love and tears
by Douglas Messerli
Jules
Barbier (libretto, based on his and Michel Carré’s play, based on tales by
E.T.A. Hoffman), Jacques Offenbach (music) Le
contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of
Hoffmann) / 1881; the production I saw was the Metropolitan Opera’s High Definition
Broadcast of January 31, 2015
Jacques
Offenbach’s operatic repertory favorite, Le
contes d’Hoffmann is a true mish-mash of musical and theatrical offerings:
comic opera numbers such as "Il était une fois à la cour d'Eisenach” (a
number that might have been at home in the Broadway musical Cabaret, replacing that musical’s number
“Messkite”); drinking songs in the manner of Verdi and Wagner; comic novelty
numbers such as Olympia’s “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” and the servant
Frantz’s insistence on his singing, dancing talent, “Jour et nuit je me mets en
quatre”; all mixed up with stunning operatic arias of love and longing
such as "C’est un chanson d’amour." 
Divided into three distinct
"tales," Offenbach’s work functions as a baggy monster, with the
vague and often fragile interconnective link insisting that the stories all
represent the poet’s failed loves ; yet productions have, at times, lopped
off an act or, at other times, added another. The opera, moreover, sometimes
effortlessly, at other times rather clumsily, shifts between realism, fantasy,
and literary autobiography while delving into the grotesque. Particularly,
under Bartlett Sher’s Metropolitan Opera direction, the work seems nearly
always teetering on the edge of a Kafka-like nightmare tinged with a
Berlin-cabaret sexuality that borders also on camp (Sher insists his sources
were Austrian, but they seem much closer, to my way of thinking, to the Berlin
of the 1920s.).
For all this, nonetheless, the Le contes d’Hoffmann survives,
perhaps simply because it does encompass so much that other operas of the day
might have thrown overboard. Whether conceiving as woman as an innocent, an
artiste, or as a courtesan, what Offenbach’s Hoffmann reveals, in the end, is
that no fulfilling liaison can be consummated as long as the writer-artist is
wed to his art. Time and again Hoffmann loses his mind, at no time more evident
than when he puts on Coppélius’ rose-colored glasses to become enchanted with
the wind-up doll Olympia (not so very different, indeed, from Lubitsch’s “doll”
described in the essay above—except that in Hoffmann’s fiction, she has no
human equivalent, despite the fact that the real human Erin Morley brilliantly
imitates her robotic actions.
Hoffmann (the charming and energetic
Vittorio Grigolo) falls in love with a fellow artist, the singer Antonia (Hibla
Gerzmava), only to discover that her very profession may result in her death.
Like a would-be controlling fiancee (today we would describe him as unliberated
sexist), Hoffmann is forced to demand, as has her father, Crespel (David
Pittsinger), that she give up her career, a choice that can only leave her in such frustration that
she is almost immediately tempted to challenge the men in her life by
chanelling the voice of her mother, a former primma dona inflicted with the
same illness. Certainly Antonia can no more give up her role as an artist than
can Hoffmann.
And finally, after nearly giving up on
love, the writer seeks love in the arms of a wicked courtesan, Giulietta
(Christine Rice) only to nearly lose his soul. Hoffmann’s absurd love does end
in the death of Giulietta’s equally lied-to boyfriend, Schlémil (David
Crawford). And even though, in killing her lover, he obtains the key to her
boudoir, he is saved by the fact that she literally leaves him in the lurch,
gondola-ing off without him. As the police arrive, he is, once more, saved by
the only one who truly loves him—and whom he, unknowinlg, tuly loves, his male
friend Niklausse, secretly his "female" muse. If the device of the
male friend/female muse offers a slightly homoerotic tinge to the opera, in the
end it truly doesn’t matter, since the
muse, obviously, is an aspect of his own being, just as the three women with
whom he falls in love are all elements of the one woman imagines as his divine
partner, the Mozart diva, Stella, who literally ignores him, and whom he, in is drunken state does not even recognize. Ultimately, the
opera suggests that true artists can only find satisfaction in themselves—along
with copious amounts of beer and wine!
Interestingly, Sher has skewered his
production away from the simplistic Hoffmann, who, despite his fascinating
tales, remains a vague actor in the stories of his own life. For Sher, the
writer E.T.A. Hoffmann is merely a stand-in for Offenbach himself. And, from
this perspective, the opera does indeed reveal a great deal about the situation
of the actual artist, a German Jew, well loved by French society, but obviously
made to also feel always as an outsider. The several Jewish references (at
times almost anti-Semitic, particularly in the legend of Kleinzach) signify the
kind of dual reality that the composer faced, wherein at one moment he laughs
with his audience as he tells the story, but by work’s end tragically becomes
the mocked figure himself, taking on the tallit
almost as a protective garment against the taunts of his failures in love and
life.
It also helps to clarify the inexplicable
evil of the four-headed villian of the piece, who appears as Lindorf,
Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and Daspertutto (all played by the noted baritone
Thomas Hampson). Why, we ask are these villians, so similar in some respects,
all out to steal, murder, and abuse Hoffmann’s would-be loved ones. There is no
explanation of course for such evil, such seemingly in-bred hate—except perhaps
for the successful insider’s detestation of all who represent something
different and new to his culture. Such hate clearly leads what Nicklausse / the
Muse observes as a "loss of love and tears," but it will never be
able to entirely destroy true art.
Los Angeles, February 1, 2015
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