Tales of Hoffmann, Quarantined
Opera Louisiane had to postpone their production of Tales of Hoffmann, which must have been painful. This is a dreamy, complex show, a meatier exploration of an artist’s struggle between his commitment to his heart and to his craft.
Want to join our Opera “book club” Wednesdays at 5pm CST? You choose which operas appeal. We provide a delicious cocktail idea and an opera to chat about. We all get to talk to someone who doesn’t live in our house. Want to be the keener? Check out the post below for the opera we’re discussing for some background!
We will forward the link to you on Wednesdays mornings when you sign up here: Quarantine Opera Book Club.
NEED TO KNOW
This show was originally performed with four key performers: Hoffmann (tenor), the Muse/Nicklausse (mezzo), love interests Olympia/Antonia/Giulietta/Stella (soprano), and the nemeses Lindorf/Coppélius/Dr. Miracle/Dapertutto (baritone). Nowadays, those are more frequently split apart. When you hear how different the music is for each of the love interests, you’ll understand what a feat of technique it requires to sing all of them! It’s too bad, because (spoiler!) at the end of the opera we learn that these historical loves of Hoffmann’s are really all aspects of his current flame, Stella - so having them performed by one person is really impactful. (Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills pulled it off.) Historical documentation shows that Offenbach intended one soprano to perform all the roles and one baritone as well, so as to more easily portray that they each represent different aspects of a single personality.
Hoffmann the character is a poet, and in this operatic instance, also (somewhat) the author of the original stories. E.T.A. Hoffmann was a German jack-of-all-trades whose stories were translated into renowned artistic masterpieces like The Nutcracker and Coppelia, in addition to this classic opera. His story “The Contest of Singers” inspired Wagner's opera Tannhäuser. (To make this weirder, Offenbach attempted to write an opera called The Rhine Nymphs. Great minds?) At one point, Hoffmann wrote a story called “Don Juan” that included a performance of Don Giovanni happening next door to the main character’s hotel. He also composed, served as a critic, a playwright, theater director, and many others. His stories were fantastical and slightly macabre, with inherent dramatic potential. German Romanticism was everywhere. His life read like a soap opera - full of love affairs, war, travel and political disputes. One of his favorite themes was that of artistic endeavor itself, and how artistic work can transcend individual self.
The Hoffmann-based play by Barbier and librettist Carré inspired Offenbach and wove Hoffmann himself in as the hero of his own stories. After a career in operetta and mishaps, this opera was to be Offenbach’s masterpiece. He died four months before the premiere at 46, after an accurate premonition that, like Antonia, he would die when he completed his work. (He didn’t quite make it; Ernest Guiraud applied the finishing touches.) People at the time found the change in his style and tales of his recent death disturbing, and wondered if the opera was jinxed after a theater fire on top of Offenbach’s demise. (Many other fires and disasters followed.) Appropriately creepy for someone whose stories influenced Edgar Allen Poe and who wrote science-tinged literature at the same time as Frankenstein was created.
Santé! (to his loves)
The Tales of Hoffmann starts and ends in a tavern. So to thoroughly set the scene, John brings you "Poet's Dream" for your pre-opera cocktail. He’ll mix his up right here, in case you want to see him in action!
Ingredients: 2 oz Gin 1 oz Vermouth 1/2 teaspoon Benedictine 2 dashes orange bitters Lemon peel for Garnish Directions: Place Gin, Vermouth, Benedictine, and Orange Bitters in a mixing vessel, add ice and stir till chilled (about 20 seconds). Strain into a coupe glass and garnish with a lemon peel, enjoy!
Synopsis
Tales of Hoffmann portrays a mysterious world where human and supernatural forces meet. In a tavern, the poet Hoffmann tells of his three ill-fated romances. In the first tale, he pursues the doll Olympia until she dances him into a mechanical frenzy, and he wearily realizes that she is not human. He falls passionately in love with the sickly but gifted Antonia, who is compelled by her mother's portrait to sing away her last ounce of strength. Finally, Hoffmann is seduced by the ill-intentioned courtesan Giulietta, who steals his reflection for the sorcerer Dapertuto. Blind with passion and convinced she loves him, Hoffmann murders Giulietta's lover Schlemil, only to see her turn her attentions to someone else. As the last tale ends, Hoffmann, lost in a bitter haze of drink and memory, rejects his love Stella, as she tosses him a flower, in favor of his sidekick and muse, who has stood by him throughout.
