Alemania
Fairytales of New York
Around the corner from the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, on Charlottenstraße, is the house where E.T.A. Hoffmann lived, and the tavern where he drank (Lutter and Wegner … it’s still there); across the street is the former National Theatre (now the Konzerthaus) where Hoffmann’s most successful opera, Undine, had its première, although its run was cut short when the building burned down a few months later. While Hoffmann’s mortal remains are located a few miles to the south in a Kreuzberg cemetery, he continues to haunt the old centre of Berlin in the form of a statue in the Gendarmenmarkt to which remarkably few tourists pay homage.
If the real Hoffmann is closely bound to the mythology of Berlin, the fictional Hoffmann – the hard-drinking hopeless romantic who is improbably redeemed by his own art – has earned a place in the pantheon of timeless archetypes. The character who appears in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann can be adapted easily to nearly any time or place, as demonstrated in Lydia Steier’s new staging, which recently had its première at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. With the action transplanted to a fancifully exaggerated vision of twentieth-century New York City, and a straightforward reading that cast Hoffmann as the rope in a tug-of-war between good and evil, the new production had a calculatingly crowd-pleasing visual dazzle that often triumphed over its shortcomings.
Of all the operas in the standard repertoire, Hoffmann may be the least bound to the notion of a canonical text. Offenbach didn’t live to produce a definitive version, and many of the earliest performances were already a patchwork of numbers lifted from other operas, passages orchestrated by different composers and insertions intended to meet the practical needs of the stagings. The fact that most of the orchestral parts were destroyed when the Opéra Comique caught fire – a curious echo of the fate of Hoffmann’s Undine – and the reappearance of various missing materials over the course of the twentieth century have only complicated the quest for a definitive text. When you see a new production of Hoffmann, you can never be sure exactly what you’re going to get.
The version presented on this evening was a genuine pick-and-mix affair: there was some spoken dialogue and some orchestrated recitative; Nicklausse and the Muse were performed by the same singer, although the three main female roles – Stella did not appear – were given to different performers; and the role of the Muse was expanded with a few extra numbers, including the violin song. If much of the music seemed to come from more recent sources, the Giulietta act – which appeared after Antonia – was far closer to the old Choudens edition, even going so far as to include ‘Scintille, diamant’ and the climactic sextet (which, despite being spurious additions, contain some of the act’s finest music). The epilogue, confusingly, seemed to be drawn primarily from the 1970s edition of Fritz Oeser.
The editorial interventions to music and text seemed to have been tailored to the production, which removed the story from its European locales and dropped its protagonist onto the mean streets of Manhattan. In the opening moments, a bedraggled Hoffmann stumbled out of a strip-club – where ‘Stella’ was the main attraction – and promptly died of a heart attack. Soon afterwards, an angel (the Muse) descended in a cloud suspended by ropes – making this one of the few opera productions to begin, rather than end with a deus ex machina – while a devil with red horns and an oversized phallus (Lindorf) appeared from a sulphurous trap door in the floorboards. The two accompanied the recently-deceased Hoffmann to a nightclub called Purgatory, where the poet was forced to reckon with the formative events of his own past.
Offenbach: Les Contes d’Hoffmann. Bertrand de Billy, conductor. Lydia Steier, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, November 2025. © 2025 by Bernd Uhlig.
The remainder of the staging played out as both a review of Hoffmann’s life and a protracted battle for his soul. The Olympia act recounted a childhood trauma in which the young Hoffmann develops an unhealthy sexual obsession with one of his Christmas toys (for this act the singer was doubled by a flat-capped youth straight out of a feel-good 1940s Hollywood movie). In the Antonia act, which shifted the action forward by roughly a decade and a half, Hoffmann appeared as a young man trying to save his true love from her confinement in the violin factory of her overprotective father. The Giulietta act – which, based on Dapertutto’s outfit, may have taken place in the 1970s – found the now-dissolute poet lusting after a Jessica Rabbit lookalike in a seedy bordello. On the evidence of Hoffmann’s trainers and the presence of a Dirty-era Sonic Youth t-shirt worn by one member of the choir, one might reasonably date the epilogue and apotheosis of Hoffmann to the early 1990s.
In visual terms the staging was a maximalist tour-de-force, not merely in its interlocking sets and clever use of the hydraulic stage, but also in its carefully choreographed sense of constant motion; this was a staging that abhorred stasis and went out of its way to ensure that something was happening at all times. Between its stylish and highly detailed representations of very specific locales – including a shamelessly nostalgic evocation of Christmas past in the Olympia act – its troupe of dancers twirling their way through various scenes, and its tasteful use of video projection (which added texture rather than definite imagery), it was the kind of conspicuously high-production-value spectacular that was threatening to become a house specialty at the Staatsoper in the year leading up to the pandemic. Beneath the surface gloss, however, there was a troubling lack of substance.
