Legacy 8- Hoffmann

A Drunken Poet’s Fantasies

Feb 21, '12 6:23 AM for everyone

I finally went to English National Opera again at the weekend.   It’s been years since I last went to an ENO production- so long ago that the last time was before my silent years.  If you bother digging back, you’ll find my rather disgruntled review of a production of Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea”.   After a series of operas blighted by over-clever directors and alienating stagings, the butchery of one of my favourite pieces led me to declare a personal boycott of the company.   And then I just got out of the habit of going- until I decided that this was silly and I ought to give them another try.

So I went to see their production of Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann”- not quite knowing what to expect.   This uncertainty was more than just a matter of production values.   “Hoffmann” is a pretty problematic piece.   It was Offenbach’s last work and he died before it was completed.   The first performance in Paris in 1880 used a score completed by someone else and cut one act entirely.  There’s no way of knowing exactly what his final thoughts on the piece might have been- what cuts or additions he might have made for performance, for example, or whether he’d have opted to use spoken dialogue (as was the convention in the French Opera Comique tradition) or sung recitatives.   It isn’t even certain what order the acts ought to be taken in.   The current ENO production opts for a very “full” text (the show ran a full three and half hours, including intervals), with sung recitatives.  

I’m not sure about the latter choice.  It may correspond with Offenbach’s aspirations to write something “grander” than his trademark productions for the Paris Opera Comique (which did not just stage works which were “comedies” in the sense of being funny and having happy endings- Bizet’s “Carmen” was created for that stage).   In terms of French performance practice of the day, however, using recitatives resulted in a piece which would have struggled to find a stage- spoken dialogue was obligatory for the Opera Comique while full-on grand opera as done by the Opera had to have five acts and involved an obligatory third act ballet (a requirement which drove non-French composers working for Paris crazy but could not be evaded on pain of strikes and trouble from the dancers’ lobby).  While these distinctions, ultimately derived from privileges and monopolies dating back before the Revolution, were beginning to break down by the 1870’s they were still strong enough to impose real limits on what could and couldn’t be staged in Paris.   Perhaps more relevant than this slightly antiquarian point, it’s interesting that modern performance practice for pieces in the “Opera Comique” tradition (“Carmen” being a conspicuous case in point) has generally tended to reinstate spoken dialogue in preference to the recitatives created for performance outside France.   There’s also a banal, literal, issue of suspension of disbelief.   The “Antonia” act (taken second in this production) centres on a young woman, daughter of a great opera singer, who has inherited her mother’s talent but who is certain to die if she sings; the whole tension of the act involves her struggle to abide by the prohibition on singing imposed by her father.   In that context a sung recitative in which she, in effect, says “I am resolved not to sing so that I can live for love of Hoffmann” sounds a little odd and the process by which her resolve is broken down by the diabolic Doctor Miracle would gain dramatic tension if it was a bit clearer at what point she starts to transgress.

The plot of “Hoffmann” is a bit odd (to put it mildly).  Hoffmann, a poet with a distinct fondness for the bottle, is waiting for his latest love (lust?) object, the opera singer Stella to join him in a beer cellar.  Hoffman’s muse, disguising herself as his old school friend Nicklausse, wants to recall him to the higher ends of poetry and make sure Stella doesn’t distract him.   In the meantime, Hoffmann entertains the assembled company- and is persuaded to recount his three previous disastrous love affairs.  The first was with Olympia, who had the slight defect of being an automated doll and ends up broken by Coppelius, the sinister oculist who supplied Hoffmann with distorting spectacles which made her appear to be human.  The second was Antonia.  The third was Giulietta, a high class Venetian prostitute who has been bribed to steal the souls of her clients for the devilish Dappertutto; in this case Hoffmann kills her pimp and she drinks poison intended for Nicklausse, who manages to steal Hoffmann’s soul back in the chaos.   After telling his tale, Hoffmann drinks lots more and finally passes out; Stella takes one look and (wise girl) heads briskly in the opposite direction while the Muse and a chorus of spirits from Hoffmann’s past rejoice in his re-dedication to art.   The moral of the story seems to be that love and commitment are the last thing an artist should aspire too- heavy drinking is a better support to fine art, though suffering helps (it should be noted that most of the visible suffering in the piece seems to be visited on others…..).  A minor moral might be that any sensible opera singer should steer clears of poets and cultivate older, rich, men.

E T A Hoffmann was a real person, active in the 1790’s-1810’s.   He combined, somewhat uneasily, a career in the Prussian bureaucracy with artistic activities.  He was a multi-talented individual, a composer of some merit who wrote poetry but is mostly remembered from his stories.  These reflected an age of turmoil and uncertainty; a world in which science and medicine and charlatanism were all intimately linked, where the boundaries of matter and mind and the human body became blurred, and where invisible half understood powers like electricity and magnetism shaded into a more traditional view of the supernatural.   Mary Shelley was a slightly younger contemporary- “Frankenstein” reflects many of the same issues as Hoffmann’s writings.  His stories are full of doubles, precognitions, strange experiments, sinister medical men and vulnerable women.   They have influenced many subsequent writers and thinkers, from Freud to Angela Carter.  

