No presentation of Jacques Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann (at least none that I have seen or heard tell of) has escaped the complications attendant on the opera’s gestation and birth. Those originate in the mass of materials the composer left for his unfinished work, continue with the choices made among them by scholars, directors, and conductors, and end with casting decisions. The long-standard performing edition came close to one sort of solution, largely through eliminating or simply passing over the most obvious contradictions, and made for a relatively tight, playable show that was satisfying if decently performed. The version revived by the Met this season goes far in the other direction, inviting back many of the complications and adding a few of its own. It makes for a baggy, musically uneven evening that would in best-scenario imaginings require a more consistently fulfilling level of performance to stay out of the doldrums.^(I)

The composer began serious work on the opera only in the late 1870s, trying to prepare it for projected productions that did not materialize. But he had been intrigued by the subject for nearly thirty years. Whether or not he’d known E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories, either in his native German or his naturalized French, I don’t know—given their presence in the culture he grew up in, it’s hard to believe he had not. In any case, he had seen the play by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, based on several of the tales and entitled Les contes fantastiques d’Hoffmann, in 1851, and had dreamed of an operatic adaptation ever since. For all those years, there’d been neither time nor reason to work on a realization of the dream. A German Jewish emigré to Paris in the riotous aftermath of the July Revolution of 1831, soon followed by a cholera epidemic, he’d first made his way with his cello, playing in the pit of the Opéra-Comique and then, with a combination of virtuosity, wit, and charm, delighting the patrons of the salons that were the route to social acceptance. Finding some success as a composer of incidental pieces and songs, he had won the license to open his original, tiny Bouffes Parisiens, where he had purveyed a mishmash of proto-operetta-ish skits and duets, pantomimes, and mélodrames—all restricted not only by the space but by licensing requirements to three or four characters—that eventually developed into dozens of whimsical one-act operettas, items of pure distraction for the theatres and habitués of the boulevards and visitors to the great international exhibitions. It wasn’t until 1858 that his breakthrough hit of Orphée aux Enfers began the string of full-length operettas, with their satirical brashness and greater musical and dramatic development, that both defined that genre and made his lasting reputation as its master.

Fellow devotees,

My article on this season’s Met revival of Les contes d’Hoffmann, originally scheduled for today, will be published on Monday, Oct. 28. I’ll be discussing the life and career of Jacques Offenbach; the music and dramaturgy of the opera itself; the choices to be made amongst the materials left at the time of the composer’s death, as sorted through by latterday scholarship; and all these in reference to the production and performances as seen and heard on Oct. 1.

CLO