Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Les Contes d'Hoffmann
The Tales of Hoffmann

Background

Les Contes d'Hoffmann was the culmination of a lifelong dream by Offenbach to write a great grand opera. Most of his career to this point had been spent writing the comic operettas for which he was held in such high esteem by the Parisian public, and he was 58 years old before he began work on his masterpiece.

While Hoffmann was being composed, the Gaîté-Lyrique, for whose 1877-78 season the show was being written, went bankrupt, forcing Offenbach to search elsewhere for a producer. In 1879, he hosted a party at his house at which several songs from the opera were performed. These excerpts caught the ear of Carvalho, manager of the Opéra-Comique, who subsequently arranged to premiere the piece. Offenbach believed Hoffmann to be his greatest work and was anxious to witness the performance of the piece. Unfortunately, he died October 5, 1880, several months before the premiere.

Throughout the composition of Hoffmann, Offenbach continued to turn out other operettas in order to support his family. The strain of his work eventually proved too much for him, and he died in October 1880, leaving Hoffmann unfinished. Ernest Guiraud was asked to finish the work for its 1881 premiere. Critics and scholars have debated ever since about the final form Les contes d'Hoffmann would have taken, and numerous editions with widely divergent dramatic structures and musical details have appeared over the years.

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