The Darkest of Light Operas
Or the hidden life of a manufactured object
©James Beswick Whitehead, 2000
revised version, March 2001
1: Bucking the Market
Most of the literature of the gramophone record has had its agenda set by the market-place. Yet the real life of these manufactured objects, their real effect and influence generally goes unrecorded. These notes will not be modelled along the lines of commercial record reviews or listening-notes. They represent an attempt to deconstruct an encounter with the records, paying attention to presentation, notes, labels, trade marks, slogans and historical context. On this occasion, there is a short essay on the libretto and its context, with a note on the real E. T. A. Hoffmann. Let this be a lesson to anyone dabbling with vinyl fetishism. It leads to cataloguing mania and to the horrible realization that A4 scanners were not built to scan 12" sleeves in one pass. I happily leave it to others to attempt encyclopedic coverage, but a few core samples may help to diagnose exactly why these objects are so very addictive. And no, I will not take the cure if it is found.
The striking artwork could, mistakenly, be dismissed as mere kitsch. Even in 1962, it would have looked like a throwback to the plush fantasy of early Technicolor movies. The swash lettering of the title suggests De Luxe aspirations. Yet the red and black with its crushing weight of velvet curtaining, may hint at something both hidden and infernal. Like Hoffmann, we are standing on the threshold of an experience that may charm and captivate. Unlike the anti-hero, we know full well that its source will be mechanical.
Music: Offenbach: Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Standard Choudens edition, Guiraud's recitatives, somewhat abridged
Cast: Simoneau, Dobbs, Graf, Rehfuss, Tuescher, Doniat, Lefort, Heimpel, Concerts de Paris, Le Conte
Running Time: 121 mins 30 secs.
Presentation: Substantial card double-sleeve with front cover artwork in colour
Documentation: Synopsis and background notes by Noel Goodwin, 1 copy with 40pp custom-printed libretto and translation
Manufacture & Distribution: Concert Hall Record Club UK: (mono only) BM 2108 A/B (2 discs) dated 1962
First Issue: Epic (USA) 3 discs, issued late 1958, noticed in Gramophone American Letter January 1959. Stereo April
Recorded: Paris 1957 - 58
Originating Company: Epic? European Co-Production with French Company?
Provenance: 2 copies, 12th and 25th June 1996, Manchester, Bury
Condition: Copy One: good playing condition, some slight craters. Copy Two: very good
Date of Playing: 18th March 2000
Sound quality: Clear and undistorted, despite long sides. A little bass light with voices favoured
Rarity: Moderate. Presumably not a standard club choice. Not seen before or since June 1996 double appearance
Collectability: Desirable
Material Value: Negligable, c £2 per set
Reissued on CD: No reissues known
Literature: Gramophone, American Letter, Jan 1959; Gammond: Music on Record IV, 1963
French studios were far later than their UK and US counterparts to equip for stereo production. Even Pathé-Marconi discs from this period are often mono only. This recording appears to have been a French-USA co-production and the American originators would have insisted on stereo for the home market. When stereo was introduced, the French preferred to issue discs in a Gravure Universelle format, which sought to minimize playing problems with mono equipment. The majority of Concert Hall issues were of this kind, styled Synchro-Stereo. The typically thin and sometimes rough quality of Concert Hall stereo is attributed to this compromise format, though it may stem from long manufacturing runs using single stampers. It is notable that multiple copies of UK Concert Hall issues show no variation of stamper details. Some Concert Hall Full Stereos were issued and labeled as such: the Grand Prix du Disque winning Rite of Spring under Boulez, 1964, was one. It does appear more vivid than the Synchro-Stereo issues. The lack of a Concert Hall stereo issue of the Hoffmann discs may be a blessing, as the mono sound is quite satisfactory.
The authors of Music on Record in 1963 considered it was worth joining the Concert Hall Club in order to obtain this recording. There was only one alternative in the general catalogue and that was in English. The conductor of that version had taken legal action to prevent its first issue on disc. Now similarly crammed onto two discs from an original rare set of three, Decca had reissued the soundtrack of the Powell-Pressburger film of 1951. It is ironic that this, one of very few complete(ish) opera recordings by Sir Thomas Beecham should have such a chequered background. The Ace of Clubs reissue shows up quite often in slush piles and sounds less terrible than accounts lead you to expect. As a curio, it is worth acquiring, though the running time is somewhat shorter than the original length of the film. (126 minutes as against 138 minutes) It is unclear whether cuts were made before or after the LXT issue. The film itself has not surfaced on UK television for some years and is generally regarded as one of the less successful of the Archers Productions. What ruled out the Beecham was not just the cast or the recording but the use of an English translation, which lost the flavour of this very French piece.
