Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Les Contes d'Hoffmann
The Tales of Hoffmann

"Olympia...Antonia...Giulietta!"
Hoffmann's Three Tales Restored to Their Intended Order

Heather Hadlock

Like his heroine Antonia, Jacques Offenbach seemed to sing himself into the grave with The Tales of Hoffmann. Old, ill, and in pain, he struggled to finish the work that would lift him into the pantheon of true artists. André Martinet's account of the composer's last days begins with a fainting spell during Hoffmann's first rehearsal, and ends with his death over the just-completed score. The fatal work became a Requiem when Talazac, the tenor who would create the role of Hoffmann, sang two excerpts with the texts of the Dies irae and Agnus dei at Offenbach's funeral.

All this enhanced Hoffmann's reputation as the work in which Offenbach at last abandoned irony to cultivate a serious musical-dramatic voice. The opera's main claim to seriousness is the Antonia act, and the reviewer for La Justice spoke for the majority of critics when he declared this "the best act of the score, if not the libretto. Offenbach seems to have worked as if to raise the coefficient of his whole musical work. One feels in it a belated intention to repent. Truly, it would be unfair not to recognize that the maestro has surpassed himself this time." The Antonia act secured the work's reputation, and Offenbach's place in music history.

It seems ironic, then, that Offenbach never intended this act as his last word: Antonia's was to be the second of three tales, and her death the middle of the story, not the end. The opera should have ended with Giulietta, but the impresario Carvalho found that act unsatisfactory and omitted it from the premiere. Ernest Guiraud's 1882 revisions made it performable, but too short to serve as the climax of the entire opera, and Guiraud sensibly sandwiched Giulietta's story between the longer and more coherent episodes of Olympia and Antonia. Thus a series of pragmatic, posthumous decisions shaped the opera's traditional form, with Antonia's scena and final trio as the musical climax, and her death as the culmination of the drama. If the opera and Offenbach's career ended on the right note, a serious note of dramatic intensity and pathos, it was due to chance and to editorial intervention rather than to the composer's plan.

Since 1977, two scholarly editions by Fritz Oeser and Michael Kaye have restored the Olympia-Antonia-Giulietta sequence that the composer and librettists envisioned. This re-ordering alters both the impact and meaning of the opera's diverse musical styles, and our sense of the tales as a composite plot.

Hoffmann's trio of charming enchantresses embody three musical styles. Olympia's mechanical trills and ticking waltz rhythms recall the operetta idiom that Offenbach now sought to transcend. Indeed some critics were disappointed with this act: Le Constitutionnel remarked that, "Nicklausse's air and the doll's couplets are in reality only operetta airs, such as Offenbach has written a hundred times before." But the composer's apparent backsliding serves an ironic purpose. In the shattering of Olympia, and Hoffmann's recognition of her as "An automaton!" this act unmasks and rejects operetta's hollow charms.

Antonia's story seems to offer a musical language in which true love and art will flourish. Her poignant song "Elle a fui, la tourterelle" opens up a new sound-world, far from the frivolity of operetta. In the lover's duet, and the magnificent men's trio "Pour conjurer le danger," Offenbach shows himself a worthy heir of Schubert and Weber, whose lyricism and elegance the composer aspired to imitate in his serious works. In Antonia's death scene, however, elegant lyricism itself becomes another snare as the girl succumbs to the fatal sweetness of her mother's song. Dr. Miracle has turned Romantic lyricism against itself, appropriating its moral and emotional power for his destructive ends.

Placing Giulietta last among Hoffmann's loves reveals how pessimistically this act deploys the musical styles of both earlier tales. Operetta-style music here accompanies soulless carnality, as in Hoffmann's drinking song, with its boisterous rhythm and "shouted" conclusion to each line. The song resembles the "Klein-zach" ballad, but this time no rhapsodic digression breaks its surface: the poet's cynical mask remains firmly in place. As in the tale of Antonia, Romantic lyricism becomes a fatal snare for the listener-artist: Giulietta's haunting Barcarolle and seduction duet with Hoffmann prove as deceitful as they are captivating, her voice an instrument of the villain Dapertutto's will. As for Hoffmann's fall from detachment into abject devotion, this is so sudden as to be almost comic. His "O Dieu de quelle ivresse," with its waves of escalating excitement, is a textbook example of passion in music-- so much so that the ecstatic melody comes dangerously close to being a caricature of itself. With Lindorf we may be tempted to mutter, "A poet? Rather a drunkard!!" The most beautiful and passionate music becomes corrupt in the realm of the courtesan and her devilish master.

Finally, placing Giulietta last highlights a dramatic motif neglected in the traditional order of the acts: Hoffmann's symbolic death in the loss of his reflection. This moment was always a theatrical coup (particularly after the 1907 Monte Carlo production that interpolated the rousing septet "Hélas, mon coeur"). But the stolen reflection was also a dramatic loose end, for moments after the theft we would see Hoffmann with Antonia -- his reflection, and the spiritual and psychic wholeness it symbolizes, apparently intact. How could Giulietta's jaded and psychically shattered Hoffmann have become Antonia's naive swain? Far more convincing is the degradation of Hoffmann's personality under the successive blows of his disenchantment with Olympia; the loss of his true love Antonia; and Giulietta's callous betrayal. Restoring his tales to their intended order creates a stronger, if bleaker, dramatic trajectory, as Hoffmann's "mad loves" cost him his reflection, soul, and romantic idealism.

Heather Hadlock, musicologist, is the author of Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Assistant Professor of Music at Stanford University.

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