NCPA Opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann to come back

NCPA June/13/2019
From July 10th to 14th, NCPA production of Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann will be presented on the stage for the second time after its premiere six years ago. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Offenbach, thus it is of greater significance to revive this “swan song” that he spared no effort to create in his later years—in honour of this great composer and in homage to him.


Still of Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Photo by WANG Xiaojing

Most of the works composed by the French-German composer Offenbach all his life are terse and forceful light operas, and he is praised as the “father of light opera” for the great many classic light operas he created. However, in the last days of his life, he composed Les Contes d’Hoffmann, his only opera seria.

In February 1881, when Offenbach had been dead for four months, Les Contes d’Hoffmann premiered at the Paris Opera Comique, attracting the attention of the whole city. That year, Les Contes d’Hoffmann was restaged for 100 times in Paris alone, and performed for more than 400 times in the next six years and named one of the most popular operas in the world.


Still of Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Photo by WANG Xiaojing

The hero Hoffmann in Les Contes d’Hoffmann has a real prototype, the German writer and poet E.T.A. Hoffmann. The sci-fi elements in this opera were very avant-garde in the 19th century, full of romantic magnificence and fantasies about “steampunk”. The whole work contains 22 characters, including the poet, a wine fairy, the Muse, a female star, a robot doll and an eccentric scientist. The three love stories about Hoffmann are almost three independent operettas. Especially, the love between Hoffmann and the robot doll Olympia is an embodiment of Offenbach’s ahead-of-time imagination.


Still of Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Photo by WANG Xiaojing

There are many well-known melodies in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, such as the robot doll Olympia’s aria “The Doll Song”, which is called a “touchstone for coloratura sopranos”, and the most famous aria “Barcarolle”, which appeared in Benigni’s classic film Life Is Beautiful.

There are many characters in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and they differ entirely from one another in personality, and there are new characters appearing in every scene. In order to fully reveal Offenbach’s imagination, the NCPA has invited many outstanding singers to its production of the opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and shown ingenuity in stage scenery, costumes and props. Designed by the director Francesca Zambello, set designer Peter J. Davison and costume designer Court Watson, this version reflects a fantastic collision between the classical and the modern. The maestro Pinchas Steinberg will conduct this round of performance, in which Peter Son, CHEN Yong, Paula Galdina and ZHANG Yajie will play Hoffman and Nicklausse (The Muse). Ekaterina Bakanova, SONG Yuanming, Nancy Fabiola Herrera, WANG Hongyao, Daria Terekhova and ZHANG Wenqin will play the heroines in the three love stories respectively. In addition, many other outstanding Chinese and foreign singers, such as Demetrius Ulyanov, WU Wei, Dietmar Kirshenbaum, LIANG Yufeng, JIN Jiujie, WANG Hexiang and Marco Spehar, will also come on the stage to tell Les Contes d’Hoffmann to audience.


Still of Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Photo by WANG Xiaojing
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