January 22, 2004: Offenbach, Les Contes d’Hoffmann
January 22, 2004: Offenbach, Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Conducted by Richard Hickox; Original Production by John Schlesinger; directed by Richard Gregson. Opera in three acts, with a prologue and epilogue. Running time: 3 hours 50 minutes, including two twenty-minute intermissions. Stalls circle, Seat A 24. £92.00
It is remarkable how used one can get to viewing a four-hour theatrical event with one’s head at nearly a right angle to one’s body: such was my angle of vision. Like Vivie Warren’s handshake, the after-effect wears off presently. It was well worth the minor strain. This is a quite wonderful production, and it grows on one in a surprising way, as does Offenbach’s music. At first the thing seemed a little dull and slow-paced, and the Covent Garden audience excessively polite and somewhat cold. But the music gets better as it goes, and the singing follows suit; and the deeper we get into the retrospective tales narrated — and, to be precise, actually reenacted — by Hoffmann, the more we come under the spell of the music and the wonderful structural idea that lies behind it.
That idea is that we have a frame story, within which we have a succession of three analogous stories, which all finally amount to the same story and then, in the epilogue, are seconded and reiterated by the conclusion of the frame story. In the frame, we are in a Parisian tavern with Hoffmann, who is still in love with a singer he has broken off with but who wants him back and has sent him the key to her dressing room. She is singing in the opera house nearby, in a production of Don Giovanni, and Hoffmann and his drinking pals are whiling the time away. Hoffmann is encouraged to tell the stories of the three women he has fallen in love with, but has lost in each case. Thus, the prologue, followed by three long acts, each devoted to one of the three women Hoffmann has loved and lost: Olympia, the mechanical lady of the scientist Spalangani’s invention (Act I); Giulietta, a Venetian courtesan (Act II); and Antonia, whose father has fled with her to Munich to rescue her from an undesired match with Hoffmann (Act III). In each case, Hoffmann’s bête noire and ultimate nemesis, the villainous figure who thwarts his desires or steals or kills his love, becomes the predictable but nonetheless fascinating blocking character who makes the drama what it is. After we have seen Hoffmann sadly, tragically lose the ladies he has given his heart away to, we return to the tavern, in the epilogue. Here, Hoffmann becomes so drunk that he falls into a stupor, does not recognize Stella, the Italian prima donna who has come for him after finishing the opera next door. The unscrupulous politician Lindorf, the first of four incarnations taken on by Hofmann’s nemesis, tips his hat to her, and takes her away. But Hoffmann’s muse, the muse of poetry, who like an unrequited lover has disguised herself as his companion, Nicklaus, and has followed him everywhere like a cauti