Although the notion of tracing Hoffmann’s journey from young idealist to drunken habitué of dive bars and strip clubs had promise – and offered a remarkably strong justification for placing the Antonia act before Giulietta – the battle between angels and demons seemed too obvious (as did the presence of the mysterious old woman who made brief, silent appearances in each act); the spiritual ambiguities in Hoffmann’s stories are too rich to be reduced to a simple morality play. The evening also suffered from a curious uncertainty of tone: the demonic Lindorf (and his alter egos) seemed to treat the staging as a comedy, but there was little in the way of supporting lightness, even in the normally genial Olympia act. The Antonia act never emerged as a convincing tragedy – nor even an emotionally-involving melodrama – while the Giulietta act coasted on the novelty of its passingly risqué setting while bypassing the dark, uncanny qualities that have earned Hoffmann’s tales their place in the world of gothic literature. If the staging remained impressive on a purely visual level, the kineticism of its imagery never quite amounted to a consistent view of the opera’s varied moods, nor its potential for otherworldly drama.
Offenbach: Les Contes d’Hoffmann. Bertrand de Billy, conductor. Lydia Steier, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, November 2025. © 2025 by Bernd Uhlig.
The evening’s cast was generally solid. Although Hoffmann features a large assortment of minor figures, the focus remained – as it must – on the principal characters who recur from episode to episode. Pene Pati’s capacity for nuanced phrasing and intelligent line-readings made him a consistently compelling Hoffmann; he had no trouble rising to the lyricism of the score’s obvious highlights – his reunion with Antonia, or the elegantly sung ‘Ô dieu, de quelle ivresse’ – but his ability to convey the restless disaffection of a disappointed romantic was far more fascinating. Perhaps the finest encapsulation of his artistry was the tale of Kleinzach, in which his caustic depiction of the misshapen dwarf gave way to loftier reminiscences of Stella.
Hoffmann’s love-interests were divided among three singers, each of whom brought appropriate tone and range to their roles. Serena Sáenz was a delightful Olympia, approaching the opening of ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’ with lucid tone and graceful phrasing – albeit one that always retained hints of the character’s artificial nature – while handling the malfunctions with deft comic timing. Julia Kleiter’s broad emotional range and dramatic engagement were a perfect fit for Antonia, perhaps the opera’s most fully realised character; her opening scenes had an appealing lightness of touch – if her duet with Hoffmann was driven by the orchestra at an unnaturally brisk pace, she had the agility to make it work – but she was able to bring greater depth to the character as the act progressed. And while Giulietta is the one major figure who doesn’t have a grand scene to herself, Sonja Herranen nonetheless contributed an elegant barcarolle to the evening.
As the Muse, Ema Nikolovska gave a spirited performance that often hinted at the monumental strain of keeping her wayward poet in check. However it was Roberto Tagliavini as the quartet of villains who ended up stealing the show. In addition to a seductively lyrical tone, his appearances had an infectious energy that no one else could match. ‘Scintille, diamant’ may be an inauthentic addition to the text, but Mr Tagliavini’s suave reading fully justified its presence: it was the closest thing the evening had to a genuine show-stopper. Although his Dr Miracle was more ostentatious than sinister and his Coppélius was somewhat sidelined by the staging, Mr Tagliavini made sure that the opera’s demonic villains were always the most commanding figures on stage.
A more troubling aspect of the evening was Bertrand de Billy’s musical direction: it is true that the suspiciously prolific Offenbach made his name dashing off effervescent tunes for light musical entertainments, and that the temptation to play Hoffmann in the style of Grand Opéra – as often happened in the twentieth century – is arguably no more authentic than the various additions that have crept into the score over the years. But on this evening the music often veered too far in the direction of insubstantial lightness. In the prologue the orchestra sounded dangerously brittle, while the hard-driven tempi and airtight control in some of the grandest scenes didn’t always give the music requisite room to breathe: the drinking chorus sounded cursory instead of ribald, the Antonia/Hoffmann duet emerged as a technical showpiece rather than an outpouring of emotion, and many of the climactic moments – the terrifying reappearance of Coppélius at the end of the Olympia act, or the death of Antonia – came across as understated.
Despite its flaws, the evening nonetheless succeeded as a work of undemanding entertainment, a simple moral message backed up by a few memorable tunes and supported by ceaseless visual spectacle. Indeed, it was not difficult to imagine this production remaining in the Staatsoper’s roster for the next quarter century, and perhaps even coming to be regarded as something of a ‘classic’. Yet despite its undeniable visual appeal, one left the theatre with the lingering sense that the production had missed out on some of the essential qualities that have made Offenbach’s Hoffmann such an endlessly fascinating contribution to the world of opera.
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