Operaphoria: Les Contes d'Hoffmann by Offenbach

Jacques Offenbach was a prolific composer of operettas, but Tales of Hoffmann is his only opera. It is one of the great operatic oddities of all time, but also a remarkably popular feature in the standard repertoire. The Met has staged Hoffmann more than 260 times, in a variety of productions.

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The history of Hoffmann began in 1851, when two of that century’s most popular playwrights—Jules Barbier and Michel Carré—wrote a play based on the fantastic stories published by another contemporary writer—E.T.A. Hoffmann. In that play, Barbier and Carré wrote a major role for E.T.A. Hoffmann, the author of the stories. That would be equivalent to someone in 1625 writing a new version of Othello that included a leading role for Will Shakespeare. Not only did Barbier and Carré manage to pull this off successfully, but they enlisted the help of a young virtuoso cellist to conduct the incidental music for the play. That cellist was Jacques Offenbach.

Twenty-five years later, that same virtuoso cellist was now the most popular composer of operettas in the world, and he was looking for a libretto in which he could invest his full talents. He wanted to prove to the world that he was not just the composer of popular music, but a musician to be taken seriously. He went back to the script for which he had conducted the incidental music and asked Barbier (Carré had died) to prepare an opera libretto based on the play. His final work would be his magnum opus.

While working on Tales of Hoffmann, Offenbach wrote five more operettas to pay the bills, but Hoffmann was his focus. Unfortunately, Offenbach never finished his last effort. When he died in 1880, he had composed a lot of material for Hoffmann, but had not yet synthesized his efforts. It remains confusing, even though several musicologists have offered reconstructions.

The story of the opera is Hoffmann’s telling of three different failed love relationships, each one overlapping the other with parallel characters. The failures are rather atypical. For example, his relationship with Olympia failed because she was a life-sized mechanical doll, but Hoffmann didn’t notice because he was wearing rose-tinted glasses. His relationship with Giulietta failed because she stole Hoffmann’s shadow in exchange for a diamond. Poor Antonia was under the influence of her mother’s ghost, who encouraged her to sing, knowing that singing would kill her.

The three stories are bracketed by a Prologue and an Epilogue. The opera opens in Luther’s, a Nuremburg bar, with a tribute to the numbing effects of alcohol. The opening lines of the chorus are, “Glug, glug, glug,” sung by barflies called “The Spirits of Beer and Wine,” who tell us that getting drunk is the way to forget our problems and have a good time. The poet Hoffmann enters, already drunk. He is in love with Stella, an opera star who, that very night, is singing Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Even though Luther’s is attached to the opera house, it is a downscale bar with low-grade musical tastes. The barflies prod Hoffmann into singing a ditty about “Klein Zack,” an oddly-shaped dwarf. While singing, he recedes into a reverie about his three lost loves, all of whom have something in common with Stella. In effect, they are parts of her.

The next three acts feature the three lost loves that devastated Hoffmann. In each case, an evil character is blamed for Hoffmann’s failure in life and love. Finally, in the Epilogue, the Muse attempts to comfort Hoffmann with the observation that pain is good for the creative process. He might be a total failure in interpersonal relationships, but at least he has his poetry. The opera ends with Hoffmann clutching his poems, a caricature of an alcoholic artist who thinks alcohol or drugs can court the Muse.

So, what is this opera about? At the end of the opera, the barflies are still singing about the glories of alcohol, and the Muse tells Hoffmann:

"Let the ashes of your heart
Ignite your genius once again.
The Muse will ease your blessed suffering.
Love makes one great.
Tears make us even greater."

Which might not be true, of course. Tears do not make us greater. Certainly, how we handle our grieving can result in personal growth, but pain and suffering can take an enormous toll on us, and some of us don’t survive it.

However, there are real lessons to be learned from Hoffmann. The story of Olympia, for example, is not just a silly story about someone who falls in love with a robotic doll. Rather, it is another way to look at archetypes like Tristan’s Isolde or Cyrano’s Roxane. These women were fantasies generated by incomplete men who needed to believe that attachment to feminine perfection could save them. Hoffmann does something similar. He has "rose-colored eyes" and sees in Olympia the woman he needs her to be, not the woman she is.

We also learn not to tolerate "the sale of our shadow" to anyone for any reason. In other words, we should not bargain with someone who wants to take away our identity or sense of self for their personal gain. Nor should we fall in love with people who cannot support us or who demand something from us that will harm us.

Finally—perhaps an unintended lesson—maybe we should not drink so much. – GP

E.T.A.

Tales of Hoffmann has been described as bizarre, and the description probably fits. However, E.T.A. Hoffmann was not bizarre simply for shock effect. There is great depth of searching inquiry in all his stories. Hoffmann himself was somewhat of an oddity, and the ditty of “Klein Zack” in the Prologue might be partly autobiographical. In his personal and social life, he was frequently in trouble, and he cultivated his antisocial image quite fearlessly. Nevertheless, along the way, “the ashes of his heart ignited his creative genius.”

In addition to Tales of Hoffmann, The Nutcracker ballet is based on one of his short stories. Also, the ballet Coppelia is based on a story similar to that of Olympia in the first act of Tales of Hoffmann. In Coppelia, a dollmaker creates a doll so realistic that the villagers believe it is his daughter, and Franz falls in love with it.

Hoffmann pushed the limits of reality to such a degree that it appeared to be a militant rejection of everyone else’s reality. A psychologist might observe that this is what people do when they cannot accept something about themselves. They create an acceptable reality. We have all seen examples of this in social relationships and politics, where someone is struggling with paralyzing fears about what will happen if others discover the truths about their inadequacies. In the performing arts, good comedies often reveal greater truths. There is no greater evidence for this than in the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose bizarre fantasies might remind us to accept the realities about ourselves. – GP

Hard Work

We will not print the name of the author of the following quote, as we are not being very nice to him. However, to give our readers an idea of how hard some musicologists are working to understand this opera, here are some fragments of an analysis of Tales of Hoffmann we found recently on the internet:

"(The opera) refers to concepts of intertextuality and intermediality…. In an eminent self-reflexive turn (these themes) are reflected and criticized. These aspects stretch from musico-literary poetological reflections on models of production or artistry; concepts of the author and the (decentralized) subject, to critics of Enlightenment and materialism, questions on gender, and finally, to a de-reconstruction of romantic thought."

Get it? Not to worry. This is an excellent, engaging production of a fascinating opera. It is thoroughly entertaining and supported by the best singing of Offenbach’s best music. – GP

All Three

All three failed love relationships in Tales of Hoffmann are usually cast with three different sopranos. However, a few sopranos with a wide range have sung all three roles in the same production, a major achievement. Sometimes the opera has been presented as a vehicle for a soprano who wants to demonstrate her versatility.

Olympia is a high, light coloratura soprano. Giulietta is a dramatic soprano, and Antonia is a lyric soprano. For the 2015 production at the Met, Russian soprano Hibla Gerzmava sang all three roles. Other notable examples include Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills at New York City Opera. – GP

Production
Tales of Hoffmann, by Offenbach
Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024

Conductor: Marco Armiliato
Production: Bartlett Sher
Hoffmann: Benjamin Bernheim
Olympia: Erin Morley
Giulietta: Clémentine Margaine
Antonia: Pretty Yende
Nicklausse: Vasilisa Berzhanskaya
The Four Villains: Christian Van Horn

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