Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Is Tales of Hoffmann Offenbach’s masterpiece, his one claim to rank with serious composers, or is it an aberration, a confused attempt to move away from forms and idioms where his true genius could shine? Offenbach’s obituaries in the English press were written before Tales of Hoffmann was performed in Paris, let alone England. Most of them suggest that Offenbach was an embarrassment, and might soon be forgotten: ‘The libretti chosen by Offenbach are too frequently disfigured by a frivolous tone, which occasionally degenerates into gross indecency…It is very doubtful whether any of his works will survive, but his name will be remembered as a curious phenomenon in the history of civilization’.
This prediction was wrong: Offenbach’s opéras-bouffes remain popular to this day in English-speaking countries, even in translations which obscure their peculiarly French wit and bite. But Offenbach survives as a serious composer, too, on the strength of Tales of Hoffmann, which won him a kind of posthumous redemption. Admirers of the frivolous Offenbach may judge as does James Harding, in his entertaining history of French operetta, Folies de Paris:
Les Contes d'Hoffmann had meant a great deal to the composer. The pathetic circumstances under which he wrote it tend to give it an importance among his works that is undeserved. Admittedly it was, for Offenbach, a major achievement and contains some charming music. Yet one has only to compare it with anything by his idol Mozart to see how short he fell of his aim. It is a swansong, not a masterpiece. His lasting fame depends on the operettas.
Offenbach must have identified strongly with the real Hoffmann. The German who even as an adopted Parisian sometimes signed his name ‘O. de Cologne’ had been cellist, conductor, impresario, publicist, above all indefatigable tunesmith and scribbler of music, through a career with constant up-and-downs, battling an unhealthy physique and almost constant pain. There was an element of the fantastic in his own life story, just as there was in that of E. T. A. Hoffmann, the creator of tales that captured the imagination of all Europe in the first half of the 19th century.
Who was Hoffmann?
Hoffmann, too, was a musician. Like Offenbach, he worshipped Mozart, and added ‘Amadeus’ to his given names in tribute to his idol. Hoffmann’s own music, much more conventional than one might expect from his tales, is barely remembered – though our encyclopaedic age is reviving some of it on records. His perceptive music criticism (he was one of the first to write intelligently about Beethoven) has earned him a small footnote in musical history. A larger one comes through his influence on other musicians, notably Schumann, who identified strongly with Hoffmann’s literary character Kapellmeister Kreisler, and immortalised his name in the capricious piano suite Kreisleriana.
Many other composers were attracted to Hoffmann’s stories as subject material – among them Delibes for his ballet Coppélia and Tchaikovsky for The Nutcracker. Offenbach, however, was the most fully drawn into Hoffmann’s world: he made Hoffmann the subject of an opera, ostensibly about a poet and the creations of his imagination, though Hoffmann is a musician as well, as is clear from one of the episodes of the opera, the story of Antonia (based on Hoffmann’s story Councillor Krespel).
Swansong Tales of Hoffmann may be, but Offenbach’s desire to expand the dramatic scope of his music had been kindled many years before; he had made several previous attempts at opera, of which the most ambitious was Die Rheinnixen, played in Vienna in 1864, without notable success. Offenbach’s obsession in his last years with gaining success as a serious composer was partly a reaction to the Paris scene after the fall of the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian war, and the Paris Commune. In spite of some ephemeral successes, Offenbach realised that this was not an atmosphere in which satirical operetta could thrive. His mind gravitated back to a play he had seen in 1851, at the time when the vogue for E.T. A. Hoffmann was at its height. Les Contes fantastiques d’Hoffmann was written by two expert theatrical craftsmen, Jules Barbier and Michel Carré (the same two who later adapted Goethe’s Faust for Gounod’s libretto). It is possible that Offenbach himself, who had a finger in so many theatrical pies, contributed to the concept of Barbier and Carré's play.
At any rate, he didn’t forget it – when in 1875 he negotiated terms with the Gaîté theatre for an ‘opéra-lyrique’, this was the subject he chose. Meanwhile a composer called Salomon had completed a setting of a Hoffmann libretto by Barbier, but he generously abandoned it when he heard that Offenbach’s heart was set on the subject.
