Tales of Hoffmann
Fantastic opera by Jacques Offenbach
Fantastic opera in five acts by Jacques Offenbach
Libretto by Jules Paul Barbier
German textversion by Gerhard Schwalbe
3 hours
Debut performance 1881 - Premiere on 4 February 2007
Three disastrous love stories. They tell about the automatic puppet Olympia, the mortally ill singer Antonia and the unscrupulous courtesan Giulietta – however, actually the tree stories turn out to be the story of Stella: of »three souls in one soul«. She was once Hoffmann's passionately beloved and is the trigger for his lust and suffering. The opera is about her and the pretended comforter alcohol, an opera of great sentiment, French airiness and musical finesse.
Jacques Offenbach died before he could finish the work and did not attend the debut performance of »Tales of Hoffmann« in 1881 in the Paris Opéra Comique. »Tales of Hoffmann« is one of the most successful operas of the French repertory. The complicated state of the devised sources make every performance of the opera a new adventure. Thilo Reinhardt will put the eternal theme of unhappy love in images beyond superficial updating, all in the sense of Felsenstein's words »fantastic – and even so true«.