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Poor Offenbach. He wanted so badly to be really respectable. It was not enough that he was a man Rossini christened �The Mozart of the Champs-Elysées,� a man who was the toast of Europe and whose tunes were whistled in the streets, and a man whose wit and style were models for the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan and Johann Strauss, Jr.
No, Offenbach wanted to be taken more seriously as a composer, and the only way to accomplish that was to write a grand opera. He was like a stand-up comedian who dreamed of playing King Lear.
You must remember that Paris, Offenbach�s adopted home town, had taken over from Vienna as the music capital of Europe, and the quickest way to conquer Paris was in its opera houses as Meyerbeer (Like Offenbach, another displaced German) had done. Wagner knew this, too, and went hat in hand to the administration of the Paris Opéra. It didn�t do him much good, and he spent the remainder of his life cursing the French.
Offenbach had already tried his hand at more extended stage works prior to beginning his masterpiece Les Contes d'Hoffmann, or The Tales of Hoffmann; in fact, five of these had had their premieres at the Opéra-Comique. He had even attempted a sort of grander opera for Vienna, which was titled Die Rheinnixen (from it, Offenbach would borrow the famous melody that became the Barcarolle in The Tales of Hoffmann). Finally, it was a slump in Offenbach�s fortunes and a decline in his popularity that made him decide to undertake a serious operatic work for Paris.
For a number of years, Offenbach had been attracted to a stage adaptation by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré (librettists for Gounod�s Faust and Roméo et Juliette) of stories by the German author E.T.A. Hoffmann. Offenbach was certain that this play was the answer to his problems. A libretto had already been fashioned by Barbier, but for another composer, who graciously agreed to step aside when he learned Offenbach was interested in the story.
On the surface, Barbier�s libretto appears to be a cleverly told story of four loves with the figure of Hoffmann as the binding, central character. Hoffmann, a dreamer and a loser, pursues the mechanical doll Olympia in Paris, the doomed Antonia in Munich, the courtesan Giulietta in Venice, and the opera singer Stella in Nuremberg, and we are witness to his gradual spiritual and physical decay and the losses he suffers at the hands of a quartet of adversaries, Coppélius in Paris, Dr. Miracle in Munich, Dapertutto in Venice, and councillor Lindorf in Nuremberg.
In reality, however, the libretto of Hoffmann is a good deal more. It is a symbolic work in which the women Hoffmann pursues are the varying sides of love itself (from the mindless to the ideal to the carnal), just as the opera�s villains form four aspects of evil out to thwart Hoffmann�s genius. Put in simplest terms, the opera is basically a triangle involving Hoffmann, Stella and Lindorf, with the latter two appearing in different guises.
To underscore this idea, Offenbach had planned from the outset that his four heroines and his four villains would be sung by only two artists, and this his how the opera was presented at its premiere. Though use of four different artists for the opera�s heroines (and sometimes even four different villains) is a 20th-century practice, Offenbach�s original concept has had its champions in our times. Beverly Sills and Joan Sutherland both appeared as the quartet of heroines, often seconded by artists such as Norman Treigle and Gabriel Bacquier as the villains. Incidentally, when Maria Callas was asked to sing all four heroines in Hoffmann, she answered, none too coyly, �Will you pay me four fees?�
An important dramatic element in the plot, however, was lost from the outset: it concerned the role of Nicklausse. For this crucial character (a trouser part sung by a mezzo-soprano) to fulfill itself, Nicklausse must be seen not just as a friend or sidekick of Hoffmann�s but as his muse, who protects him if not always from himself, at least from those who wish him harm. But the part was so truncated at the premiere that all sense of Nicklausse�s significance went by the boards for a very long time.
At this point, it is probably well to pause for a moment to ask and answer the question, �Who was E.T.A.Hoffmann?� First of all, he was a real eighteenth-century figure who wrote stories of fantasy, madness and the supernatural, a sort of Germanic Edgar Allan Poe, if you will. He never captured the imagination of Americans, for much of the spirit and style of his writing is lost in translation. He remains popular to this day, however, in German-speaking countries.
The historic Hoffmann (for the record, his initials stand for Ernst Theodor Amadeus, the latter name changed from the original Wilhelm in honor of Mozart) was a good deal more than just an author of seven volumes of stories plus his memoirs. Born in 1776, he crowded into his 48 years of life an amazing number of careers. He was a lawyer, a legislator, an illustrator, a music critic, an opera administrator and a composer.