The opera’s three disastrous love affairs are (somewhat loosely) based on Hoffmann stories.   The Hoffmann protagonist’s relationship with the historic figure is slightly more remote.   The “real” Hoffmann was certainly a notoriously heavy drinker and a serial womaniser (with a worrying tendency to seduce his music pupils; he’d be on the Sex Offenders’ Register these days) who eventually succumbed to a combination of liver failure and syphilis.   There’s no evidence, however, that he ever had an affair with a wind up doll or stabbed anyone in a Venetian brothel.   He made a good peg on which to hang a slightly disparate series of episodes, and a nice example of a “poete maudit” to counterpoint real life figures like Baudelaire and Verlaine active in Paris at about the time Offenbach was labouring on his opera.  The fact that he was German and the action could be set some sixty years in the past was perhaps an advantage too in the France of the “Moral Order”, still marked by defeat against Germany in the Franco-Prussian War and the upheavals of the Paris Commune and its suppression.   Nominally a republic but with a parliament full of monarchists, the 1870’s had been marked by a puritan reaction led by Catholic clergy whose hostility to the perceived frivolity of the fallen Second Empire was shared by anti-clerical republicans.   Offenbach had lost most of the targets of his satire with the fall of the Empire but was still associated with its excesses in the minds of many.   Perhaps it’s not surprising that “Hoffmann” is a bit uneven; the Olympia episode is much closer to his old satiric vein than the other parts.   As it happened, his death more or less coincided with the final victory of the republicans over those planning to restore the monarchy and a certain relaxation of the harshest asperities of post-war Puritanism which may have made it easier to stage a morally ambiguous work.

So what of the production?   Musically it was fine, even though Clive Bayley (singing all of Hoffmann’s diabolical antagonists in fine bass tones) slightly overshadowed Barry Banks’ Hoffmann (then again Hoffmann is frankly a bit of a prat and hard to take entirely seriously….).   The real challenge is the soprano role as the three woman of Hoffman’s dreams have to sing in very different styles; Georgia Jarman did a pretty good job of this (and I’m not being nasty when I say she came over best as the doll Olympia- and was least at ease as the courtesan Giulietta).   I suppose the staging was bound to be a bit odd at times- it’s a strange and non-naturalistic set of stories and the whole thing might be the product of Hoffmann’s fuddled imagination.   There was one slight puzzle.   For some reason the director chose to interpret Nicklausse as a very literal schoolboy, looking like a stray from Richmal Crompton.  Since the same singer was doubling Nicklausse and the muse disguised as Nicklausse and both incarnations wore the same costume throughout it was never quite clear which persona was present at any given time.  That didn’t matter too much in itself- indeed the ambiguity is quite creative- except that it also meant that Nicklausse never grows up, while Hoffman is clearly shown as getting older.  He’s in schoolboy shorts for the Olympia scene but goes into long trousers thereafter and the logic of the storyline implies that some time has to have passed between the acts.   This does start to raise questions- is Nicklausse ever really there at all?   Is he dead and only there as some kind of memory (though the poison intended for him in the Giulietta act is real enough)?    Did any of his past loves ever exist- or are they all projections of Stella into his own past?   I suspect those girls who are particularly attracted to dressing as a way of creating and living out different personas might have their own views on this.

I deliberately steer clear of reviews of productions I intend to see to avoid going with too many preconceptions so I genuinely wasn’t aware that the director Richard Jones has a certain number of recurring visual tics- one of which is cross-dressing characters (others include actors in animal suits - a stage gorilla ambled on and off stage during the Giuletta scene, characters wearing paper masks and lots of on-stage smoking).   Obviously the muse-as-Nicklausse ticked that box a bit but he also shifted the part of Cochenille, servant and assistant to Spalanzani the toy maker responsible for creating Olympia, into a drag role.   She’s in the picture above; Simon Butteriss does a very creditable teeter on high heels- it took a couple of looks for me to be absolutely certain that she wasn’t quite what she seemed.   I’m sure her frock would go down a storm with girls into the Fifties look!   The Olympia act also involved the chorus dressing up in sailor suits and sissy dresses (taking a cue from Spalanzani’s “toy maker” status to imply that his audience are children- which doesn’t square all that well with the libretto and misses the point that displays of automatons and other such wonders of technology were very much serious adult entertainment in Hoffmann’s day).  The result was disconcertingly like a certain kind of fetish party- and the one time that the staging threatened to get in the way of the music and drama.   Overall, though I think I’ve just about forgiven ENO…..