An earlier French version had circulated on Columbia LPs in the early 1950s. This turns out to have been recorded as early as 1947. The conductor was Cluytens, and unlike his stereo remake, the cast was drawn from the Opéra Comique and was native French. Underrated at the time, this set is now regarded as documenting the Opéra Comique tradition in this central work, a tradition already in decline and now gone. This version resurfaced on CD in 1995 and again in August 2000. By 1962, however, it was long deleted and the choice was Beecham or Le Conte.
Though he enjoyed a successful career and made many records, French Canadian tenor Leopold Simoneau was never an artist heavily promoted by record companies. His discs for Philips France trickled onto the UK market, often in excerpted forms, even where the complete operas were available on the continent. For a detailed account, see the article by John T. Hughes in ICRC, Vol II No.5, Summer 1996. As good French-language tenors have not been thick on the ground in the LP era, his records would seem to have deserved more attention. As Hoffmann, the voice seems, if anything, too youthful and fresh to convey the world-weary and disillusioned anti-hero. There is a case for saying that Offenbach's score leaves the evils of the libretto to speak for themselves, giving us dark things brightly told. In fact this whole recording fails to suggest the theatre and I could never really banish the suggestion of the singers gathered to deliver their stuff in the studio. Some gathering, some stuff!
American soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs sings the rôles of the doll Olympia and the singer Antonia, leaving the more sensual part of the courtesan Giulietta to the German Uta Graf. Dobbs has youth on her side and the voice is fresh and agile. It does not appear to be very big, however, and she does not command attention in the manner of many better known and often worse singers. Incidentally, her light timbre is a counter-example to cite when considering whether black singers always have an identifiable covered or smokey character to their voices. Graf has a warmer mezzo-ish timbre, without supplying much cream. But then this show is kept moving at a swift pace and both singers may have benefited from more space to characterize. Nata Tuescher has a forthright, rather hard tone for the breeches rôle of Nicklausse but is less well suited to being the voice of Antonia's mother. Perhaps the voice in the mirror is meant to be a demon.
What took me by surprise was the extent to which the show was stolen by Heinz Rehfuss as the trio of evil geniuses. Without being exactly a basso profundo, this was a voice that thinks black. All the evil was conveyed in fully musical terms without any coarse exaggeration. Though a slight beat is noticeable in the voice as recorded, the focus seemed spot-on and the legato of a kind we normally have to return to 78s to hear. Though only Doniat and Lefort are actually French, and Simoneau virtually, the language is much better managed here than in many starry international productions. The chorus is small but notably good and crisp.
In sum, the set is chiefly remarkable for the male singers. There is little staging, though a good loud winder is found for the doll. The orchestra is somewhat backwardly recorded and the side-breaks are awkward, inevitably, given the compression onto two discs. A few abridgments go further than the printed libretto: Franz loses the second verse of his dance-song, for instance. It is possible that the Epic set included this.
If this set should turn up in a slush-pile, it is well worth snapping up. Textual fanatics should note that the complete Oeser score, recorded on CD by Sylvain Cambreling with a starry cast, runs to some 210 minutes. A full version of the Choudens score would run approximately 140 minutes.
Fin-de siècle Paris was a city where alchemists had their own newspaper and where automata-makers thrived, where poets dreamed of corpses on park benches, where engravers dredged their uneasy sleep for subjects. Good soil indeed for the revival of E.T.A. Hoffmann's early romantic tales of the fantastic. Hoffmann might be surprised that his contribution to music has been as inspiration more than composer. In Offenbach's music, he is even swallowed by his own work to become its subject and depicted as a hopeless drunk. Glou, glou, glou, as the opening chorus has it, or glug, glug, glug.
Tales of Hoffmann has a self-consciously ironic libretto which straight away presents us with another opera, Don Giovanni, to which we may contrast it. While Don Giovanni pursues the Eternal Feminine through its every physical incarnation, Hoffmann's Ideal, Stella, the opera-singer, falls into her constituent parts as Machine, Courtesan and Voice. Giovanni's ego pursues multiple flesh-and-blood partners, whereas Hoffmann's internal divisions send him yearning after phantoms. Hoffmann does not dine with a stone guest at the end of the opera, he sups with phantoms from the start. I can think of no other nineteenth century opera which dramatizes the paralysis of the will.
