 
Heinrich Spängler
Helga Rabl-Stadler
Entführung
Masterpiece
Don Carlo
The concerts
|
A DIAMOND SUBJECTED TO CONSTANT CUTTING
New findings on Offenbach’s main work "Les Contes d’Hoffmann"
For the Salzburg Festival 2003 conductor Kent Nagano and stage director David McVicar are preparing a new version of Jacques Offenbach’s fantastic opera "Les contes d’Hoffmann" (The Tales of Hoffmann). Some of the original couplets by Offenbach that were discovered only recently in the estate of the musicologist Fritz Oeser will be performed for the first time.
“Scintille, diamant, miroir”. Older opera fans especially have the beginning of one of the catchy tunes in their memory which are a hallmark of Jacques Offenbach’s masterpiece "Les contes d’Hoffmann". However, if we listen carefully to the original French text of Dapertutto’s mirror aria, it is not a mirror he is singing about but a diamond. Offenbach did indeed write a mirror aria for the demon appearing as four villainous characters, who destroy the relations engaged in by the fictitious poet E. T. A. Hoffmann with four women. This mirror aria was, however, given a new text for Dapertutto’s alter ego Coppelius to sing. And the famous mirror aria was not written by Offenbach but by a certain André Bloch. He wrote it for a performance of Les contes d’Hoffmann in 1904 in Monte Carlo.
A phantom haunts the musical world
André Bloch was a pupil of Ernest Guiraud who composed the recitatives
which replaced the spoken dialogues in Georges Bizet’s original
Carmen. This was for a performance at the Vienna Court Opera in 1875 shortly
after the death of the composer and which initiated the successful reception
of the opera all over the world.
Offenbach’s most sophisticated composition suffered a similar fate
in that at the end of 1880, only three months before its premiere, he
died and was therefore unable to give it any definitive form. From then
onwards, apart from manifold problems of detail, it haunted the musical
world like a phantom: as an opéra comique hardly ever performed,
with spoken dialogues between the musical numbers and – following
the catastrophic fire in Vienna’s Ring Theatre in December 1881
it was regarded for years as a bad omen – as a through-composed
drama lyrique with linking recitatives by Guiraud.
Rudolf Hradil, Pont
des Arts, Paris, 1998
Important contribution by the Salzburg Festival
It was not until Walter Felsenstein’s (highly controversial) staging
of the dialogue version at the Comic Opera in Berlin in 1958 that people
began to discuss the performance material. These discussions reached boiling
point almost in 1976 when the conductor Antonio de Almeida came across
several unknown sketches by Offenbach and six years later 350 pages of
the completely orchestrated autograph turned up in an auction. Having
the libretto available in its original form before it had been censored
led to the start of an exciting process of re-working the opera, especially
as the new finds made it possible to make corrections to the falsely handed
down text.
The Salzburg Festival has also played a part in this process of development.
In 1980 James Levine conducted new material for the first time in the
Venice act and in 2003 Kent Nagano will conduct original couplets only
recently discovered and which will be included in the new production by
David McVicar. Gradually a phantom of opera history is increasingly assuming
the outlines the composer himself envisaged before death prevented him
from completing the work.
Ulrich Schreiber
Rudolf Hradil, Paris,
Boulevard Moutparnasse, 1985
Jacques Offenbach
Les contes d’Hoffmann
New production
Conductor Kent Nagano
Stage director David McVicar
Stage design and costumes Tanya McCallin
Lighting design Paule Constable
Chorus master Rupert Huber
Dramaturgy Alain Patrick Olivier
Hoffmann Neil Shicoff
The Muse/Nicklausse Angelika Kirchschlager
Lindorf / Coppelius / Captain Dapertutto / Doctor Miracle
Ruggero Raimondi
Andrés / Cochenille / Pitichinaccio / Frantz Jeffrey Francis
Olympia L’ubica Vargicová
Antonia Soile Isokoski
Giulietta Waltraud Meier
Voice of the mother Marjana Lipovšek
Spalanzani Robert Tear
Crespel Dan Dumitrescu
Nathanaël John Nuzzo
Meister Luther Peter Loehle
Hermann Markus Eiche
Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus
Vienna Philharmonic
Grosses Festspielhaus
Premiere
Wednesday 30 July 7.00 p.m.
Further performances
Sunday 3 August 7.30 p.m.
Saturday 9 August 7.00 p.m.
Friday 15 August 7.00 p.m.
Tuesday 19 August 7.00 p.m.
Sunday 24 August 7.00 p.m.
Saturday 30 August 7.00 p.m.
Tickets are available from the Ticket Office
of the Salzburg Festival in the following price categories:
€ 22 / 45 / 65 / 90 / 140 / 210 / 270 / 350
Telephone: 0043 662 8045-500
Telefax: 0043 662 8045-555
E-mail: info@salzburgfestival.at