He was unable to rid himself of his Germanic influences and so corrupted the taste of an entire generation by his false prosody, which has been incorrectly considered originality.  In addition he was lacking in taste.  At the time they affected a dreadful mannerism of always stopping on the next to the last note of a passage, whether or not it was associated with a mute syllable.  This mannerism had no purpose beyond indicating to the audience the end of a passage and giving the claque the signal to applaud.  Offenbach did not belong to that heroic strain to which success is the least of its cares.  So he adopted this mannerism, and often his ingeniously turned and charming couplets are ruined by this silly absurdity now gone out of fashion.

Furthermore, he wrote badly, for his early education was neglected.  If the Tales of Hoffman shows traces of a practised pen, it is because Guiraud finished the score and went out of his way to remedy some of the author’s mistakes.  Leaving aside the bad prosody and the minor defects in taste, we have left a work which shows a wealth of invention, melody, and sparkling fancy comparable to Gretry’s.

Gretry was no more a great musician than Offenbach, for he also wrote badly.  The essential difference between the two was the care, not only in his prosody but also in his declamation, which Gretry tried to reproduce musically with all possible exactness.  He overshot the mark in this for he did not see that in singing the expression of a note is modified by the harmonic scheme which accompanies it.  It must be recognized, in addition, that many times Gretry was carried away by his melodic inventiveness and forgot his own principles so that he relegated his care for declamation to second place.

What hurt Gretry was his unbounded conceit, with which Offenbach, to his credit, was never afflicted.  As an indication of this, he dared to write in his advice to young musicians: 

“Those who have genius will make opera-comique like mine; those who have talent will write opera like Gluck’s; while those who have neither genius nor talent, will write symphonies like Haydn’s.”

However, he tried to make an opera like Gluck’s and in spite of his great efforts and his interesting inventions, he could not equal the work of his formidable rival.

* * * * *

Although he was not a great musician, Offenbach had a surprising natural instinct and made here and there curious discoveries in harmony.  In speaking of these discoveries I must go slightly into the theory of harmony and resign myself to being understood only by those of my readers who are more or less musicians.  In a slight work, Daphnis et Chloe, Offenbach risked a dominant eleventh without either introduction or conclusion—­an extraordinary audacity at the time.  A short course in harmony is necessary for the understanding of this.  We must start with