Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Met Opera Live
This was another excellent performance from the Met, though that house’s addiction to enormously elaborate scenery – most of which could be sold off to Las Vegas – reaches lunatic proportions, robbing the work of its dream-like or hallucinatory quality, though that must surely have been a large part of Offenbach’s intention. The paradox of Les Contes d’Hoffmann is that the finer the performance, the more frustrating the piece itself becomes.
Perhaps it has that in common with its near-contemporary Carmen, another work that succeeds only on a superficial level. Neither, notoriously, reached a definitive form before its composer died, though Hoffmann is very much less finished than Carmen, but they have in common that no two productions that one sees of them use the same musical or verbal text. The other evident similarity that they have is that both of them are so full of good melodies and have enough strong situations as well as weird lacunae that it isn’t conceivable that either should be dropped from the repertoire.
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