Is any opera more frustrating than Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann? It persistently arouses hopes which it almost as persistently fails to realise. Because there is no such thing as an authoritative text, one always hopes that a new production will have hit on a solution to its numerous problems. I’ve seen enough accounts of it now to feel miserably confident that any production will be a mixture of pleasures and let-downs. This new effort by ENO, a co-production with the Bavarian State Opera, is as good an attempt as any I ever expect to see, and its shortcomings are emphatically not to be attributed either to Richard Jones and his team, or to the performers, the strongest cast that ENO has had for anything for a long time. Perhaps Antony Walker could give a stronger profile to the music, which the orchestra plays impressively; but he may have been hedging his bets as to how seriously we should be taking this hotchpotch of intensity, mockery, high spirits and gloom.
Hoffmann and his series of doomed loves are hard to sympathise with, but if we don’t this very long evening becomes ever less enjoyable. Jones doesn’t so much hedge his bets as exercise to the full his remarkable gift for dark comedy and light melodrama, but that still doesn’t resolve the issue of what, finally, we are to make of Hoffmann’s predictable series of delusions. Jones and his designer Giles Cadle present us with a continuously delightful series of stage pictures, including drop curtains of alternating wit and beauty. The permanent set, the kind of claustrophobic clutter that is Jones’s hallmark, proves to be versatile, though it perhaps works best for the tale of Olympia, the singing doll. Disturbing as this scene is, it is the opera’s most successful, and Georgia Jarman, who plays all Hoffmann’s loves, acts brilliantly and sings with an unnerving suggestion that she is mechanical: this really is a contribution to the German tradition of meditating on dolls, puppets, etc., which Kleist and Rilke among others engaged in, while being an ideal illustration of the tedium of coloratura without expression. Jarman’s subsequent incarnations are just as convincing, but the cogency of the drama drains away.
Barry Banks is the tireless Hoffmann, sounding exactly as he has done now for many years, with a plaintive voice that has a limited expressive range. That is rather cruelly shown up by his muse and friend Nicklausse, Christine Rice at her creamiest, able to create in a few gestures and notes what many singers would take an evening to convey. Clive Bayley is the four villains, demonstrating once again that he is as versatile and imposing a bass as any in the world at present. If only all their efforts were in a more effective cause, and if only Offenbach had lived to complete his work, so that we would know whether he was something besides the greatest musical satirist.
The Met. broadcast of Götterdämmerung, which I saw in the comfort of Huntingdon’s Cineworld, was a disappointment, not only by the standards of the previous three instalments of Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s immense drama, but independently of the expectations they had created. Fabio Luisi, who has taken over the conducting of the last two parts from James Levine, stated in the second intermission that he was intent on getting away from ‘the heavy German tradition’, and he succeeded all too well — but with the wrong orchestra: the Met. orchestra plays Wagner wonderfully in that tradition, but much less convincingly in what Luisi prefers, a strange combination of bass-light textures and ponderous tempi. The Norns, admirably sung and acted, were already too lacking in the portentousness that is the point of their wonderful scene. Siegfried and Brünnhilde fared much better in their rapturous duet, my hopes rose.
But the Gibichung scene, Wagner’s depressing portrayal of the quotidian world of vain ambitions, revealed very quickly what the central dramatic weakness would be: the Hagen of Hans-Peter König was quite the most amiable I have seen, looking and sounding like a well-disposed Mastersinger; and at his most treacherous and murderous, he still appeared to be behaving more in sorrow than hatred. I have never known Wagner’s drama so effectively undermined.
The most moving scene was Waltraute’s narration to the blithe Brünnhilde of the state of the gods. Waltraud Meier was supreme here, and brought out the best in Deborah Voigt. From whatever cause, the default expression on Voigt’s face is a smile, and that suits this scene as it does little else. Voigt can be no one’s favourite Brünnhilde, her voice is too hard and monochrome; but she stayed the course and mounted the equine armour that did service for her steed Grane, even patting his metal ears. Jay Hunter Morris, in his first attempt at the complex Siegfried of this drama, sang well if not exactly beautifully, and acted with endearing freshness. The Gibichungs were excellent. But so long as Luisi takes his present view of this mighty score, it hardly matters who is singing, the impression will be equally shallow.
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