By far the most significant consequence of the sorting-out was the elimination of the role of The Muse. In the run-up to the premiere, Carvalho, apparently influenced by the personnel he had on hand, had split it off from that of Nicklausse. But now, after the trial-and-error of a number of productions, the consensus was that the opera played better without it altogether, leaving Nicklausse as a sort of common-sense boon companion to Hoffmann who tries, each time without success until it is too late, to extricate his friend from the scrapes his romantic poet temperament keeps landing him in. There were occasional ragged threads left dangling from the former concept—a reference to “watching over” Hoffmann, or to being his mentor. But they only aroused a passing curiosity as to what Hoffman was doing with a mere adolescent as sidekick (for that is what the operatic pants role tradition unequivocally suggests), let alone protector, and what this adolescent was doing singing of nights of love and bliss with Venice’s foremost courtesan. That convention aside, the part of Nicklausse offered only those few remaining hints of ever having served any other function, let alone a double identity. The remaining variations in the opera’s presentation were in the playing order of the Antonia and Giulietta acts and in the matter of whether or not to unite the soprano, bass-baritone, and character tenor roles by casting a single artist for each grouping, as specified by Offenbach and Barbier, but not always easily done (especially with the female parts) in the real world of operatic theatre.

If we are to re-introduce The Muse, two questions arise. First: is this truly the one-and-only Muse of Poetry herself, devoting such extended attention to a single client? (She is so named in the Met’s program, and I suppose that for a demigoddess, all things are possible.) Or is it Hoffmann’s personal muse, his own artistic inspiration and rival of his worldly loves for his devotion? The question isn’t just academic—it implies a big difference in how the role is played, and in Hoffmann’s attitude toward her. Second: shall The Muse be a framing device, restricted to the first and last scenes, or does she enter into the action of the stories themselves, as a Muse/Nicklausse combo? If the latter, what music is assigned to M/N, and what’s she up to when not singing, there being scant provision for that in libretto and score? And since we have now re-opened the sorting-out process, what narrative progression do we want from Les contes d’Hoffmann, directed toward what sort of emotional fulfillment? After all, there was none until Barbier and Carré created one for their play. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories are independent of one another except as psychological projections of their author. Each has a separate narrator, a separate antagonist, and separate romantic partner. But to make a coherent theatrical entity of their three chosen tales, Barbier and Carré needed a uniting factor, and so transformed Hoffmann from his real-life self (a composer, critic, and spinner of eerie tales under several identities, and judge and court administrator under his own) into a romantic protagonist, transfixing his drinking companions with the stories of his past loves. If we leave it at that, we have a coherent narrative, but one with a rather discouraging ending. In the “present” of the opera’s beginning (the three tales being flashbacks) Hoffmann, the artist, aspires to La Stella, the lauded prima donna who is singing Donna Anna in the performance of Don Giovanni that has been progressing upstairs while he relates the sequence of his calamitous choices here below. We hope he has learned his lessons. But when we at last arrive at the Epilogue, we find that the only morsel of wisdom he’s acquired is that the oblivion of alcohol is preferable to any further romantic aspirations, and as the students stumble out to a final refrain of their drinking song, he remains alone and stupefied at his tavern table. In one last deception, the councillor Lindorf, first in line of the poets’s enemies, makes off with La Stella, realizing the scheme he’d set in motion at the start of the action.