In Barbier’s collaboration with Offenbach on the libretto, it is hard to disentangle who was most responsible for the brilliance of the concept. Barbier clearly knew his Hoffmann – not just, as Ernest Newman points out, the Tales themselves, but the personal history of their creator, difficult to piece together from the biographical material then available. He realised that many of the incidents and characters in the stories were fictional disguises of Hoffmann himself, and his experiences in love. The portrayal in Tales of Hoffmann of the fictional Hoffmann’s obsession with Olympia (and perhaps Antonia) owed much to E.T. A. Hoffmann’s own unrequited love for one of his singing pupils, the 16-year-old Julia Mark.
At the most obvious level, the fascination of Hoffmann’s Tales lies in the bizarre, the grotesque, the emphasis on the dark side of life. Discarnate spirits, ghosts, personal magnetism, poisons and alchemy – all these are products of the conflict between a rationalistic, scientific world-view and a spiritual or miraculous one. Reading more attentively, however, the Tales turn out to be psychological thrillers – good and evil battle for control of the souls of Hoffmann’s characters. Their author was himself haunted by fears and hallucinations arising from the world of dreams, and his semi-scientific psychology regarded artistic genius as a form of possession.
A challenge to producers
It was therefore a brilliant idea on Barbier’s part (and perhaps Offenbach’s) to present the three acts of the opera as (in Newman’s words) ‘a phantasmagoria in the brain of Hoffmann, an eerie psychological drama played out in and around the soul of Hoffmann’, and to enclose the opera in a realistic prologue and epilogue ‘in which we see the phantast first of all entering the kingdom of macabre dream and then returning from it to the world of common day’. The concept is challenging to the producer of the opera, not least because Barbier himself, especially in the Epilogue, resorts to a kind of symbolical presentation in which it is unclear whether Hoffmann is simply dead drunk with wine, or completely intoxicated by the poetic spirit. This aspect of the opera was further confused by a change of plans – the role of the Muse,who strives to win Hoffmann from more earthly passions, was originally intended to be sung. The part was doubled by the singer of Niklausse, Hoffmann’s companion, friend, and cool, ironic critic and adviser. When, however, Tales of Hoffmann was first produced at the Opéra-Comique, the part of the Muse was given to a young actress, and her scenes were rendered as mélodrame, speech over music – in modern versions Niklausse usually takes the part, sometimes singing, sometimes speaking.
Frederic de Haenen depiction of scenes from the first production. Public Domain
This is just one example of the uncertainty of Offenbach’s intentions, bedevilling the history of this opera. Whether the vocal casting can or should mirror the dramatic conception is debatable. The symmetry of the real and the imagined is clear: a number of the characters are doubles – Lindorf, Hoffmann’s rival for the favours of the singer Stella, reappears as a different sinister character in each act: Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and Dapertutto. The identity of the characters is reinforced by signature-tunes in the music, and the tessitura is such that all these parts can be taken by the same singer.
One singer, four roles?
It is much harder for a single singer to encompass all the female roles, even though all are embodiments,in Hoffmann’s imagination,of the singer Stella. The mechanical Olympia requires an almost over-efficient coloratura technique; Giulietta the courtesan must be vocally rich and voluptuous, while the tuberculosis-ridden Antonia must be frail and touching, although the emotional range of her music is greater than that of any of the others. The publicity gimmick of casting all these roles with one soprano (and the saving of cost?) has more dramatic plausibility than musical.
Superficially this opera may seem to be merely three different stories about Hoffmann’s love-life, and the challenge to the producer is to make the imaginative conception clear. The circumstantial details of Hoffmann’s stories are a gift for staging, and can be turned to advantage, as in John Schlesinger’s Covent Garden production, in which the guests at Spalanzani’s ball are all dressed in white, the doll Olympia in pink, to emphasise that everything is seen from Hoffmann’s perspective, through Coppélius’ rose-tinted magic spectacles. But the attempt to give dramatic unity to any production has to face the problems inherent in text and music alike, problems mainly but not entirely due to Offenbach’s losing race against death to complete the piece.
