I’ve always had a special fondness for the composer, Jacques Offenbach. In the first place, his phenomenal success during the Second Empire in France from 1852 till 1870 and beyond blasts apart the myth of qualitative differences between peoples, nationalities, and races. Here was a musician born of Jewish parents and brought up in Germany whose works came to epitomize the exhilarating light-heartedness, scintillating causticity, and sexiness of the French spirit of the time. Those of you who have heard music from his most famous operettas will probably agree that the experience can be compared to swirling around in champagne bubbles. In the second place, I have always admired the courage with which he demolished in his operettas all the sacred political, social, and religious cows of his day, turning them into ludicrous caricatures. He must have enjoyed protection in the highest places because there was enough subversive material in his works to have him assassinated several times over! In our age of political correctness, which, incidentally, I loathe, this is a virtue to be treasured. Finally, the tenacity with which he pursued the writing of his first and only opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, despite the excruciating physical pain that never left him, is, for me, deeply moving.
Despite the international fame his operettas brought him, Offenbach wanted to be taken seriously as an opera composer. It’s as though Elton John yearned to receive a commission from the Metropolitan Opera or the Canadian Opera Company. Or, if you allow me another comparison, it’s as though the most brilliant comic actor in the world longed to play Shakespeare’s tragic hero, Hamlet, just once before he died, and actually managed to pull it off successfully. Well, almost successfully. You see, Offenbach did not live long enough to complete the score. It was performed in January 1881, three months after his death. As a result, even favourably disposed musicologists still tend to describe The Tales of Hoffmann as a “problematic,” “potential,” or “unresolved” masterpiece. Scholars, conductors, and directors keep rewriting its text and score, rearranging its scenes, making cuts and additions, a process that doesn’t necessarily make his opera more clear. If I were to describe all the different versions of the opera that are available today, I would be standing here talking for the next few hours. It seems that no two commentators can even agree on the meaning of this opera, which is certainly not the case with the composer’s exuberant operettas.
Now it’s all very well to say that there is no definitive interpretation possible of this opera. But as individual opera-goers, we have to make up our own minds. To help you reach your own conclusions, I would like to share with you my personal reactions to the Tales of Hoffmann. Whether you agree or disagree with me, at least I will provide you with a starting point for a discussion about what for me is one of the most fascinating works in the operatic repertory. My reactions revolve around two issues: the sources that inspired this opera, and the themes it evokes. I must forewarn you that my views on The Tales of Hoffmann and the staging you will see are appreciably different. There’s no need to worry. Take in what I have to say, enjoy the production, then make up your own mind. This is what art is all about.
Unlike some of Offenbach’s biographers such as Siegfried Kracauer and James Harding, I do not believe that the composer, who was terminally ill when writing his masterpiece, sought refuge unconsciously in his past and reached back toward his roots and the music of his native country, Germany. I do not subscribe to the notion that he felt some occult kinship with E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German writer whose stories indirectly inspired his opera. Hoffmann was a concocter of infernal, neurotically over-imagined fairy tales that were simply incompatible with Offenbach’s temperament. Granted, the music of his opera is richer, more varied, and expressive than that of his operettas. But it still remains the music of Offenbach, which means that it still overflows with exuberance and wit. It is still far more French than German. It seems to me that everything Offenbach ever wrote leads up to it. The party scenes of the Prologue, at Spalanzani’s, and in Venice; the mechanical doll’s coloratura fireworks and the hilarious moments when she runs out of “juice” and has to be rewound, the comic servants who are among the most grotesque nutbars one can find on or off the operatic stage are all precisely the kind of things he had been dealing with for years. If one compared modulations, rhythms, melodic structures, and orchestration aria for aria and scene for scene, one could, I’m convinced, demonstrate that the best of Offenbach’s operettas such as La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein and La Périchole are very close musical cousins of The Tales of Hoffmann.
