In all this he had written to fashion, to the taste of a time and a particular social class. Fashion being fickle and eminently vulnerable to political and economic pressures (which, in the times of Louis Philippe and then the Second Empire, were not lacking), he’d seen his standing rise and fall with it, and at length with the fortunes of war. It reached bottom in the wake of the Franco-Prussian conflict and the days of the Commune, when despite his reputation and extraordinary adaptation to the Parisian language and culture, his national origins were not helpful. Now, in 1879, he was in poor health and, with the perspective of age and experience, aware that the brilliant topical frivolities that had carried him to the heights did not guarantee a legacy. But his popularity had rebounded to a degree, and he had in hand a contract with Léon Carvalho’s Opéra-Comique, an institution from which he had been persistently excluded, for a production of his Hoffmann opera. Barbier himself would be the librettist. Despite failing health and the pressure of other projects, he worked feverishly to complete it. And Les contes d’Hoffmann had its premiere, to mixed critical reception but high popular acclaim, in February of 1881. Its composer, though, had been dead since the previous October.

Offenbach customarily avoided setting the final, publishable form of a work till he had registered early audience responses. Without the composer to lend guidance during the final rehearsal period, it was left to his collaborators, most prominently Ernest Guiraud, Offenbach’s son Auguste-Jacques, and Carvalho himself, to decide exactly what was to be performed. The Venetian act proved especially troubling, and was in fact eliminated from the premiere, with bits of its music salvaged for use in the other acts. Over the next quarter-century, a number of other hands, informed by further production experience, joined in the sorting-out that produced the performing edition that, with several variants in cuts and casting assignments, served as the standard until some of the lost alternate materials began surfacing in the late 1970s.^(I) As I noted above, these music and theatre professionals collectively made sensible, practicable decisions, including the cobbling together of an effective Venetian act. The opera’s five-act structure became a three-act one, with the opening and closing scenes in Luther’s cellar tavern converted to prologue and epilogue status. Still, sensible and practicable though the choices were, they left some worrisome loose ends.