A Grand Phantasmagoria

By Michael Walsh

Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann returns the Met to top form

From a distance, seemingly beyond the stage, the workshop of an eccentric inventor swims into view, its cheery interior alive with whirring mechanical toys that no child has ever imagined. Gondolas glide serenely through the perfumed, decadent atmosphere of La Serenissima--Venice, dark and dangerous. A placid bourgeois home suddenly explodes with the nightmarish visitation of a sinister, cadaverous physician who walks through walls and bursts from fireplaces in a ball of flame.

The phantasmagorical spirit of E.T.A. Hoffmann lurks everywhere in the Metropolitan Opera's brilliant new production of Jacques Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), which opened last week. Vividly directed by Otto Schenk and imaginatively designed by Guenther Schneider-Siemssen, Hoffmann is the Met's most successful, satisfying effort in months. It is all the more welcome because the season, still somewhat colored by 1980's labor disputes, began in a lackluster fashion. Soprano Renata Scotto was booed in her opening-night performance of Norma, and a Ring semicycle (Das Rheingold and Siegfried) fizzled out in something less than Wagnerian glory. It was in December, with Franco Zeffirelli's lavish cast-of-thousands production of La Boheme, that the company began the return to form.

Hoffmann is best seen as the progression of a soul. There is the comic slapstick of Act I, in which the eponymous poet falls in love with Olympia, a mechanical doll. Next there is the sobering disappointment of Act II, in which the hero falls in love with a faithless Venetian courtesan. Finally, there is the tragic catharsis of Act III, in which Hoffmann's sincere love for the simple, shy singer Antonia is destroyed by the vicious machinations of the evil Dr. Miracle. Each affair should appear to be more intense than the last.

The production illustrates the progression perfectly. The first act--all bright colors and gaily spinning contraptions--is an extended divertissement, with Hoffmann the butt of a joke shared by everyone except him. Olympia, the crowning achievement of Spalanzani's workshop, is obviously a machine, and in a fine, broad comic touch, Director Schenk has the inventor's assistant twist each of her fingers to produce the dazzling coloratura of her famous Doll's Song. The mood turns passionate when Hoffmann meets the sensuous Giulietta, and Schneider-Siemssen's Venice creates an atmosphere of dark mystery, with shadowy palazzi looming over dark canals whose waters hold untold secrets. The intensity deepens and comes to a climax in the third act: as in a horror movie, the normality of Antonia's surroundings only heightens the terror prescribed by Dr. Miracle. The epilogue finds Hoffmann back in the tavern where he began the evening--drunken, disheveled and disabused of idealistic notions, but inspired to write his feverish tales. For all its legerdemain, the staging provides an unsentimental, clear-eyed view of the only serious opera by the man whom Rossini called the "Mozart of the Champs Elysees."

Heading an exceptionally able cast, Tenor Placido Domingo makes Hoffmann into a cross between a matinee idol and a bespectacled down-on-his-luck poet who loves not wisely, and far too well. Domingo sings with a youthful ardor and freshness that belie his frantic performing schedule these days. Perhaps because his voice is more declamatory than those of other Latin tenors, less reliant on sheer beauty, it has held up well under heavy use and a wide-ranging repertory and, if anything, sounds better than ever. Soprano Ruth Welting, who stopped the show on opening night with her delightful Olympia, tosses off her sparkling roulade with graceful ease and fine comic precision. In the role of Giulietta, Tatiana Troyanos' smoky mezzo is redolent of the promise of sensuality, and Bass Baritone Michael Devlin cuts a commanding figure as all four of Hoffmann's nemeses.

In the pit, Conductor Riccardo Chailly, 29, leads a performance that marks him as potentially one of the most important opera conductors to emerge in years. Like the director and designer, Chailly imposes a unity on his conception of the score, seeing it as the servant of the story and moving it along crisply with an unerring rhythmic sense. He communicates both Hoffmann's playfulness and passion, making the listener ultimately believe that the opera is a greater, more organized work than it really is. This is a more effective illusion than any that afflict Offenbach's earnest, deluded hero.

--By Michael Walsh

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