✭✭✭✭✩

by Jacques Offenbach, directed by Lee Blakeley

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

April 10-May 14, 2012

“Fantastic Singing Fulfills Hoffmann’s Fantasies”

Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann (Les Contes d’Hoffmann) makes a welcome return to the Canadian Opera Company after far too long an absence.  The COC last staged it in 1988.  The present production from De Vlaamse Opera of Belgium is lavish and does justice to the fantastical tales that make up the action and this singing throughout is excellent.

Offenbach’s opera is based on an 1851 play by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré which dramatizes three of the stories of German author and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), whose tales of fantasy and horror would have wide influence over later writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol and Charles Dickens among others.  His stories form the plots of Delibes’ ballet Coppélia and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. 

The opera makes Hoffmann himself the central character but depicts him as the cliché of the Romantic artist, living alone in a tiny room and drinking to feed his imagination as he longs for Stella, who becomes the model for the women in every stories he writes.  (In reality Hoffmann was married twice and though he died of alcoholism and syphilis, the primary bane of his life were the constantly changing politics in the Europe of his time.)  In the current production we meet Hoffmann (Russell Thomas) drinking and scribbling away in his crowded lopsided room.  His Muse (Lauren Segal) is there to protect him and disguises herself as Hoffmann’s friend Niklausse, who acts as a kind of Sancho Panza to the futile and fantastic romantic quests of Hoffmann’s Don Quixote.  As a crowd of admirers waits for the appearance of Stella after the opera, Hoffmann entertains them with three tales of his own romantic misadventures.

The first and most bizarre tale finds Hoffmann in love with Olympia (Andriana Churchman), the “daughter” of the inventor Spalanzani (a fine Michael Barrett), who in reality is an automaton.  This episode is absolutely hilarious as Spalanzani has to galvanize Olympia into action with what looks like Jules Verne’s notion of a defibrillator.  Director Lee Blakeley enhances the fun by making this Olympia particularly randy and discovering she can stimulate herself with one of the paddles.  Churchman gives a great performance of Olympia as a mischievous adolescent trapped inside a creaky mechanical body she can’t fully control and, except for a couple notes, pulls off Olympia’s famous showpiece coloratura aria with aplomb.

The second tale finds Hoffmann in love with the young woman Antonia (Erin Wall), the daughter of an opera singer.  Antonia, however, has inherited the strange medical condition from her mother that singing too much will literally kill her.  Contrary to the orders of her father (a sensitive Gregory Dahl), the evil Dr. Miracle (John Relyea) comes to treat her.  Yet, when alone with her, Miracle deliberately encourages Antonia to sing and follow her mother’s path to the stage.  He even conjures up the ghost of Antonia’s mother (Ileana Montabetti) to further help cause her doom.  Wall gives a wonderfully warm account of the role, fully conveying both the beauty and fragility of the doomed woman.

The third tale is the most confusing, especially since the ending has been cut, and Blakeley’s direction does not make it clearer.  Hoffmann is now in love with Giulietta (Keri Alkema who makes the most of her rich soprano), a Venetian courtesan, who has been engaged by the evil Captain Dapertutto (Relyea again) to seduce Hoffmann and steal his reflection.  Despite various machinations and a duel with a rival for Giulietta (Dahl again), the story ends merely with Hoffmann’s disillusionment with the callous courtesan. 

In the Epilogue we return to the admirers in the tavern and learn that the three women of the tales are all version of the same woman who is Stella.  Blakeley changes the conclusion to provide a happy ending, but it also does not make sense.  The Muse had told Hoffmann he ultimately would have to choose between her and Stella.  Hoffmann is supposed to realize his past follies and choose the Muse.  Here, Stella (Ambur Braid) goes off with his rival Lindorf (Relyea again), but then returns to Hoffmann while the Muse remains with him despite singing “La Muse apaisera / ta souffrance benie”.  What suffering is there to calm if Hoffmann has Stella?  Or, since all the action has taken place in Hoffmann’s mind, is this just another delusion?   

Setting these flaws aside, the production is wonderfully imaginative.  The wit in the design and direction of the Olympia scene alone is worth the price of admission.  Set designer Roni Toren has the tiny room in which we first see Hoffmann fade into the distance to be replaced by a stage-sized version of the same room with wainscoting that reaches above people’s heads and gigantic versions of key pieces of Hoffmann’s furniture so that all the adults now appear toddler-sized.  This puts the adults in the same position as Clara after the Christmas tree grows in The Nutcracker of living out the fairy tale, or nightmare, of their imaginations.  Costume designer Brigitte Reiffenstuel has created lavish costumes reflecting the late Empire period when Hoffmann wrote his most famous tales.

As Hoffmann, American tenor Russell Thomas has an heroic tone and just the bronze timbre that suits French opera.  The great pity is that he is so unable to reflect the expressivity of his voice in his facial expressions or body language.  It’s an odd situation when we have more of an idea what the automaton Olympia is thinking than we do of Hoffmann and is tortured soul.  (David Pomeroy sings Hoffmann on May 3 and 8.) 

In contrast, mezzo-soprano Lauren Segal uses her lustrous voice and fine acting ability to convey the Muse’s frustration and despair over Hoffmann’s infatuations.  As the four clearly differentiated villains, bass-baritone John Relyea is absolutely superb.  His dark, menacing voice and penetrating gaze make him dominate the stage whenever he appears.  Tenor Steven Cole is his comic counterpart as the four clearly differentiated servants. 

Under conductor Johannes Debus the COC Orchestra gave an account of the score that combined lushness of sound with rhythmic precision creating enough tang and bite to cut through any hint of sentimentality.  Lovers of French opera and of this opera in particular need not hesitate.  We can only hope that the COC does not wait another 24 years to revisit such a delightful work.                    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: Another version of this review will appear later this year in Opera News.

Photo: Andriana Churchman, Steven Cole and Michael Barrett. ©2012 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.