“Fantastic Opera” is what Jacques Offenbach calls his swan song “Les contes d’Hoffmann – The Tales of Hoffmann”. He did not live to see the premiere in February 1881, and when he died four months earlier he had not yet completed the score, which is why it was completed by someone else. At the Gärtnerplatztheater it was now performed after the source-critical edition by Fritz Oeser from 1977 and was in every respect an “Opéra fantastique”, in which reality merges with nightmare.
Largely German, when songs or arias are thematized as “art” in the course of the plot, but also sung in French, we experience here the dark visions of the poet ETA Hoffmann. At the beginning and end he hacks wildly into a typewriter in the midst of his lemur-like gothic-style drinking buddies, dressed in black leather and made up like dead people. In between, he re-experiences his relationship with three women, whom he thinks he encounters again in Stella as a synthesis.
The first is Antonia: a doll that, through rose-tinted glasses, comes to life and becomes a love object for the poet. Ilia Staple sometimes sings flawlessly, sometimes brilliantly cutting like an automaton and is multiplied in lots of showcases with identical dolls that populate the happenings in a kind of crypt on a revolving stage. Its high walls are covered with countless crumpled sheets of music, which looks like a vertical unreal flokati.
Callas or Caballé in a glass coffin
Stage, costumes, staging, lighting design and choreography are again – as in November 2019 with “Tosca” at the Gärtnerplatztheater – by Stefano Poda. In addition to the singer, it shows eight other women in red futuristic net dresses, how they move in their showcases, first rigidly, then repeatedly in a minimalist, doll-like manner. It’s played so perfectly that you sometimes turn away from the action and turn to the fantastic extras. This is repeated in the third act, when Hoffmann meets Antonia, a young singer with lung disease. Jennifer O’Loughlin exudes little warmth, but since she embodies a memory, she deliberately artificially exhibits her lyrical coloratura soprano. There are the great opera divas of the 20th and 21st centuries in their glass coffins, constantly changing their habit and gesture, in their glass coffins: Wagner heroine Martha Mödl, Tebaldi and Callas, Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé to Edita Gruberová, who recently had a tragic accident, and many others. It is amazing how a Callas or Caballé not only resemble the real model in mask and hairstyle, but also adopt their posture. Not only their names appear on the base, but also those of Hoffmann’s stories such as “Rat Crespel” or “Der Sandmann”, on which the opera is based.
In the fourth act, the courtesan Giulietta (cool seductress: Camille Schnoor) multiplies. Like something out of a sci-fi film, the women wear silver motorcycle helmets over white, transparent mesh skin, which are adorned with broken glass and diamonds, as if it were a work by Damien Hirst. The gentlemen, however, appear again as black nightmare figures like in the horror film à la “Nosferatu”. Hoffmann also acts like a remote-controlled puppet from the cabinet of horrors. It’s wonderful how Lucian Krasznec keeps collapsing like a puppet when he sings about Klein-Zack, which his legs won’t obey. He also sings and plays Hoffmann with an enchantingly austere diction and an unmistakably luminous, will-o’-the-wisp tenor. His muse, adviser and friend Niklas is his alter ego in the form of Anna-Katharina Tonauer with a mezzo that exudes mild comfort, at least in costume. She, too, appears for the apotheosis with the balmy melody to the text “One becomes great through love, greater still through suffering” all in white like all the other men and women. Hoffmann sees the white light of death and disappears into a nirvana of icy cold. Mathias Hausmann successfully slips into the role of Hoffmann’s evil opponents Lindorf, Coppelius, Dr. Miracle and Dapertutto. Buffo tenor Maximilian Mayer shines as Andreas, Cochenille, Franz and Pitichinaccio. Anthony Bramall holds the whole thing together well at the podium of the Gärtnerplatz Orchestra, even if elegant esprit on the one hand and romantic pathos on the other have not yet been fully explored.