Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a writer, jurist, composer, music critic and caricaturist, a man of many talents whom literary history remembers as one of the most important representatives of German Romanticism. His fantastic and eerie tales, in which reality intertwines with phantasmagoric visions, exerted a strong influence on many writers, ranging from Poe and Baudelaire to Gogol and Dostoevsky.
Based on his tales The Sandman, Councillor Krespel and The Lost Reflection, the French composer Jacques Offenbach wrote an opera in which Hoffmann himself becomes the hero of his own stories. Over the course of a drunken night in a tavern in Nuremberg, the writer recounts to a group of students the three great loves of his life: Olympia, a mechanical doll; Antonia, a gifted but ailing young woman; and Giulietta, a courtesan. Each of these loves, marked by illusion, loss and unattainability, is destroyed by an incarnation of the same adversary. The framing narrative, linked to Hoffmann’s fascination with the opera singer Stella, the poet’s fourth love, binds these stories into a unified yet fragmented dramatic arc.
The Tales of Hoffmann are not a linear narrative, but a series of variations on love, art, illusion, and loss. The opera unfolds on the threshold between reality and fiction, with the same characters appearing in different guises. For this reason, the composer entrusted the role of the poet’s nemesis to a single performer, just as the four women Hoffmann loves are often interpreted by one singer. Offenbach worked on the opera in the final years of his life, aware that he might not live to see its premiere. He died four months before the first performance, leaving the final Venetian act unfinished.
The Zagreb production will be directed by Krešimir Dolenčić, whose previous staging of Offenbach’s masterpiece was met with great acclaim, under the baton of Ayrton Desimpelaere, Chief Conductor of the Slovenian National Theatre Opera and Ballet Ljubljana. The production’s visual concept, set design and costume design will be created by David Szauder, one of the most prominent contemporary digital visual artists.
