Les Contes d’Hoffmann

Les Contes d’Hoffmann – Greek National Opera

Jacques Offenbach

In co-production with La Monnaie (Brussels)

Stavros Niarchos Hall of the Greek National Opera – SNFCC

Petros Magoulas’ Performances: 20, 28 Dec 2022, 5, 8 Jan 2023

Starts: 19.30 (Sundays: 18.30)

Les Contes d’Hoffmann is the highly anticipated new Greek National Opera co-production with La Monnaie in Brussels, ingeniously directed by Europe’s leading opera and theatre director Krzysztof Warlikowski, who takes on the challenge of revealing the essence of a work in which time and space are merely the remnants of a crumbled mosaic. This production is made possible by a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) to enhance the GNO’s artistic outreach.

A dramatic work of opera filled with a series of superb melodies, including its hugely famous barcarolle, Les Contes d’Hoffmann has endured right through to the present day as one of the most popular of all French operas, standing tall alongside Carmen, Faust, and Manon. The libretto by Jules Barbier is based on stories written by the multi-talented E.T.A. Hoffman, whom Barbier made the opera’s protagonist. Three female figures –the soulless automaton Olympia, the critically ill singer Antonia, and the courtesan Giulietta– each display certain characteristics that together make up the prima donna Stella, the woman Hoffman has fallen for. The love he feels for each of them is wrecked in each instance by an older man –three separate personas: Coppélius, Dr Miracle, and Dapertutto– whose various characteristics are evinced in composite by the wealthy Lindorf, with whom Stella departs at the opera’s end, leaving Hoffman in despair. Jacques Offenbach passed away shortly prior to completing the opera, which proved to be his last. With its score completed by the composer Ernest Guiraud, the work met with enormous success. There have followed numerous painstaking attempts to reconstruct Offenbach’s score over many years, as new sections from the composer’s manuscripts containing valuable musical material continue to be discovered in various places, even in recent times. The GNO is presenting the opera as it appears in the most recent critical edition of the work, prepared by Michael Kaye and Jean-Christophe Keck.

Warlikowski’s staging is driven by the fact that Les Contes d’Hoffmann has a particularly complex narrative, and by the realisation that both score and libretto are without stable structure. These elements provide the director, and audiences, with the sense that the work is open to reinterpretation and redefinition. In an evolution of his signature directorial style, Warlikowski peers at the story of this opera through the prism of the seventh art, drawing inspiration from such cinematic works as A Star Is Born, The Shining, and Inland Empire. The emancipation of an enigmatic and complex woman, the disappointments of an author in crisis, the addictions and subjective delusions – everything here offers itself up for the metatextual exploration of the mysterious interplay between story and storyteller, artist and artwork.