Hoffmanns Erzählungen

In the organizer's words:

A perpetual riddle

Original title Les Contes d'Hoffmann / Fantastic opera in five acts / Libretto by Jules Barbier based on the play by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré / Edited by Michael Kaye and Jean-Christophe Keck

Hoffmann is an artist, poet, aesthete and sees himself as destined for greater things. Once, when he was still searching for inspiration on the ground, "his" Stella became a star on the stages of the opera world. And Hoffmann? He began to believe that love and art do not go together, indeed, it is completely unthinkable that this is possible! So he ekes out his existence, drinking - and searching for explanations, digressing into stories that slowly become clear that they spring neither from his poetic genius nor from higher artistic inspiration. On the contrary - they show the ugly grimaces of his perception of reality and the world as if through a burning glass: people become monstrous threats, Stella becomes an unfeeling machine, a singer committed to death, a courtesan. If only he had read her letter and ever seen the possibility that everything would be all right: Perhaps he would have become someone else.

With The Tales of Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach created what is probably the most famous fragment of opera literature. While still composing it in 1880, the creator of numerous operettas and stage works died suddenly. Together with librettist Jules Barbier, he left behind a work inspired by three of E. T. A. Hoffmann's tales, which invents the fantastic madness, deep despair and eagerness for creativity, success and love of the title character and presents us with a perpetual riddle.