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
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.
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!
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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