The problems are radical: would Offenbach finally have decided in favour of spoken dialogue or sung recitative? Who wrote most of the sung recitative usually heard in productions today? Offenbach himself, or Ernest Guiraud, who was called in to put the music in performable shape (the same Guiraud who composed the sung recitatives for Bizet’s Carmen)? What is the best order for the three central acts? The libretto indicates, in the Prologue, that it should be Olympia, Antonia, Giulietta, but most musicians feel that the Antonia story provides the best climax – moreover, the Giulietta act was clearly the one Offenbach left least finished, and has been most tampered with since Offenbach’s death.
The best way to resolve these questions, it may be thought, is by more historical research, but the barriers are formidable – not the least being that the archives of the Opéra-Comique, where Tales of Hoffmann was first performed, were destroyed by fire in 1857. After carefully reviewing the evidence, one scholar, Hugh Macdonald, has suggested that poor ailing Offenbach left little more than a brilliant operatic idea and a bundle of tunes. It is hard to decide, for example, whether the famous Barcarolle, originally invented for the opera Die Rheinnixen to describe the flow of the Rhine, was diverted into the canals of Venice because Offenbach was pressed for time. This seems unlikely, but it is more certain that the Barcarolle’s reappearance in the Epilogue is not an inspired reminiscence giving unity to the opera, but an attempt to capitalize on what was clearly to be the ‘hit’ of the piece. This was done either by Offenbach himself, pressed for time, or by a timid arranger after his death, reluctant to risk an idea of his own.
In spite of all the uncertainty surrounding this opera, it has continued by-and-large to be performed from the score published in 1907 by the Parisian firm of Choudens. By common consent this is far from a faithful version. It contains music Offenbach didn’t write, and travesties his original intentions. But what were his intentions? The more one looks the less one is sure – take the question of the recitatives. The original contract between Offenbach and the Gaîté Theatre was for an opéra-lyrique – that is, fully sung, without dialogue. This was consistent with Offenbach’s aim to move towards fully-sung opera – he associated spoken dialogue with operetta. But the theatre went bust, and the new contract was with the Opéra-Comique, almost by definition presupposing spoken dialogue. So Offenbach stopped writing recitatives.
Many of the recitatives sung nowadays appeared for the first time in an edition of 1885, four years after the premiere. But who wrote them? We don’t know, though some musicians claim to be able to hear immediately the difference between Guiraud and Offenbach (Richard Bonynge among them, who favors a return to the spoken dialogue). To complicate the matter still further, scholars such as the conductor Antonio de Almeida claim that Offenbach had completed the piano score of the opera in 1873, including most of the recitatives. In May 1875 there was a private run-through in Offenbach’s living room for the director of the Opéra-Comique, Carvalho, and the impresario of the Vienna Court Theatre. Daughters and friends of the composer sang the parts.
Almeida was shown the manuscript parts of this performance, the findings from which were incorporated in a new edition by Fritz Oeser. This restores the correct order, with the Giulietta act following Antonia, restores the part of the Muse, and banishes the spurious Septet in the Giulietta act. Unfortunately most scholars are sceptical about the authority for its other changes, including the assumption that the recitatives in this new edition are by Offenbach.
An ability to express enough musical and dramatic vision
The problems of deciding what to perform in Tales of Hoffmann are as great as in – say – Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea – which seems extraordinary in an opera written only just over 100 years ago! The parallel is with the near-contemporary Boris Godunov, and some of the reasons are similar. What keeps these works alive is that their composers were able to express enough of their musical and dramatic vision.
Biographer Siegfried Kracauer has touchingly captured what drove Offenbach on:
his only ambition was to complete the work on which his heart was set… He was deeply affected by the story of Antonia, who, if she sang, was bound to die. He sadly told himself that he had always succumbed to the temptation to sing in a fashion different from that in which he should have sung; and by dint of incessant brooding about this supposed life-long aberration he arrived at the conclusion that there was a secret connection of his work on The Tales of Hoffmann and the approach of death: and he, like Antonia, would die because in this opera he would really sing.
First published in Opera Australia, 1989