Act Three. Placing the Venetian scene last requires a revision of the Bildungsoper narrative, one that, scholarship instructs us, is more in line with the creators’ intentions than the standard version’s. In it, Hoffmann’s response to the shattering of his dream of domestic tranquility with Antonia, on top of his humiliating misadventure with Olympia, renders him bitter and cynical. He becomes a man who rejects the quest for true love with a hunger for the purely sensual variety, and wants even to replace the languorous forms of that with the madder-music-stronger-wine variety he extols in his Couplet Bachiques. Of course, being still a romantic poet at heart, he cannot help converting this impulse into yet another “in love” episode. But that’s getting ahead of our story.

I assume that this act’s change of venue, from Florence in both story and play to Venice, was largely for atmospheric reasons—good ones, for we can hardly imagine the scene’s most evocative music anywhere else. The shift also takes us from the Cradle of the Renaissance, with its artistic and intellectual legacy proclaiming itself on every piazza, to the city of ongoing carnival and festival, a magical but decadent memento of La Serenissima, the sea-trading political and economic hegemon of earlier centuries. The setting for this act, though frightfully cluttered and crowded, was the most successful of the production in capturing some of the feel of place.

Over the past century, the famous Barcarolle has usually been out of whack, vocally speaking. That’s because the role of Giulietta, originally intended for a soprano (a “coloratura soprano,” at that) had gravitated toward mezzo-soprano or even contralto, while that of M/N had taken on the lighter pants role coloration of the typical Nicklausse—yet Giulietta takes the upper line in the duet, thereby obliterating the balance between the two voices and losing some of the effect of the interweaving lines. This was somewhat mitigated here by the presence of Berzhanskaya, for although Clémentine Margaine, the Giulietta, has the larger, more solid mezzo voice, Berzhanskaya was able to hold her own and come closer to completing the music’s effect. Margaine offered a cold, dominating sort of Giulietta rather than a seductive, insinuating one, but at least made it back to the land of normal operatic interpretation after her detour through last season’s misbegotten Carmen. 

“Allez! pour te livrer combat,” sings the new nemesis, “Captain” Dapertutto.^(I) So begins the fine recitative, written by Guiraud, that leads into Dapertutto’s aria. But which one? We’ve already seen that in the standard performing version, the music of one of several re-writes by Offenbach is purloined to give Coppélius his “J’ai des yeux,” and to make room for “Scintille, diamant,” the foremost of all the inauthentic pieces we are reluctant to be without. The scholarly revisions have taken it back from “J’ai des yeux,” but without restoring it to its intended place. On the Erato recording, Kaye has chosen one of the settings of “Tourne, tourne miroir,” which uses all the words of “Scintille, diamant,” and thus could be said to accomplish the same action. It’s a bustling, rather jolly song in operetta mode, which I don’t at all mind hearing. But its popularity aside, there is a strong case for “Scintille, diamant,” grounded in what seems to me the most dramatically telling view of the character who sings it. Dapertutto has an occult power over Giulietta. When he calls, she must answer; it’s a sort of Parisian Klingsor/Kundry relationship, through which Giulietta uses her irresistible sexual allure to help her demonic master capture the  souls of selected men. She has, for instance, drawn in Schlemil, whose shadow Dapertutto has stolen, leaving him without substance, an object of derision. (In play and original libretto, there is some wordplay about Schlemil’s wish to be lit from all sides, so that the shadow’s absence will not be noticed.) Now, by way of variety, Dapertutto covets Hoffmann’s reflection—not his substantial being, but the part of Hoffmann that he considers his essential self. In the story, Giulietta calls it his “dream-ego,” the self that dreams and thus creates, and in the aria Dapertutto sings that one man (Schlemil) is about to lose his life, and the other (Hoffmann) his soul. The aria (in whichever form) aside, Dapertutto’s music is conversational and ironic in tone, and the Mirror Couplets are just a solo-moment  extension of that. As with Coppélius and “J’ai des yeux,” to insert “Scintille, diamant” is to lift Dapertutto to another level, more dangerous and “operatic.”