Met Opera: Grigolo Still Looking for Love in "Les Contes d'Hoffmann"

Met Opera: Grigolo Still Looking for Love in "Les Contes d'Hoffmann"
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
Vittorio Grigolo as Hoffmann with Tara Erraught as his Muse and Laurent Naouri, in background, as his rival Lindorf in the Met’s revival of Les Contes d’Hoffmann.

Vittorio Grigolo as Hoffmann with Tara Erraught as his Muse and Laurent Naouri, in background, as his rival Lindorf in the Met’s revival of Les Contes d’Hoffmann.

Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera

Few operatic heroes are more unlucky in love than Hoffmann, the hapless poet in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and the Met Opera’s current revival of Bartlett Sher’s sumptuous staging with the fiery tenor Vittorio Grigolo in the title role and a topnotch cast around him is a special treat for all opera fans.

Grigolo is an ideal Hoffmann. Besotted by both drink and women, Hoffmann is looking for love in all the wrong places and with all the wrong partners, and ends up losing everything with only his Muse left for comfort. Grigolo, an Aretino tenor, sang the role at the Met two years ago and his rich vocal talents convey all the frustration and anger of the poet.

There is a passion in Grigolo’s singing that leaps across the orchestra pit and fires the audience. He was a terrific Romeo earlier this year opposite Diana Damrau in last season’s new Romeo et Juliette, another Sher production, and he is slated to sing Cavaradossi in the Met’s new Tosca on New Year’s Eve.

As Hoffmann’s Muse (a k a Nicklausse) the Irish mezzo Tara Erraught is making an impressive Met debut, especially in the 3rd act barcarolle “Belle nuit, o nuit d’amour.” And the poet’s three loves, each of whom gets her own act, are admirable.

Erin Morley, a soprano from Utah who sang the same role in the revival two years ago, is stunning as Olympia, the wind-up robot doll, and provides the night’s biggest vocal fireworks in her “Les oiseaux dans la charmille.” Anita Hartig, a Romania soprano, delivers a melting “Elle a fui, la tourterelle” as the sickly Antonia, and the Belarus mezzo Oksana Volkova is alluringly sexy as the Venetian femme fatale Giulietta.

Laurent Naouri, a French bass-baritone, is outstanding as Lindorf, Hoffmann’s rival, and as each of the villains in the three separate tales. Naouri has a deep and resonant voice that is at once menacing and soothing. Met audiences will get to hear him again later in the season in a new production of Massenet’s Cendrillon.

The German conductor Johannes Debus, in only his second turn in the pit, led the always splendid Met Orchestra in a well-paced but urgent reading of the score and the Met Chorus is again in top form, especially in the opening “Drink, Drink, Drink.”

Sher’s 2009 staging of Les Contes d’Hoffmann can still provide a bit of a shock. Sher, who is mainly a theater director, knows how to keep an audience focused on what’s happening onstage. The opening Prologue is set in a tavern, and for some of the women patrons the phrase “scantily clad” would be an understatement.

Each act – the 1st in a Parisian doll factory, the 2nd in a grand country house outside Munich, the 3rd in a palazzo in Venice – has marvelously detailed sets and opulent costumes. And that Venetian palazzo would make a Playboy Club look like a church Bingo parlor. At the outset, girls in G-strings and pasties mingle with guests and simulate sex in orgiastic revelry.

Offenbach, a celebrated 19th-century operetta composer who is most popularly known for the music to the dance of the can-can (from Orpheus in the Underworld), had long wanted to write a full serious opera based on the stories of the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann. It was only toward the end of his life that he got around to it.

Jules Barbier had co-authored a play based on Hoffmann’s tales and when Offenbach approached him about writing a libretto for an opera based on them he signed on. Barbier was an established librettist, having provided the book for Gounod’s Faust among others, and was like Offenbach an admirer of Hoffmann’s writing.

The three Hoffmann stories they chose for the opera – one funny, one sad, and one disillusioning, even violent – are sandwiched between a Prologue and Epilogue that provide a framework for the tales and include a sort of moral on the folly of mistaken love.

In the first, Hoffmann finds himself duped into falling in love with a mechanical doll. Next he is enamored of a frail woman with a beautiful voice, but who dies when they make music together. Finally, he is seduced by a Venetian courtesan who steals his soul on a bet. In each he is thwarted by his nemesis Lindorf in one guise or another.

Les Contes d’Hoffmann had its premiere in 1881 at the Opera Comique in Paris, but Offenbach died shortly before the first performance and never saw it on the stage. It has been revised countless times over the past century and more but the current Met score is based on Offenbach’s original concept.

�+����J�E�&

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot