A poet walks into a tavern, already tipsy on nostalgia. His name is Hoffmann, and he begins to tell his friends stories of three women he once loved—or imagined he did. Each story burns like the last drops of absinthe in the glass: sweet, strange, and a little poisonous. In Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), Jacques Offenbach invites us into a world where reality and imagination blur until neither can stand alone. The music glimmers with irony, tenderness, and heartbreak—just like Hoffmann himself.
Offenbach, often remembered for his sparkling operettas (Orpheus in the Underworld, La Belle Hélène), was nearing the end of his life when he turned to this ambitious opera. He wanted to prove he could be more than a composer of wit and waltz; he wanted depth, drama, and immortality. Les Contes d’Hoffmann, left unfinished at his death in 1880 and completed by his colleagues, became that legacy. Its mix of fantastical storytelling and psychological introspection marked a departure from the frivolity of Second Empire Paris toward something darker and more modern—closer to Freud than farce.
The libretto by Jules Barbier (after his own play inspired by the real E.T.A. Hoffmann) constructs a dream within dreams, as the poet re-lives three distorted reflections of love—each more haunting than the last.
First comes Olympia, the perfect woman—or rather, the perfect automaton. Hoffmann, blind to the truth, falls in love with a mechanical doll who sings coloratura scales with mechanical precision. When her gears fail and her secret is revealed, the audience laughs—then gasps. It’s a scene as absurd as it is tragic, a satire on how we idolize perfection while missing humanity.
Next is Antonia, the fragile singer who lives for music yet dies from it. She’s a ghost of Romantic longing, her voice both her gift and her doom. The lush, lyrical score of this act—particularly her duet with Hoffmann and the chilling trio with her mother’s spirit—feels like Offenbach’s own farewell to melody.
Finally, Giulietta, the Venetian courtesan, tempts Hoffmann into surrendering his reflection—literally his soul—in exchange for desire. It’s a fever dream of decadence and deceit, culminating in betrayal and murder. By the end, Hoffmann has given away everything that made him whole.
Each tale peels away another illusion, leading to the opera’s meta-tragic finale: Hoffmann, drained and disillusioned, realizes that his muse, Stella, is all of them and none of them. Love, art, and suffering are the same flame.
At its heart, Les Contes d’Hoffmann is about the artist’s curse—the inability to love without turning love into art. Hoffmann transforms every heartbreak into poetry, every loss into song. The opera asks whether creation can ever exist without destruction, and whether beauty itself might be the most dangerous illusion of all.
It’s no wonder modern audiences see in Hoffmann a reflection of our own fragmented lives. In an age of curated personas and digital “selves,” the opera’s theme of losing one’s reflection feels almost prophetic. Olympia’s mechanical perfection, in particular, reads like an 1880s prototype for today’s AI muses and Instagram filters—humanity, polished to the point of unreality.
Offenbach’s score moves with astonishing fluidity between comedy and pathos. The “Doll Song” is a dazzling feat of vocal athletics, while Antonia’s Act II aria bleeds sincerity. The Venetian Barcarolle, “Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour,” floats like moonlight over the canal—a melody so seductive that it’s often extracted as a stand-alone piece, though in context it drips with irony. It’s beauty born of tragedy, as if the night itself knows that love will dissolve by dawn.
When Les Contes d’Hoffmann returned to The Met: Live in HD, audiences were reminded just how cinematic Offenbach’s imagination was. Bartlett Sher’s production leaned into the surreal—mirrors, shadows, and doubling effects that made the poet’s psyche feel like a hall of illusions. The visual storytelling matched the music’s elasticity, proving that Hoffmann’s tales still thrive on the edge between dream and delirium.
Hoffmann’s final toast—drunk, defiant, and oddly triumphant—is to the very pain that fuels his art. In that moment, Offenbach’s unfinished masterpiece becomes strangely complete. It captures the eternal truth that beauty, once glimpsed, always leaves a scar. For all its waltzing charm and gothic absurdity, Les Contes d’Hoffmann remains one of opera’s most psychologically resonant works—a portrait of the artist as both victim and magician.
Offenbach never heard a full performance of Les Contes d’Hoffmann. He died with the score still unfinished, pencil in hand. In a poetic twist, his friends completed it posthumously—turning the “tales” of Hoffmann into Offenbach’s own final reflection. (And really, what could be more fitting for an opera about art outliving the artist?)
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