Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's "Les contes d'Hoffmann" (review)

Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's "Les contes d'Hoffmann" Heather Hadlock Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000 165 pages, $29.95

For many operagoers today, Les contes d'Hoffmann (1881) is second only to Carmen as the most enduring masterpiece of nineteenth-century French opera, and for its enthusiasts the opera possesses both a piquancy and a disturbing quality that have made it more durable than the audience favorite of several generations back, Charles Gounod's sweet (and, for many, terminally cloying) Faust. The opera's open-ended quality—its dreamlike fluidity or perhaps the hallucinatory quality inspired by its protagonist's excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs—has made it a perennial favorite of audiences and directors, although for a minority this opera is the unwanted crunchy frog in the box of operatic chocolates. Great singers have often given inspired performances of the title character, as well as one or more of the four villains and one or more of the loves of Hoffmann. In recent years, tenors like Alfredo Kraus, Plácido Domingo, and Neil Shicoff have provided distinctive interpretations of the role of the deluded poet-lover. Although the opera can survive being relocated in time, space, or historical period better than most because of its dreamlike quality, it is probably best left in the feverish world of early German Romanticism, in the heyday of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Eichendorff. ¹

In the rush for limited space in the permanent repertory of opera, what gives this work its competitive edge? For many in the audience the great emotionally compelling moment in Les contes d'Hoffmann comes midway through the Prologue. Hoffmann, who has been regaling the students in Luther's Tavern with the ballad of the dwarf Kleinzach, breaks out of the restrictive format of the strophic ballad to rhapsodize about the face and features of his latest love, the opera singer Stella. This feverish outburst, distinguished by chromatic urgency and propelled by nervous rhythmic vigor, makes it clear that this lyric display is the work of a great (if perhaps overly volatile) poet. The music of Jacques Offenbach matches the fervor of the poet's overheated imagination and sets the tone of hallucinatory recollection that makes this opera so unsettling. The moment also reveals a sense of urgency that goes beyond the playful banter that made Offenbach's operettas so popular.

In her attractive study of Offenbach's most enduring opera, Heather Hadlock suggests that the Prologue seems like the most modern episode in a work that continually calls attention to its formal incompleteness. Although the normally swift-working composer had lingered for five years over the composition of his final opera, Offenbach left major portions of the Venetian act and the Epilogue uncompleted when he died in 1880. But even a thoroughly finished opera would not have resolved the work's "restless incompleteness" (p. 4); as Hadlock contends, the "initial instability" in the opera's form was complemented by the practical but controversial decisions made by the composer's executors in order to make Les contes stageable for its first production in 1881. The Venetian act, which is potentially the most disturbing episode, was scrapped altogether in order to meet the production deadline, and thus from the beginning the opera has forced its producers to choose among multiple versions. Offenbach's original scheme, which Hadlock describes as "three operas in miniature" (p. 15), surrounded by the framework of Hoffmann's story-telling, was distorted by the truncated original stage production. The existence of alternate pieces of music (and the absences of some potentially crucial pieces) have created problems and opportunities for stage directors ever since.

The title of Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's "Les contes d'Hoffmann" proves not as accurately descriptive of its contents as it might be, because the women and music promised by the subtitle are...