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The cursed opera by Tim Ashley, The Guardian
Plagued by ill health and a sinking reputation, Offenbach chose as his last work a bleak, sinister fable. Tim Ashley explores how The Tales of Hoffmann echoed the dark tragedies of the composer's own life
(Johannes Häfner)
When Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann was first performed in Paris in 1881, the composer had been dead for three months, so it is perhaps hardly surprising that the work was seen as valedictory - "Offenbach's last testament", as one critic put it.
Yet many also considered The Tales of Hoffmann strangely different from anything that he had previously produced, and indeed from anything anyone had heard before.
Offenbach was primarily a composer of operettas, but The Tales of Hoffmann is a serious work that, despite moments of edgy humour, is overwhelmingly bleak, its subject matter sinister. The central character is based on the German writer ETA Hoffmann, who, during a drunken binge in a Nuremberg pub, tells three disquieting tales about the great loves in his life. Each is drawn from one of the real Hoffmann's short stories; each depicts passion thwarted by a demonic figure.
The first object of his desire is the automaton Olympia. Hoffmann is conned into believing her to be a real woman by Coppelius, the deranged oculist who created Olympia's lifelike eyes, but who later destroys Hoffmann's fantasy by smashing her to bits. The second, Antonia, is a soprano, plagued by an unnamed illness that worsens when she sings. She becomes the victim of the mesmerist Dr Miracle, who forces her to sing herself to death. Finally, there is Giulietta, a courtesan in thrall to the sorcerer Dapertutto. Giulietta offers her favours for the price of a man's soul, then rejects her victims when the grotesque transaction is completed. We are never told whether the tales are intended to be real, or whether they are the products of Hoffmann's booze-befuddled brain.
The demonic subject, together with a series of bizarre events surrounding the opera's creation, soon saddled The Tales of Hoffmann with a curious reputation. Offenbach worked through ill health for four years to finish the score, though when he died, he hadn't produced definitive versions of a number of scenes; for the premiere, a performing edition was hastily assembled by the composer Ernest Guiraud. A peculiar story soon began to circulate, however, that Offenbach had made some sort of mysterious "pact with death" in order to have time to finish the piece, only to be robbed of his dream just as his own Hoffmann is robbed of love by the devil. The opera, it was said, was jinxed.
A number of catastrophes soon added to the work's reputation. The theatre where the Austrian premiere took place in December 1881 was burnt to the ground a few days after the performance. Six years later, a similar conflagration consumed the Opéra-Comique, destroying the score as Offenbach had left it. For years many opera houses wouldn't touch it, and the supposed curse was seemingly only lifted when a Berlin production in 1905 passed off without incident and was hugely successful.
So what drew Offenbach to such uncharacteristic subject matter? There seems little doubt that his identification with his central character was acute. His fictional Hoffmann is a great teller of tales, whose life is on the skids; Offenbach was a great entertainer, whose reputation had taken a turn for the worse, leaving him isolated and open to ferocious attack.
Success had come to the composer almost overnight, when he opened his own theatre, the Bouffes-Parisiennes in 1855, initially presenting programmes we would now call cabaret or revue. After the premiere of the full-length operetta Orphée aux Enfers in 1858, he was identified as the musical voice of France's Second Empire. The public couldn't get enough of his work.
The catastrophe came in 1870, when the Second Empire collapsed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. Though he had lived in France since 1833, Offenbach was born in Cologne in 1819, the son of a synagogue cantor. His German origins suddenly made him suspect. He became the butt of anti-semitic jibes in the rising tide of racism that eventually culminated in the Dreyfus affair. His public stayed away, and his music was frequently held up as embodying all that was meretricious in the previous regime.
Given the satirical clout of his greatest operettas, the charge of triviality now strikes us as absurd, but it rankled. Offenbach had turned to operetta only after countless proposals for serious works had been turned down by opera houses. The Tales of Hoffmann was effectively his final bid for acceptance by the French musical establishment, which had always deemed him eccentric.
Offenbach, who was also drawn to Hoffmann through his enthusiasm for German Romanticism, could not have failed to be struck by certain similarities between the writer's life and his own.
One of the great figures in German literature, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) began his career as a composer and turned to writing only after losing a lengthy battle with the German musical establishment, which had dismissed his works as cranky. But music continued to obsess him; in many of his stories, he links it with supernatural forces. Counsellor Krespel, the tale on which the Antonia episode is based, presents music itself as an uncontrollable, diabolical entity that can kill - literally.