I believe, like David Littlejohn, that Jacques Offenbach was simply looking for a good story for his legacy opera: one that would enable him to deploy all of his known compositional skills, one that would be popular enough to be commissioned by the Opéra-Comique, one that would ensure his own immortality and, as he promised his wife just before he died, make their grandchildren rich, which indeed it did. He found this story in a play written in 1851 by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, and based on several wildly fantastical tales by the German E.T.A. Hoffmann. The French playwrights even made Hoffmann the hero of their drama. When the play was first produced, people talked about it as a natural for musical setting. Olympia, after all, has to waltz wildly and sing brilliantly. Antonia dreams of being a star soprano even though she is a dying consumptive like Violetta and Mimi. Stella, Hoffmann’s final love, is an opera star and an adulated one as well. Barbier and Carré wrote drinking songs for the outer frame scenes and for Giulietta’s Venetian orgy. Much of the play was written in verse, and the text lent itself to a musical setting with remarkably little revision.
All of this leads me to believe that Offenbach felt no special attraction to the German writer, Hoffman; rather, he appreciated Barbier and Carré’s astutely condensed, largely demystified Parisian stage version. The French play was still exotic enough while avoiding the overheated, overblown romanticism that characterized the original stories that inspired it. I think Offenbach was convinced that, given his considerable talent as a composer, he could do something very special with the text. Taking great pains to compose for the first time in his life—he spent the better part of two years on his unfinished score instead of knocking it off within several months as he normally would have—he managed, before his death, to do precisely that.
But even if one can agree with the view that Offenbach did not identify with the German writer, Hoffmann, there is a second issue to deal with, namely, what is this opera supposed to signify? For me, The Tales of Hoffmann offers a splendid orchestration of the two intertwining themes of love and death, a function that opera can perform almost better than any other art form because of the visceral power and excitement its music generates. Love here implies passion: irrational, blatantly sensual, or tender. Death means not just the physical destruction of the beloved but the shattering of idealistic illusions, which can make life a living death for the hero who is experiencing this loss. This explains the four villains who are constantly stalking the hero. They can be interpreted as metaphors for the potential for heartbreak contained in every one of his amorous adventures.
When the hero of Offenbach’s opera, Hoffmann, appears in the prologue, he is madly in love with a haughty prima donna named Stella who seems to embody aspects of the three women he has already loved and lost: Olympia, Antonia, and Giulietta. Is this latest liaison doomed to failure as well? It would appear so from the song with which he regales his fellow drinkers in the tavern. The song describes an ugly dwarf, Kleinzac, and evokes Hoffmann’s sorrowful awareness of the conflict between reality and dreams of romance. During the course of the aria, his mind wanders off into the recollection of a beautiful young woman who had once conquered his heart. The music acquires a poignant sadness. Hoffmann eventually pulls himself out of this state as though emerging from a trance, and resumes the song about the dwarf, remarking that however ungainly Kleinzac may appear, he is worth more than the remembrance of this former love. And indeed, by the end of the opera, Hoffmann will lose Stella just as he had lost the three others. The first incarnation of the villain dogging his existence, the councilor Lindorf, knows that sooner or later Hoffmann will sink into a drunken stupor and then Stella will be his.
This sombrely pessimistic vision of passion is very French. From the seventeenth century up till the twentieth, from Mme de Lafayette to Marcel Proust and beyond, French writers have more often than not insisted that love, when defined as a burning exaltation of the mind, the heart, and the senses resembles a multi-hued, evanescent mirage. By its very nature, it cannot last. An extreme, facetious example of this attitude occurs in the original French version of the film, La Cage aux folles which some of you may remember from the 80’s. The husband in the homosexual couple begs his former wife to preside over a dinner party during which he will be entertaining their son’s up-tight, rigidly bourgeois, future in-laws. To persuade her to play the part of the devoted spouse and mother, he invokes the passion they felt for one another in a distant past: Toi que j’ai aimée pendant quinze longues minutes. (“You whom I loved for fifteen long minutes.”)
As Hoffmann regales his fellow drinkers with the tales of his unhappy loves, the ephemeral nature of this emotion becomes increasingly obvious. The mechanical doll Olympia in Act I represents aesthetic perfection that dazzles and fires up his imagination. The coloratura pyrotechnics of her aria reflect this. In a sense, Olympia is like a blank cinema screen upon which the hero projects all of his ardent idealism. He doesn’t want to see her as she is, despite his friend Nicklausse’s admonitions. His imagination transforms her into the companion with whom he longs to embark on a symbiotic relationship during the course of which their two natures will become one. “Ineffable delirium where one feels one’s being melting into a kiss,” he exclaims ecstatically. The villain in this act, Coppélius, actually does him a favour by dismembering the doll, as do Spalanzani’s guests who cruelly mock his gullibility.
