Act Two. This is Antonia’s act, set in Munich. In the standard version, it was positioned as Act Three. That always felt right. When well played and sung, it secures our most intense emotional engagement and, if we’re thinking of the acts as steps in Hoffmann’s maturation, as a Bildungsoper sequence, shows him trying to enter into a settled life with a real woman of sympathetic qualities after the disappointments of a doll-woman and a treacherous courtesan. When that fails, the dreams are over. That’s a plausible and compelling narrative, with Antonia’s Song as its climactic story. The scholarly-informed versions, including this “Oeser-influenced” one, take us on a different route, because they are trying to lead us back to The Muse and to some form of redemption. In this sequence, Hoffmann graduates from his mechanical doll fantasy to Antonia, and when faced with her inherited vulnerability, even relinquishes for their future’s sake the shared artistic fantasy that had been so important to their love. But he is again brought up against his nemesis, in a crueler and more numinous guise than Coppélius with his toys and eyes and Spalanzani with his faux-female decoy. Here’s a foe with magical powers of both music and medicine, gifts of great potential benefit turned to evil purpose.

“A strangely furnished room,” say the directions in both play and libretto for this scene’s setting. “At an elegant home,” reads the Met program’s synopsis, which, perhaps misled by the fact that the word “tourterelle” is grammatically feminine, goes on to tell us that Antonia is singing of her dead mother, whereas the song is of course about her separation from Hoffmann, effected by her father’s removal of the household here to Munich; the words of the second verse remove any possible doubt about that. The reason the room is said to be “strangely furnished” is that in the story by E. T. A., father Crespel is himself an eccentric fellow, who has designed his own home in a peculiar fashion. He is also a great collector of rare violins, a selection of which hang in the music room. While this is presumably not that home, Crespel (in this performance Bradley Garvin, capable in a light-bass way) has evidently brought his odd domestic aesthetics with him, and there are still violins about. In this production, the stage picture is “strange” only in the sense that it is almost abstract, open and light in tone—a inexplicable choice, partly because it contradicts the heavy feel of a bourgeois German dwelling, and partly because it completely misses the fortified, locked-in atmosphere Crespel has created to protect his daughter.

In the standard scenario, Nicklausse plays no role in this scene until the very end, when he accompanies Hoffmann’s re-entrance following Antonia’s death (we are meant to assume that he has been “on watch,” though this will not register with most audiences) and sings a single word, “Malheureux!” as he blocks Crespel from stabbing Hoffmann.^(I) Here, though, M/N is on hand at the top with another song, “Vois sous l’archet frémissant,” in which she/he uses the presence of violins to urge Hoffmann back to art. There being no violins on display, nor anything to hang them from, a single violin—quite a pretty one, nicely lit—descends from the flies as a stand-in. The song is not bad, better than the one for The Muse in the Prologue, and was listenably sung. But it’s no mini-hit, like Nicklausse’s “Une poupée,” and again keeps us waiting for what would otherwise be that lovely rise of curtain on Antonia and her “Elle a fui.“