In making Hoffmann the protagonist of of his opera, Offenbach cannily isolates the autobiographical strand in the writer's fiction. The great love of Hoffmann's life was a soprano named Julia Marc. But she rejected him and married a decrepit alcoholic, years older than herself. Hoffmann's passion remained undimmed and gradually took on a pathological, paranoid quality. His fiction frequently focuses on a neurotic hero, an unattainable female figure and a sinister, predatory older male, whose machinations leave catastrophe in their wake.
Many of Hoffmann's tales derive their force from a deep ambivalence as to whether the weird events they depict are genuinely the result of supernatural agencies or merely the projections of the damaged psyches of his heroes. At the opening of A New Year's Eve Adventure, the source of the Giulietta section, Hoffmann tells us that his hero "feels so little difference between his inner and outer worlds that one can hardly distinguish the boundaries of either". The Sandman, which introduces us to Olympia and Coppelius, presents the narrative through the eyes of a mentally unstable man, who suffered horrific abuse as a child. It is hardly surprising that Dostoevsky and Freud were among the greatest admirers of Hoffmann.
Offenbach has sometimes been castigated for straying too far from the original plots and for toning down the horror of Hoffmann's writing. The accusations are only partly true. The Olympia episode, certainly, is presented as a bitter comedy, in marked contrast to the utter nightmare of The Sandman. However, few scenes in opera are more disturbing than the sequence in which Miracle - a character invented by the librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré - brings Antonia's dead mother back to life in order to destroy her child.
Stylistically, the opera reveals a remarkable amalgam of French and German influences that effectively forms a tribute to the two countries that shaped Offenbach's life. Weberian chorales preface Hoffmann's narrative. Olympia delivers a big coloratura aria straight out of French grand opera, while Antonia sings herself to death to music reminiscent of Schubert. Giulietta's famously sexy barcarole, meanwhile, derives from a previously unsuccessful opera called The Rhine Nymphs, about the same watery crew that Wagner depicted in the Ring.
Yet there is one aspect of the opera that makes it absolutely unique: in some ways it has to be recomposed or reassembled each time it is performed. There is still no definitive score, nor can there ever be. Despite the destruction of much of the original material in the Opéra-Comique fire of 1887, a huge number of manuscripts for Hoffmann are still extant, including multiple versions of several scenes.
There have been numerous performing editions, some claiming to be "critical", others importing music from Offenbach's other works to strengthen supposedly weak passages.
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.
Friday January 9, 2004
Plagued by ill health and a sinking reputation, Offenbach chose as his last work a bleak, sinister fable. Tim Ashley explores how The Tales of Hoffmann echoed the dark tragedies of the composer's own life
(Johannes Häfner)
When Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann was first performed in Paris in 1881, the composer had been dead for three months, so it is perhaps hardly surprising that the work was seen as valedictory - "Offenbach's last testament", as one critic put it.
Yet many also considered The Tales of Hoffmann strangely different from anything that he had previously produced, and indeed from anything anyone had heard before.
Offenbach was primarily a composer of operettas, but The Tales of Hoffmann is a serious work that, despite moments of edgy humour, is overwhelmingly bleak, its subject matter sinister. The central character is based on the German writer ETA Hoffmann, who, during a drunken binge in a Nuremberg pub, tells three disquieting tales about the great loves in his life. Each is drawn from one of the real Hoffmann's short stories; each depicts passion thwarted by a demonic figure.
The first object of his desire is the automaton Olympia. Hoffmann is conned into believing her to be a real woman by Coppelius, the deranged oculist who created Olympia's lifelike eyes, but who later destroys Hoffmann's fantasy by smashing her to bits. The second, Antonia, is a soprano, plagued by an unnamed illness that worsens when she sings. She becomes the victim of the mesmerist Dr Miracle, who forces her to sing herself to death. Finally, there is Giulietta, a courtesan in thrall to the sorcerer Dapertutto. Giulietta offers her favours for the price of a man's soul, then rejects her victims when the grotesque transaction is completed. We are never told whether the tales are intended to be real, or whether they are the products of Hoffmann's booze-befuddled brain.
The demonic subject, together with a series of bizarre events surrounding the opera's creation, soon saddled The Tales of Hoffmann with a curious reputation. Offenbach worked through ill health for four years to finish the score, though when he died, he hadn't produced definitive versions of a number of scenes; for the premiere, a performing edition was hastily assembled by the composer Ernest Guiraud. A peculiar story soon began to circulate, however, that Offenbach had made some sort of mysterious "pact with death" in order to have time to finish the piece, only to be robbed of his dream just as his own Hoffmann is robbed of love by the devil. The opera, it was said, was jinxed.