After this exercise in self-delusion, Hoffmann comes to his senses and regains his psychological balance. In Act 2, he lavishes all his protective tenderness on a lovely young woman, Antonia. He is convinced he has found the love of his life. On the surface, Hoffmann seems to have chosen well, indeed, extremely well. Here is a tender, sensitive person who genuinely cares for him. There is one insurmountable problem, however. Although Antonia has promised her father and fiancé never to sing again in order not to aggravate her grave malady, she secretly longs for prima donna stardom, like her late mother. On the conscious level, she is a sweet, obedient daughter and acquiescent fiancée, willing to sacrifice her dreams of operatic glory to a conventional existence. But in the subconscious depths of her being, she yearns to break free from this straitjacket of conformism and fulfill herself as a great artist even if it means flirting with death and even succumbing to it. Thus, the third villain, Dr. Miracle, is simply the catalyst who brings up to the surface all of Antonia’s repressed yearnings until the urge to sing becomes irresistible and leads inevitably to her death. Dr. Miracle does this by conjuring up Antonia’s dead mother who, in turn, exhorts her daughter to fulfill her destiny by deploying her magnificent vocal talent. The trio in which Antonia, the ghost of her mother, and Dr. Miracle, fiddling diabolically on his violin, join forces, contains for me the most thrilling music in the whole opera.
In Act 3, brokenhearted again, older, and totally disillusioned now, Hoffmann becomes infatuated with the Venetian courtesan, Giulietta. In hyper-politically correct language, one could refer to her as a horizontally accessible person. His attraction to Giulietta signifies a downward moral spiral. All he craves at present is physical excitement to anesthetize his existential anguish. Two musical high points in this third act reflect the radical change that has overcome Hoffmann. The first is the famous barcarolle on which the Venetian Act opens. It creates an atmosphere of languorous, dusky sensuality. The second is Hoffmann’s drinking song in which he derides and denounces love as a fallacy. All he wants now is to submerge himself in the erotic intoxication generated by the luxury-item prostitute under whose spell he has fallen.
What makes Giulietta so redoubtable is the cleverness with which she can simulate passion. She has a complete mastery of its rhetoric and gestures. She knows how to ooze eroticism convincingly while remaining glacial inside. She collects lovers the way a hunter bags trophies. They can drop dead at her feet and it will leave her completely indifferent. Hoffmann is so beguiled by her presence that he allows himself to be drawn into a vortex. This is obvious in the impassioned duet they sing culminating in the words: Ivresse inassouvie (“Unassuaged inebriation.”) His rival for the courtesan’s love, Shlémil, lost his shadow when he allowed her to subjugate his heart. Hoffmann will lose his reflection, symbolizing his depersonalization as a result of his servile erotic fixation.
Giulietta’s ability to ensnare men is all the more frightening because she allows herself to be manipulated by the sinister Dapertutto, the fourth reincarnation of the villain who is constantly pursuing the hero. Like a master puppeteer, he controls the whole of Giulietta’s love life. His aria, Scintille, diamant (“Sparkle, diamond”) illustrates this total domination he exercises over her and the thrill he feels in wielding total power not only over her but, via remote control, over all her lovers. When Giulietta dies after consuming a poisonous drink meant for Hoffmann’s friend, Nicklausse, Dapertutto reveals his cynicism and heartlessness by uttering the words: Giulietta, maladroite (“Giulietta, how clumsy”).
So after relating his unhappy adventures to his drinking companions, what is left for Hoffmann in the Epilogue? He can’t join Stella for an assignation. He is too drunk by this time to be an effective lover, as the first villain, Lindorf had correctly surmised. Nor would he want to risk being wounded again emotionally. Fortunately for him, he is an extremely talented poet. He will commit himself to his Muse, who is none other than his devoted friend, Nicklausse in another reincarnation. Hoffmann’s muse had always wanted to reclaim him. Now that his amorous adventures have reached a dead end, he will belong to her and her alone. His muse will enable Hoffmann to transform the agony of his life into artistic gold. Hoffmann’s art, at least—one hopes—will never let him down.
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