This morning (west coast time) was the first Met livecast of the season, featuring one of my favorite operas, Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. When you really love a work there are two directions you can go in: either you find problems with every production, or you find something to love, love, love in every production (the same person can take either path, depending on the work & one's mood). In this case, I found much to love, love, love.
I had seen the Bartlett Sher production at the Met when it was new in 2009. I had to pay a "new production" premium on my ticket, which I wasn't expecting, but OK, if you're traveling to that expensive metropolis in the first place, you're in an extravagant mood. Perched in my parterre box (it was the closest I could get to the stage), I liked the production very much. Seeing it again, I liked it even more. It teeters in a sweet spot between sumptuous & seedy; its lyric flights & swoony, fantastical darkness (even the students' drinking song at the opening blithely suggest violence & mayhem, before veering off into paeans to wine & beer), even its rich, deep colors shading into darkness, convincingly convey the spirit of the titular poet.
The stage opens in darkness, with a shabby desk & an old typewriter in the lower right corner; Hoffmann is also there, & if not drunk, then distraught. Pages flutter down from overhead. His muse enters, vows to save him, & disguises herself as his friend Nicklausse. The scene expands to the tavern, & then segues to the first act, Olympia, the mechanical doll that Hoffmann thinks is real, & is his ideal. This act has a George Grosz feel, full of dark energy & louche members of the demimonde. It also shares the aesthetic of the circus, not the slick, streamlined circuses of today, but the tawdry, sweaty glamour of the late nineteenth century circus (an inspiration for artists from Dickens to Picasso). The walls are striped, like a tent. There is a freak-show ambiance. Lulu-haircuts parade past leering clowns. Limbs festoon the walls, the eyeballs in Coppelius's bin drip viscously. Olympia is a vivid slash of pink with a cartoonishly high golden crown on. She is multiplied by dancers, as is the rose-bespectacled & besotted Hoffmann. It all goes to smash over a money dispute, & the circus leaves town.
The Antonia act comes next in this version. The setting is more stripped down but just as dreamlike: against a twilight blue, silhouettes of trees in varying shades of gray hang behind the mostly bare stage. There is a piano in the foreground, covered with music which mostly gets ignored or shoved aside. Dr Miracle arrives in a playful sort of horse-drawn buggy which also manages to suggest Sjöström's film The Phantom Carriage. Antonia's father, in a richly brocaded robe, broods over her mother's fate, & hers. He is not fond of Hoffmann. Antonia, encouraged by Dr Miracle, sings herself to death, & another of Hoffmann's loves expires. The more restrained staging of this intimate, more domestic act is a buffer between the more lavish, more social setting of the first & final acts.
That final act, in Venice, is suitably, lavishly carnivalesque. There are the Venetian signifiers: a dark red gondola, & a prancing, comically menacing Punchinello, straight out of Tiepolo. An increasingly desperate & cynical Hoffmann (even the tenor's hair is picturesquely askew) is now hopelessly entangled with an outright courtesan, Giuletta. She, seduced by a glittering diamond, seduces him, stealing even his reflection. The desperate Hoffmann murders a rival for a woman he longs for but also loathes. This act, possibly the darkest & most cynical in the work, opens with the lilting loveliness of the famous barcarolle. Death in Venice indeed, & we return to the tavern, where the half-mad Hoffmann, drunkenly hallucinating these tales, loses his chance at the actual woman he is in love with. As in Proust, the lover creates the loved one, only to discover that his invention does not quite overlay the actual person. But as he collapses in a drunken haze of despair, his Muse steps out of her Nicklausse drag (retaining the elegant top hat) & leads him to sit down at his neglected typewriter. This lovely & savage opera, teetering on the edge of full-blown tragedy, ends on a hopeful note: as the choral voices soar behind him, his fingers curl above the keyboard, & (again as in Proust) he begins to turn the grit & irritants (or the outright devastations) of his life into the nacreous splendor of his art.
Tenor Ben Bliss was our affable livecast host. It's always a bit jarring, though, to have the fourth wall so immediately dismantled; right after an act's finale, the singers, with professional aplomb, come right out & discuss their roles in the trajectory of their careers or other such matters, while the audience (some of us, anyway) are still swirling in the dreams they created. This was conductor Marco Armiliato's 500th performance at the Met; as you might expect from that record, he does a very good job, though he made some odd remarks about ranking Hoffmann slightly below the greatest operas, like Parsifal. (But it's pointless to compare anything to Parsifal, even (in the spirit of Cary Grant saying he wished that he, too, were Cary Grant) Parsifal itself.) What's the point of ranking things like that? (Maybe the maestro wasn't conveying his thoughts well in what was obviously not his mother language?)
Ever since I saw him in the livecast of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette (my thoughts here), I have been looking forward to Benjamin Bernheim as Hoffmann, & he was splendid in this long & challenging role. Hoffmann is what Romeo might perhaps have turned into if he had survived Rosaline, & Juliet, & some post-Capulet woman; as with all ardent romantics, after a certain amount of experience his idealism has edged towards cynicism & even despair. The slightly frayed elegance of his demeanor is nicely contrasted with the looming solidity of his impressive rival, as embodied by Christian Van Horn, the one's passionate & soaring tenor outcries sabotaged by the other's amused bass-baritone undercuts. The woman are also dazzling: Erin Morley is wittily precise but also strangely moving as the robot love Olympia; Pretty Yende is warm & captivating as Antonia & appealing as Stella, the "real-life" diva Hoffmann loves; Clémentine Margaine is a juicy Giuletta. Vasilisa Berzhanskaya was a forthright & faithful Muse/Nicklausse. I hope they release this splendid performance on Blu-Ray. I would love to watch it late into the night.
Afterwards I went across the street to a brewpub, having consumed nothing all day but a latte & some lozenges. Perhaps foolishly I downed most of my first pumpkin ale before my pizza arrived, leaving me in a Hoffmannesque haze. One of the baseball playoff games was on a screen near me, so I'd glance up from time to time for the comforting familiarity of the autumnal scenes: the pitcher leaning forward, shaking off the catcher; the hitter swinging &, most of the time, missing, the crowd bedecked in team colors, milling around. . . . Then I saw something I usually manage to avoid: not only a political ad, but one for Trump. After warning me that illegal aliens were being given transgender operations (seriously, though this sounds like some sort of fascist-swamp fever dream Mad Libs), the ad assured me that "President Trump was on my side". If he's on my side, I'm switching sides. As I pondered this into my second pumpkin ale, I decided that I hope aliens really are being given transgender operations: why not give the wretched of the earth something besides more misery? I'd much rather have my tax money spent on that than on making billionaires into squillionaires, or whatever the next step in their deification is. During the livecast interviews, the set & costume designers (Michael Yeargen & Catherine Zuber, respectively) had mentioned the "Kafkaesque" atmosphere they were trying for. I personally was leaning more towards Weimar, but we all agreed on touches of the surreal & the dreamlike. But then I leave the theater & find myself in a world in which a vicious clown like Trump is actually a serious contender for President, & I have to ask, what does Kafkaesque or surreal really mean these days? What is a dream? If this is a dream, when will we wake?
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