Hoffmann encounters Coppélius because he has seen Olympia from his window. Her appeal for him is aesthetic—she’s a model of perfect beauty. Mysteriously still for long periods, she suggests a realm beyond, to which the poet must aspire. Accordingly, he has apprenticed himself to her father, Spalanzani, in the hope of meeting her. The opposition of art and science (or, perhaps we ought to say, art and technology) is absolute: no more poetry, no more music, Spalanzani insists. Through the study of physics young Hoffmann shall rise to a professorship and, by the way, meet Spalanzani’s daughter, whose coming-out to society will happen this very evening. As with all the character roles in Hoffmann, there must be something odd about Spalanzani, something of the mad scientist seen in a parodic light. And how should he be cast? He is designated as tenor, but the part’s range can be covered by a lower voice. In the Met ’37 performance, he’s sung by Louis d’Angelo, the company’s leading comprimario bass in those years. That doesn’t seem to me to work at all. Michael Devlin, who later sang the nemeses at the Met and elsewhere, does the part with a great deal more suavity and fluency on the New Orleans ’64 recording, and Vladimir Bauer, a character baritone who stretched that category to include Iago, leaves an indelible impression with the role in the Felsenstein film. What’s clearly needed, though, is a gifted character tenor with a strong lower range and some feel for the grotesque—Paul Franke, for example, who did it at the Met for years and can be heard on the ’55 and ’59 broadcasts, or Michel Sénéchal, predictably good on the Erato recording. In this production, he’s just played straight as a businesslike clinician, sung by a tenor (Tony Stevenson), but one with a weak bottom octave. The part, an important one, made no point.

The guests arrive, bringing a bit of a downtown look that’s not a good fit with the society we hear in the music, and then Olympia, in the person of Erin Morley. She sang the Doll Song prettily, accurately, and with some spirit, and executed the elaborate automatonic choreography with security, precision, and a touch of slyness—a thoroughly professional job in all respects. The act then played out more or less as it usually does, within the performance limitations already described.

Pauvre Hoffmann i:  As the act ends with the cry of “un automate!,” Hoffmann hears what drives him mad, the mocking laughter of those in the know. From the outset, everyone else has understood that the Miss Paris to whom he has been addressing his flowery, romantic inventions, with whom he dreamed of living together and to whom he ascribed profound thoughts, was only a machine. A beautiful and somewhat mysterious machine at whose perfection they had come to marvel, but still a machine. They—every one of the other characters and the many guests to the coming-out ball—were all with the times, with this age of mechanical beings that seemed quite lifelike, as if surely inhabited by some human or spiritual presence, while Hoffmann was lost in his foolish poetic fantasies and projections, the last to know. We can only pity the artist, adrift in a new and unfriendly world, while the inventors of this ingenious bit of virtuality and of new ways of seeing destroy their own creation while squabbling over the never-to-be-realized profits.