Despite the title, we are offered little in the way of stories. Each panel of the triptych is a tableau or situation, a bubble, full of its own air and destined to go pop. We could define each of the females negatively: Olympia is without mind, Giulietta is without soul and Antonia is without physical health. Despite the emotional warmth of Hoffmann's self-pity, it is an alienating piece. We pass from one thing to the next without foreground and background resolving themselves. A comic servant takes the stage. He would sing if he could, but he can't, he would dance if he could but he can't. He comes before us and takes his leave. When he has gone, we may wonder if he was there any more than the dwarf Klein-Zach of the ballad. Offenbach's background as a parodist makes him the ideal composer for this epic of alienation: the music tends to divert us from the grave implications of the text. We are never browbeaten or hypnotized by the music and if we find the piece disturbing, Offenbach allows us to think we may be imagining it.
Here is the inversion of a Wagnerian scheme: in Wagner, characters find themselves through myth, whereas Hoffmann is stripped down by each episode. Hoffmann is not delving into the past in order to make sense of it. That would lead to self-knowledge and the possibility of growth. Each episode seems like a variation on the theme of disillusionment, but in this hall of mirrors, there is no end to the illusions. It little matters in which order we play the acts: buildings require detailed blueprints but demolitions usually do not. The extensive materials left by Offenbach at his death mean that all versions require intervention. There is no Authentic Score and it remains uncertain whether he wanted recitatives or dialogue. As in the workshops of Coppelius, parts are reused, so that the celebrated Diamond Aria and Barcarolle are cannibalized from other scores. It is ironic to find the Barcarolle was reclaimed from a score called The Rhine-maidens. E. T. A. Hoffmann himself wrote an opera on Undine. Strange reflections are everywhere in this fluid world. The journey begins in the depths of a wine-glass and goes nowhere. Glug, glug, glug.
Fascination, literally the binding of another by the gaze, lies at the heart of the libretto. Hoffmann gazes at Olympia through special glasses before she is smashed by the creator of her eyes. A man loses his soul by gazing in a mirror. A sick woman is encouraged by an evil doctor to sing herself to death, joining the spirit of her mother in another mirror. Olympia takes her animation from his soul, Giulietta takes her freedom from his imprisonment, then he watches impotently as Antonia is absorbed by her own mother. This is the darkest of light operas and one that reveals its depths on the turntable, away from the distractions of staging. It looks better in the mind's eye.
Elsewhere in E. T. A. Hoffmann we find tales of homunculi, those alchemical pioneers of in vitro fertilization. In one of the more startling lines of the libretto we realize that, years ahead of her time, Olympia is the product of two fathers. "She has my eyes", says Coppelius, and the girl begins to look like the casualty of a broken home and an experimental relationship gone wrong. The ending is uniquely sad, leaving Hoffmann slumped in a drunken stupor, leaving the world to evil geniuses, Mesmers and mechanics. They will effect a transformation of the soul more real and lasting than the romantic poets.
8: The Brotherhood of Serapion
Self-portrait by E. T. A. Hoffmann
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, 1776 - 1822 achieved success in his own eyes very briefly, with the production of his romantic opera Undine in Berlin in 1816. On the twenty-fourth night, the theatre burned to the ground. It is the Hoffmann of the final years, as a founder of the Brotherhood of Serapion, a circle of story-telling drinkers, whose disappointments in love and life form the basis of the libretto. Though he counted many of the leading lights of German Romanticism among his friends - men like Arnim, Brentano and Chamisso - Hoffmann, a deputy judge by profession, lived his artistic life in the cracks between duties. Romanticism in Germany seems to filter through scientific and philosophical layers, carrying a sense of high seriousness with it into the poetic bedrock. Humour was expressly forbidden in some quarters, as tending to accommodate the marvelous to the bourgeois common-sense outlook. Hoffmann, however, employs a whole battery of self-conscious devices to undermine his own narratives, such as writing a work in which the biography of a tom-cat and a musician are accidentally shuffled at the publisher's and printed as one. By casting doubt on the authorial voice, Hoffmann typically places natural and supernatural elements on an equal footing.
Self-portrait with annotations by Hoffmann
The artistic dislocations of the twentieth century have tended to blur the changes that took place within the nineteenth century. It is all Romantic Art since Modernism reared its head. It is, however, also possible to view the later nineteenth century as a dilution of the spirit of Romance and explicitly a revision and criticism of that impulse. The Tales of Hoffmann libretto uses the framing device of First Act and Epilogue to confine the poet's dreaming to three strange love affairs, his motivation restricted to his failure to keep Stella, his muse. It is, in its well-made way, the evidence of a revolution that had failed.
©James Beswick Whitehead, 2000