Pretty Yende was our Antonia. She has an attractive lyric soprano voice of about the right weight for this part, and sings with musicality and a general stylistic awareness. At least on this evening, though, the voice could have used more firmness, the interpretive gestures (both musical and physical) more incisiveness—it all sounded slightly tired and careful, though never unpleasant. And here is our four-in-one character tenor’s moment, with Frantz’s song, “Jour et nuit je me mets en quatre,” which can elicit sad smiles but more often calls forth impatient irritation. Aaron Blake, who in the previous scene had evidently been instructed to play Cochenille not merely as a a stammerer, but as a sufferer from some awful full-body neurological disorder, managed to avoid most of the irritation, and upon ascending to the Gs and As of his vocalise displayed more upper-range body and color than the performance’s leading tenor.

Dr. Miracle, with his clinking vials of phony medicines; his illusionist’s knack of being here and gone at any given moment; his powers to interrogate his patient and detect her pulse in her absence, or to summon a dead woman’s voice from the grave or drive his victim to her death with wild sorties on the Devil’s violin—and, we should add, to draw from his creator music of a darkness unprecedented in his oeuvre—is the most terrifying of Hoffmann’s nemeses. How are we to take him? When Hoffmann was a drunken poet, his opposite was a calculating bureaucrat. When he was an aspiring scientist, it was a master of technology allied with a maestro of deceptive visions. And now that he is a selfless lover seeking to protect his beloved from the sweet temptation that will surely heighten her feverish disease to a mortal pitch, it is a nightmarish figure with the superpowers just enumerated. We cannot escape the conclusion that the nemeses are Hoffmann’s alter ego, shapeshifting into whatever form is appropriate to his current identity. Or as Clara, the captivating and sentient lover of Nathanael, the protagonist of E. T. A.’s Sand-Man, tries to explain to him when he writes of his dread at the appearance of Coppola, a “Piedmontese mechanician,” whom he identifies with the Coppélius who so frightened him as a child and who, he believes, caused his father’s death: “I will frankly confess, it seems to me that all of the horrors of which you speak existed only in your own self, and that the real true outer world had but little to do with it.” And later: “If there is a dark and hostile power which traitorously fixes a thread in our hearts  . . . and drawing us by means of it along a dangerous road to ruin . . . if, I say, there is such a power, it must assume within us a form like ourselves, nay, it must be ourselves, for only in that way can we believe in it.” How logical her reasoning is, and how compatible with a modern psychological view.