Prefer to watch it? Opera Cheats does a lovely job of telling the plot. Vivs Green is also hilarious in her summary.
NPR wraps its synopsis and assessment of Hoffmann up in a bow: “Offenbach's drama follows the same scheme, placing the title character into three, fanciful stories of failed love. The result is one of the grandest and most expressive of all 19th-century French operas — achieving a combination of emotional depth and musical brilliance that only the finest opera composers ever equaled.”
My favorite condensed guide to this opera comes from Seattle Opera. Check this out for a great rundown on who’s who, and what to listen for.
But Which Version of Hoffmann????
The Encyclopaedia Britannica explores the various possiblities for this opera, and of its casting challenges.
The Tales of Hoffmann has no “official” version. Among the points of debate among music historians are Offenbach’s intentions regarding sung recitatives versus spoken dialogue. Even the order of the opera’s acts has been varied. The opera opens and closes with scenes of Hoffmann’s obsession with Stella, an opera singer. In between are visions of his passions for three other women. Offenbach’s original plan was that those three acts would serve as a kind of spiritual journey from youthful infatuation (the Olympia act) through mature love (the Antonia act) to the indulgences of an idle wastrel (the Giulietta act). In contemporary performance, however, the second and third acts are sometimes switched. Further, some companies label the Prologue as Act I and renumber the succeeding acts accordingly.
As The Guardian sums up, “Every conductor and producer approaching the work has to choose what to include or omit. To bring this great, enigmatic masterpiece to life is effectively to retell its tales from scratch - which is part of its abiding mystery and one of the sources of its endless fascination.”
A Doll’s Blink
The “Doll’s Aria” is one of the toughest arias in the repertoire. This is coloratura - a special voice type that can do super high, fast, accurate melodies. We think of them as gymnasts, and no matter how many times we hear this, it blows our mind. Or as this article asks, “Is this the most insane piece ever written for soprano?”
Netrebko and Garanca (today’s opera stars) knock the Barcarolle out of the water here. I’m guessing you’ve heard this before in commercials and movies…8 million times. But it’s still gorgeous.
Here’s a step by step guide to the opera with clips from renowned performers, aligned with the synopsis of those moments from Opera Inside.
Opera News has the top 10 Tales of Hoffmann clips for you to explore, without all the words around the videos.
With All the Verses
Here’s the Greek National Opera doing a shortened version. No subtitles and the video quality is limited.
Rent Tales of Hoffmann from the Met ($5). Rent an old school Tales of Hoffmann from the Met (Gedda).If you’re a super detailed listener, here’s the libretto (FR/EN) from the Metropolitan Opera. (The libretto has all of the lines of the show in it.)
Enjoy a stunning cast (Shicoff, Ramey, Mentzner, Dessay) at La Scala, in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
…And Other Stories
Jacques Offenbach started out as a cello virtuoso, appearing across Europe with people like Anton Rubenstein, Franz Liszt, and Felix Mendelssohn - and got the nickname “Franz Liszt of the cello.”
Like the play, the opera is based on three of the psychologically complicated and fantastic stories of the German Romantic author and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann. Those stories are “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”), “Rath Krespel” (“Councillor Krespel”; Eng. trans. “The Cremona Violin”), and “Die Geschichte vom verlorenen Spiegelbilde” (“The Story of the Lost Reflection”). Freud gives an extensive psychoanalytic analysis of Hoffmann's "The Sandman", one of the stories from Tales of Hoffmann, in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche. Dostoevsky and Freud were great admirers of Hoffmann.
Offenbach, a German composer who wrote famously French operas/operettas, stuck to fluffy fun shows for most of his commercially successful career. They sold better! He even wrote some while he was composing Tales of Hoffmann, which clearly has more heft to it. He really struggled to get any of his operas staged, and eventually decided to do it himself, opening an Operetta Theater and aligning it with the World’s Fair for the most bang for the buck. Despite many obstacles including a government monopoly on opera (!!), he made it happen and filled it with his 90 operettas. So count him as an artistic entrepreneur, as well. Because of his success, the “real” musicians considered him frivolous - but Rossini called Offenbach “the Mozart of the Champs-Elysées.”
Guiraud, who finished up Offenbach’s orchestration, also rewrote the original dialogue in Bizet's Carmen as recitatives, still in use today. So if you’ve seen Carmen, you’ve heard his work before.
Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann is an in-depth scolarly take from Princeton on this opera, for our musicologists.
Offenbach composed the “Can Can.” for an opera: Orpheus in the Underworld. See? I knew you’d heard of him.