A number of catastrophes soon added to the work's reputation. The theatre where the Austrian premiere took place in December 1881 was burnt to the ground a few days after the performance. Six years later, a similar conflagration consumed the Opéra-Comique, destroying the score as Offenbach had left it. For years many opera houses wouldn't touch it, and the supposed curse was seemingly only lifted when a Berlin production in 1905 passed off without incident and was hugely successful.
So what drew Offenbach to such uncharacteristic subject matter? There seems little doubt that his identification with his central character was acute. His fictional Hoffmann is a great teller of tales, whose life is on the skids; Offenbach was a great entertainer, whose reputation had taken a turn for the worse, leaving him isolated and open to ferocious attack.
Success had come to the composer almost overnight, when he opened his own theatre, the Bouffes-Parisiennes in 1855, initially presenting programmes we would now call cabaret or revue. After the premiere of the full-length operetta Orphée aux Enfers in 1858, he was identified as the musical voice of France's Second Empire. The public couldn't get enough of his work.
The catastrophe came in 1870, when the Second Empire collapsed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. Though he had lived in France since 1833, Offenbach was born in Cologne in 1819, the son of a synagogue cantor. His German origins suddenly made him suspect. He became the butt of anti-semitic jibes in the rising tide of racism that eventually culminated in the Dreyfus affair. His public stayed away, and his music was frequently held up as embodying all that was meretricious in the previous regime.
Given the satirical clout of his greatest operettas, the charge of triviality now strikes us as absurd, but it rankled. Offenbach had turned to operetta only after countless proposals for serious works had been turned down by opera houses. The Tales of Hoffmann was effectively his final bid for acceptance by the French musical establishment, which had always deemed him eccentric.
Offenbach, who was also drawn to Hoffmann through his enthusiasm for German Romanticism, could not have failed to be struck by certain similarities between the writer's life and his own.
One of the great figures in German literature, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) began his career as a composer and turned to writing only after losing a lengthy battle with the German musical establishment, which had dismissed his works as cranky. But music continued to obsess him; in many of his stories, he links it with supernatural forces. Counsellor Krespel, the tale on which the Antonia episode is based, presents music itself as an uncontrollable, diabolical entity that can kill - literally.
In making Hoffmann the protagonist of of his opera, Offenbach cannily isolates the autobiographical strand in the writer's fiction. The great love of Hoffmann's life was a soprano named Julia Marc. But she rejected him and married a decrepit alcoholic, years older than herself. Hoffmann's passion remained undimmed and gradually took on a pathological, paranoid quality. His fiction frequently focuses on a neurotic hero, an unattainable female figure and a sinister, predatory older male, whose machinations leave catastrophe in their wake.
Many of Hoffmann's tales derive their force from a deep ambivalence as to whether the weird events they depict are genuinely the result of supernatural agencies or merely the projections of the damaged psyches of his heroes. At the opening of A New Year's Eve Adventure, the source of the Giulietta section, Hoffmann tells us that his hero "feels so little difference between his inner and outer worlds that one can hardly distinguish the boundaries of either". The Sandman, which introduces us to Olympia and Coppelius, presents the narrative through the eyes of a mentally unstable man, who suffered horrific abuse as a child. It is hardly surprising that Dostoevsky and Freud were among the greatest admirers of Hoffmann.
Offenbach has sometimes been castigated for straying too far from the original plots and for toning down the horror of Hoffmann's writing. The accusations are only partly true. The Olympia episode, certainly, is presented as a bitter comedy, in marked contrast to the utter nightmare of The Sandman. However, few scenes in opera are more disturbing than the sequence in which Miracle - a character invented by the librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré - brings Antonia's dead mother back to life in order to destroy her child.
Stylistically, the opera reveals a remarkable amalgam of French and German influences that effectively forms a tribute to the two countries that shaped Offenbach's life. Weberian chorales preface Hoffmann's narrative. Olympia delivers a big coloratura aria straight out of French grand opera, while Antonia sings herself to death to music reminiscent of Schubert. Giulietta's famously sexy barcarole, meanwhile, derives from a previously unsuccessful opera called The Rhine Nymphs, about the same watery crew that Wagner depicted in the Ring.
Yet there is one aspect of the opera that makes it absolutely unique: in some ways it has to be recomposed or reassembled each time it is performed. There is still no definitive score, nor can there ever be. Despite the destruction of much of the original material in the Opéra-Comique fire of 1887, a huge number of manuscripts for Hoffmann are still extant, including multiple versions of several scenes.
There have been numerous performing editions, some claiming to be "critical", others importing music from Offenbach's other works to strengthen supposedly weak passages.
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.
Friday January 9, 2004