodied the frivolity of the Second Empire, making terrific fu