The wonder of Hoffmann seems to be not that he did so many things, but that he did so many things so well. As a composer of eleven operas, he earned the praise of Carl Maria von Weber (composer of Der Freischütz), his music criticism championed and enlarged the audience for the music of Gluck, Mozart and Beethoven, and his creative presence influenced Schumann to compose what many think is his masterpiece for the piano, Kreisleriana. As an impresario, Hoffmann headed companies in Hamburg and Leipzig, while as a jurist, he became the presiding judge of Berlin�s Supreme Court.
His life, however, was not just a series of triumphs. Like Poe, he had a morbid fascination with horror and death, and was an alcoholic. It has been suggested that his visions and fantasies were as much liquid as they were mental. Hoffmann�s alcoholism became an important factor in Offenbach�s opera, for the poet drinks himself into a stupor during the course of retelling his tales, and thereby loses Stella, his latest and dearest love.
Like Hoffmann, Offenbach was German, born in Cologne in 1819, the seventh child of ten born to a poor Jewish musician and cantor. He soon became his father�s star pupil and, at a great financial sacrifice, his family sent him and his brother to Paris for further study. There, Jakob Eberst became Jacques Offenbach. After study at the Paris Conservatoire, he earned his living as a cellist in various orchestras, including that of the Opéra-Comique, and after a while established himself as a cello virtuoso, one in constant demand for appearances in leading Paris salons.
After a stint as music director of the Théâtre Français, Offenbach opened his own theater in 1855 to perform the frothy one-act musical comedies he had begun writing a few years earlier, as well as works by Mozart, Rossini, and such friends as Adolphe Adam and Léo Delibes. This theater, Bouffes Parisiens, was soon at the center of the Paris nightlife, for this was the time of the first great world exhibition held in the capital. By day, crowds flocked to the Palace of Industry and other exhibition sites; by night, they packed the Bouffes Parisiens.
Over the years, Offenbach introduced in dizzying succession a string of comic delights that included the still riotous Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld), La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein and La Périchole, to quickly skim the cream off the top of his output of over 100 stage works.
So why call him �poor Offenbach�? It is not just because after years of fame and fortune he suddenly found himself on the outside looking in. By 1870, the superficial, carefree days of Napoleon III had evaporated and the Republic that followed was a more serious, less fun-loving era. Offenbach attempted to survive by opening a new theater, but it went bankrupt. To offset his losses, he undertook a tour of the United States, which brought some financial relief.
No, he is �poor� in our eyes because of his need to be more than he was and because he lived to finish Hoffmann but did not live to see its premiere or its becoming a success. It was as if he instinctively knew he wouldn�t. In a letter to the director of the Comique, Offenbach urged, �Make haste and produce my opera. I have not much time left, and my only wish is to see the first night.� That note was penned in July of 1880. On October 4 of the same year, he died, leaving behind only a piano score of Hoffmann and some forty pages of orchestration. Indeed, it is claimed that he passed away with the score of his opera in his hands. In his book Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time, author Siegfried Kracauer makes this touching observation of the composer�s final months:
He was a lonely old man, whose only ambition was to complete the work on which his heart was set...He was deeply affected by the story of Antonia who, if she sang, was bound to die. He sadly told himself that he had always succumbed to the temptation to sing in a fashion different from that in which he should have sung; and by dint of incessant brooding about his supposed life-long aberration, he arrived at the conclusion that there was a secret connection between his work on The Tales of Hoffmann and the approach of death: that he, like Antonia, would die because in his opera he would really sing.
With Offenbach�s death, open season was virtually declared on the score of Hoffmann. All manner of distortions and changes were inflicted upon it even before its premiere, and these alterations would prevail and be compounded for nearly a century. The attitude seems to have been one of �It�s only music by Offenbach; we can do as we please with it.�
The problems began when Offenbach�s family asked Ernest Guiraud (the composer of the recitatives for Bizet�s Carmen) to complete Hoffmann (some music was still needed for the Venice scene and the epilogue and most of the score needed to be orchestrated). Guiraud, however, did much more. On his own, or at the urging of the Comique, he also decided that the spoken dialogue in the score should be sung.
