One of his short stories inspired Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, but ETA Hoffmann – German romantic writer, polymath, rake – was also a sci-fi pioneer. He tried to build his own automata and invented tales about artificially created beings even before Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The wind-up mechanical doll, Olympia, from his story The Sandman (1816), has a central role in composer Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, which has opened at the Royal Opera in a richly inventive new production conducted by Antonello Manacorda and directed by Damiano Michieletto. No gag opportunity is missed, no surprise suppressed. The whole event is a riot, done with extreme seriousness.
Offenbach died in 1880 before the work could be staged. Had he not done so, he might have left a definitive edition of his odd, lopsided but touching creation. The Royal Opera, in a co-production with Opera Australia, Opéra National de Lyon and the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, presents a new edition. For an opera staged regularly but not frequently, any changes should distract few: it manages a degree of chronological security that leaves the Italian production team – also responsible for, among others, the Royal Opera’s winning Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci last year – free to pursue their wildest fantasies.
