After the Metropolitan Opera opened its season with a recently composed opera—Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded—the company returned to standard repertoire for an entertaining if uneven revival of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann featuring a spectacular tour-de-force performance in the title role by Benjamin Bernheim. The French tenor is having a breakout year with a new solo CD, “Douce France,” just released on Deutsche Grammophon and building upon his great success earlier this year at the Met paired with Nadine Sierra as the doomed lovers in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
Though it featured some other fine portrayals, this season’s Hoffmann was compromised by brusquely brisk conducting by Marco Armiliato who was conspicuously out of his usual Verdi-Puccini comfort zone.
Last seen seven years ago, Bartlett Sher’s confused, vaguely Kafkaesque production fails to offer a coherent vision of Offenbach’s wildly inventive yet disparate work, one he left unfinished when he died in 1880. The German-born composer of many delightful operettas, Offenbach longed to write a more serious work and turned to Jules Barbier’s ambitious libretto based on the fantasy oeuvre of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Barbier with co-author Michel Carré first wrote a play that dramatized several of Hoffmann’s stories featuring a heavily fictionalized version of their author as its central character. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story of a man who becomes infatuated with a mechanical doll proved to be both the source of Offenbach’s first act as well as the ballet Coppélia, currently being performed across Lincoln Center Plaza by New York City Ballet.
Offenbach’s Hoffmann consists of three discrete acts—each recollecting one of Hoffmann’s unfortunate loves—bookended by a prologue and epilogue set in a tavern where the drunken poet waits for his latest paramour, the opera singer Stella. He reflects on his romantic misadventures under the eyes of his friend Nicklausse whom we learn is actually Hoffmann’s Muse in disguise. To reinforce the connection between the three acts, Offenbach and Barbier intended for the roles of Hoffmann’s loves, his conniving nemeses and their servants to be sung by a single soprano, bass and tenor, respectively. Sher and James Levine, the production’s original conductor, had intended to follow this plan but only followed through with the male characters when Anna Netrebko changed her mind about singing all of the heroines. The dark, unmagical production reverted to the familiar traditional route of casting three singers as his loves which seriously undermines the work’s unity.
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Since the composer died before completing a final score, his opera has presented considerable challenges to opera companies ever since its 1881 premiere when it was performed in an edition completed by Ernest Guiraud, the same man who composed the sung recitatives that the Met still uses in its recent production of Bizet’s Carmen. Since then, many other Hoffmann editors have struggled with how to realize the composer’s vision. Despite recent rediscoveries of previously unknown material by Offenbach, the Met stubbornly clings to a confusing and now much-disputed edition by Franz Oeser, which ignores many revisions suggested by musicologists Michael Kaye and Jean-Christophe Keck. This production, however, has adopted the now-accepted switch in the order of the Antonia and Giulietta acts and expanded the ambiguous dual role of Nicklausse and the Muse of Poetry.
Bernheim came directly to the Met from the Salzburg Festival, where he led a new production of Hoffmann in which his Met colleague Christian Van Horn portrayed the work’s villains. As the festival used Keck’s version, American soprano Kathryn Lewek, whom the Met only sees as Mozart’s Queen of the Night, performed all of Hoffmann’s lovers. The Met instead turned first to Erin Morley, who had also participated in the company’s two most recent revivals for Olympia, the mechanical doll. Her brilliantly droll portrayal once more delighted with its glittering yet deliriously off-kilter high-flying coloratura hijinks.
As the fragile singer Antonia, Pretty Yende returned to the Met after an absence of more than five years. Her previously light and agile soprano has grown heavier and its highest notes no longer come easily. She remains an earnestly appealing artist, but her vaguely generalized portrayal of the intense young girl who sings herself to death was curiously unmoving. Her rising lines didn’t consistently ring out cleanly or on pitch.
The Met finally offered Clémentine Margaine a role other than Carmen which she commandingly performed once again at Lincoln Center just last spring. As the voluptuous courtesan Giulietta, the rich-voiced French mezzo boldly conspired with Van Horn’s suave Dappertutto to steal the gullible Hoffmann’s shadow and then ably anchored the crowd-pleasing if spurious septet which crowns the Venetian act.
In the greatly expanded roles of Nicklausse and Hoffmann’s female Muse, Russian mezzo Vasilisa Berzhanskaya made a mixed impression in her Met debut. Her resounding low notes suggested she’s a contralto while firmly attacked glowing high passages made it clear why she recently tackled the soprano title of Bellini’s Norma with some success in Italy. However, she didn’t seamlessly negotiate the shifts between those divergent registers in her frequently demanding music. Nor was she able to make much dramatic sense of Sher’s baffling decision to have Nicklausse act in cahoots with the four villains to sabotage Hoffmann’s affairs. Knowing looks awkwardly shared between Berzhanskaya and Van Horn were ineffective in suggesting they were working toward the same goal. I can imagine, however, that Berzhanskaya may become more at ease vocally once inevitable debut nerves subside.
Van Horn’s sturdy bass-baritone sounded most comfortable in its highest range and though he sang well he made less of an impression than others have in his four roles as he and Sher did little to differentiate Lindorf from Coppélius and Dr. Miracle. The latter joined by Yende and Eve Gigliotti—forthright as the ghost of her mother—failed to make much of the usually surefire trio that drives Antonia to her death. They were let down by Armiliato’s hectic and superficial pacing which went for excitement at the expense of elegance.
Aaron Blake, who usually performs leading roles with regional companies, ventured into character tenor territory as the four servants with mixed results. Although he ably dispatched Frantz’s charming couplets, he otherwise seemed ill-at-ease with the tired comic schtick asked of him.
With immaculate French and his potent tenor superbly in command of Hoffmann’s often punishingly high tessitura, Bernheim portrayed an unlucky hero who moved convincingly from wide-eyed innocent in the Olympia act to Giulietta’s louche fellow reveler. Sher’s production, ably recreated by Gina Lipinski, unfortunately doesn’t offer us much to explain how his hero’s adventures will ultimately lead to artistic inspiration, Bernheim’s eager and dreamy Hoffmann exuded an endearing vulnerability that was remarkably different from the manic, self-destructive character Vittorio Grigolo (now tenore non grata at the Met) offered during the production’s most recent revivals.
With Roméo and now Hoffmann, Bernheim has firmly laid claim to being one of the Met’s most important tenors, a status no longer an option for Jonathan Tetelman, who seemed to burn his Lincoln Center bridges in a recent unusually contentious interview.
Audiences worldwide can enjoy Bernheim’s peerless Hoffmann when the Met transmits Offenbach’s haunting masterpiece in HD on October 5.
