As happened with his contemporary César Franck, the unabated public appetite for a handful of surefire works through the twentieth century obscured, rather than prompted, interest in Offenbach's other music. As Franck's Symphony and Symphonic Variations became concert staples, for instance, and his organ works commanded a vast following, the fact that some of his best and most powerful music is to be found in his opera scores, and some of his most engaging in a vast number of harmonium pieces, was ignored. Likewise, the hold a half-dozen of Offenbach's operettas continues to exert on an admiring public—given a fillip by Manuel Rosenthal's 1938 Gaîté parisienne suite drawn from them—has effectively buried the remainder of his work, including nearly 100 other operettas, large and small; several ballets; a quantity of salon music; pedagogical works for cello (quite listenable); several interesting orchestral works; and the Concerto militaire for cello and orchestra. Despite his whelming popularity, the Concerto militaire is a revealing index to Offenbach's neglect, for, though the work was composed probably in 1847 and the composer died in 1880, not until 2004 was Jean-Christophe Keck's definitive edition of the score, based upon Offenbach's autographs, published by Boosey & Hawkes. Meanwhile, the work was "known" in the reconstruction—orchestration, recomposition, and arrangement—by cellist Jean-Max Clément. Clément worked from the autograph of Offenbach's first movement, which he cut and whose cello writing he simplified, but relied upon piano sketches for the remaining movements, in the upshot producing a work quite different from what Offenbach composed. In 1995 cellist Ofra Harnoy recorded the Clément version with Offenbach aficionado Antonio de Almeida leading the Bournemouth Symphony. Meanwhile, the third-movement Allegretto, the autograph of which was presented to the Library of Congress in 1955, gained currency as a separate piece, the so-called Concerto rondo, recorded by Harnoy, with Erich Kunzel leading the Cincinnati Pops, in 1983. Confusion generated by the Clément version and the Harnoy recordings was resolved only in 2006 when Marc Minkowski led a recording of the Keck edition, with soloist Jérôme Pernoo, revealing a substantial work confected of the liveliest invention, rich sentiment, sly humor, and elegance set off with virtuoso writing for the cellist verging on the impossible. Joined to its proper finale, an elaborate rondo playing around 20 minutes, Offenbach's "militaire" designation comes into focus—the repeating material, replete with snare drums, possesses a martial swagger foreshadowing the military sendups of the operettas to come.

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