Comic opera and humour, Offenbach's works were intended solely to amuse. Though generally well crafted and full of humorous satire and grand opera parodies, plots and characters in his works were often interchangeable. Given the frenetic pace at which he worked, Offenbach sometimes used the same material in more than one opera. Another Frenchman who took up this form was Charles Lecocq (1832–1918). The singspiel developed in 18th-century Vienna and spread throughout Austria and Germany. As in the French "opéra comique", the "singspiel" was an opera with spoken dialogue, and usually a comic subject, such as Mozart's "Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Jacobowsky und der Oberst (opera) Jacobowsky und der Oberst (opera) Jacobowsky und der Oberst, Op. 49, ("Jacobovsky and the Colonel") is an opera in four acts by Giselher Klebe who also wrote the libretto based on the 1944 play of the by Franz Werfel. It premiered on 2 November 1965 at the Hamburg State Opera which had commissioned the work. Klebe dedicated it to the then director of the Staatsoper, Rolf Liebermann. Time and place: 1940, Paris, St. Cyrill, Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz The first American performance was on 27 June 1967 at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, using the same cast, conducted by Matthias Kuntzsch.