This decision, of course, lengthened the opera, so it then became necessary to make cuts, and opera�s second act, the scene in Venice (which Offenbach had originally planned as Act 3) was thrown out as well as a part of the epilogue. But Guiraud was smart enough to realize that the Barcarolle from the Venice act was too lovely a moment to be lost, so it was moved to the Antonia act and the setting for that scene was changed from Munich to Venice (are you still with me?).
It was in this garbled version that Hoffmann finally had its premiere at the Comique in February of 1881 and, as far as the public was concerned, very successfully. It ran for a hundred performances in its first season alone. The Comique�s version was the one that would largely prevail until 1904, when Hoffmann underwent another overhauling for a production in Monte Carlo. There, the Giulietta scene was reinstated, but with a septet added as its finale that might (according to conductor Richard Bonynge, who has long struggled over the issues involved in arriving at an authentic Hoffmann) have been the quartet cut from the epilogue at the time of the premiere. It is impossible to be certain of its source, for Offenbach�s original manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1887.
Also, using music from the Offenbach operetta Le voyage dans la lune, a new baritone aria was created for Dapertutto, the brilliant �Scintille, diamant,� ironically (given its origins) now one of the most popular excerpts from Hoffmann. Dapertutto�s original aria was transferred to the Olympia scene and reassigned to Coppélius. All of these changes were then perpetuated in the 1907 Choudens edition of the score, which became the gospel.
It was only after World War II, and in a period consumed with questions of authenticity, that questions finally began to be seriously asked as to what exactly Offenbach had intended in Hoffmann. A new critical edition of the score by Fritz Oeser was published in 1978 which righted a number of wrongs, and as late as the 1980s new performance material relating to Hoffmann was being uncovered.
Suddenly, as is the case with Bizet�s Carmen, Hoffmann presented opera companies with an embarrassment of riches as well as a number of headaches. Each company and each conductor were forced to come up with a performance solution of their own. Some opted for more rediscovered music than others, some were loath to part with �Scintille, diamant� or the familiar and undeniably effective septet of the Venice finale, while others let go of these familiar set pieces but denied the Venice scene its proper place. And so it goes.
This fall, San Francisco Opera is offering the 1907 Choudens version with three interpolations from the Oeser edition that contain some of the rediscovered music. Most of the changes have been made by conductor Steven Mercurio and director Christopher Alden to establish the character of Nicklausse as Hoffmann�s muse.The first addition creates a slightly different and longer version of the prologue, the second adds an aria for Nicklausse during the Antonia scene, and the third is an expanded version of the epilogue. Mercurio and Alden are also restoring the Venice scene to its rightful place after the Antonia scene. There will be a single singer for the villains, but there will be three for the heroines.
Looking back, it seems a great pity that Offenbach couldn�t have been around to read this posthumous praise (however left-handed it might be) heaped on him by Friedrich Nietzsche:
If by artistic genius we understand the most consummate freedom within the law, divine ease and facility in overcoming the greatest difficulties, then Offenbach has even more right to the title �genius' than Wagner has. Wagner is heavy and clumsy; nothing is more foreign to him than the moments of wanton perfection which this clown Offenbach achieves as many as five times, six times, in nearly every one of his buffooneries.
Wagner was also invoked, obliquely, in this glowing estimate of Offenbach�s gifts by the English writer Sacheverell Sitwell:
This composer of more than a hundred operettas could achieve moments, like the �Letter Song� [from La Périchole], which have the purity, the clean jet of inspiration, of Mozart. This is no audacious comparison to anyone who knows enough Rossini to compare him to Mozart, and enough of Offenbach to think of him as close to the comic genius of Rossini. The Contes d'Hoffmann is in vindication of this coupling of their names. And it is more than probable that Mozart himself, could he have seen it, would prefer this opera to a �music-drama� that lasts for four evenings and has never a light or lyrical moment.
Rich words that Offenbach was destined never to know. But I strongly suspect that, deep down, he died fully knowing his worth. And after all the abuse he and his Hoffmann have suffered through the years, he is entitled, I think, to the final word, especially since these words have such a prophetic ring:
I have one terrible, invincible vice, that of working all the time. I'm sorry for those people who do not like my music because I shall certainly die with a tune on the tip of my pen.
© 1996 John Ardoin, All Rights Reserved.
John Ardoin is music critic of the Dallas Morning News and author of The Callas Legacy and The Furtwängler Record. He is currently at work on the first book in English devoted to Russia's Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.
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