Years ago a student of mine, interested in the occult, spoke with a psychic while working on “Scintille, diamant.” She told him that it constituted a real spell, and that he should be careful in dealing with it. ^(I)And though the words are the same, I doubt that she would have warned him off of “Tourne, tourne miroir“—it creates no spell, let alone the suave, magnetic, slowly building one with which “Scintille, diamant” lures Giulietta. Yes, she is for sale, is indebted to Dapertutto for her enviable position, and loves jewelry. That’s the worldly surface of the moment; the diamond must have a deeper undertow. In terms of the dramatic narrative, the most important argument for placing the Venetian episode last is that, unfortunate as the developments of the Paris and Munich acts have been, the facts that Hoffmann now kills a man and has his artistic soul taken from him surely constitute the climax of his misfortunes, leaving him most in need of redemption. Besides, this is one of the best tunes in the show, and though the aria is “by” André Bloch, that tune is Offenbach’s, drawn from the overture to one of the operettas and first set for his own instrument, the cello. Like many 19th Century opera composers, notably Rossini, Offenbach frequently recycled his own music. With all this, I can’t get too worked up about the aria’s “inauthenticity.” It was retained in the Met’s performance.

The remainder of the act proceeded in the standard sequence, perhaps with a cut here or an added line there—nothing popped out for me. There’s only one character left to consider, Pitichinnacio, the last of the four character tenor roles and the one with the least to sing. I suppose the problem for contemporary sensitivities is that, following the comic stereotypes of the stuttering servant and the deaf servant, Pitichinaccio is a dwarf. The creators went a little out of their way for this character, for they reached out to one of the E. T. A. stories that is not the basis of any of Hoffmann’s acts in order to include him. In that story, Signor Formica, he is not only a dwarf but a “eunuch dwarf” (can we cast a countertenor?) and a “little monster;” in short, another stereotype treated as an object of good clean fun, but also suggesting the malevolent spirit so often held to go with a deformed body. In the opera, he is converted to Giulietta’s pet who, when he does speak, offers the snarky tone of the court jester. He can only make an impression if played and sung dwarfishly and snarkily. That’s finessed in this production by suiting him up in a Harlequin costume—another inconvenience effectively deleted from the scene.

Pauvre Hoffmann iii: Those words are at last actually sung, by Dapertutto upon his entrance into the Sextette, and the “Captain’s” succeeding thoughts in the ensemble tell us that he is privy to all of Hoffmann’s earlier misadventures with love. The night-Hoffmanns are four-in-one, and far ahead of the day-Hoffmann. In the earlier episodes, his beloved women have both died, at the hands of the nemeses of course, but with his own foolishness and naïveté, or, to put it more sympathetically, his assumption that his own romantic sincerity was a normative sort of human interaction, having played the catalytic role. This time, once Hoffmann has been led to mistake what the surpassingly beautiful and seductive Giulietta actually has to offer—sublime sex, satisfying both the poet’s aesthetic and sensual longings—for true love, and having once again placed his bet on that perception, he is the victim of the woman’s sheer treachery. And again, he hears the mocking laughter of all who saw it coming. He’s hit bottom, for sure.