In the summer of 1876, facing Philadelphia's Sunday Blue Laws during a United States Centennial tour, Jacques Offenbach relabeled his scandalous songs about Venus as hymns and litanies on the printed program and smuggled his comedy past the authorities. This episode traces the German-born, French-adopted cello prodigy from his birth as Jacob Offenbach in Cologne in 1819, through violin at six, composing at eight and cello at nine, to the 1833 journey to Paris where the notoriously xenophobic Luigi Cherubini, who had rejected a young Franz Liszt, stopped his audition mid-piece to admit him to the Conservatoire. He dropped out after a year.

The conversation follows his years as a prank-playing cellist in the Opéra-Comique pit, his rise as a salon virtuoso touring with Mendelssohn and Liszt and performing for Queen Victoria, and his 1855 decis ...