GAY DAYS IN PARIS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23009, 9 April 1938, Page 4 (Supplement)

GAY DAYS IN PARIS

LIFE OF COMPOSER OFFENBACH BT H.W. A most vital study of a man who himself revelled in life, the book "Offenbach and the Paris of His Time," by S. Kracauer, translated from the German by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher, is well worthy of an honoured place in any library. While showing the result of scholarly research the information given is set out with great skill and is •'enlivened with all the wit of the period. It is more than a biography. Offenbach was not one of the great composers and he, more perhaps than any of the geniuses of music, was part and parcel of the life of the city in which he passed most of his life. The author therefore uses Offenbach as the central., thread of hisr story and deals with tlie life of the Paris boulevards as much as with the life of the composer. He arrays before the reader all the *reat characters, the foiblcs'and the social structure of the Second French

Empire. The book, then, may be truly described as the story of Offenbach, poet, wit, composer and dandy, whose princenez and long side whiskers came to symbolise tho extravagant gaiety of four fantastic decades. It is also the story of Paris when the sudden development of industry poured more money into people's pockets than they knew how to spend. The age of the Jockey Club and the dandies when Louis-Philippe was on the throne and the succeeding; age when Emperor Napoleon 111. was ruling, and when Paris seemed like ono of Offenbach s own operattas, are described vividly by Herr Kracauer. Dr. Veron, who made a huge fortune out of a patent medicine, the Comte de Mornv, Flaubert, Zola, .Wagner, Baudelaire and Hortense Schneider, actress and courtesan, are only a few of tho figures brought to life in the book. Copiously illustrated with fine collotype reproductions of paintings, caricatures, music scores and programmes, tho volume is printed on excellent paper and is an - outstanding example of modern printing art. Although a translation. it is in fluid and stylish English i-and in every way nets a high standard. " O'Sp'ntiach and the Paris of His Tirno." 4, ** 8. Kracauer. (Constable.)