Jacques Offenbach was born in 1819 in Cologne, Germany, but as a child he moved to Paris where he received a thorough musical education. In his operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, Offenbach parodies the famous Greek legend of Orpheus and Euridice. Indirectly, however, he criticises the complacency of many of his contemporaries. The overture was not written entirely by Offenbach, Carl Binder added various pieces to it for a Viennese production of this operetta in 1860 and since then, these pieces...