Romantic, fantastic and, in the end, humanly tragic, Jacques Offenbach’s opera “The Tales of Hoffman” turned out to be an apt though ambiguous finale to the life of its prodigious, prolific composer.
And it’s a fun opener to the Grand Teton Music Festival’s four-part presentation of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2024-25 “Live in HD” series. “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” screens at 1 p.m. Sunday in the Center for the Arts theater, with tenor Benjamin Bernheim singing the role of the titular poet, who is loosely based on the great German critic, artist, composer and author E.T.A. Hoffman.
Offenbach’s opera opens in a tavern in Nuremberg, where Hoffman is implored to recount to a gathering of rapt students and admirers (and one jealous muse, disguised as Hoffman’s friend Nicklausse, sung by mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya in her Met debut) the stories of his three great loves: the miraculous mechanical doll Olympia (sung by soprano Erin Morley), the doomed diva Antonia (soprano Pretty Yende) and the beguiling courtesan Giulietta (mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine).
Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn sings the role of the Four Villains who thwart Hoffman’s romances, including the Councilor Lindorf, who has designs on the poet’s current and ultimate object of affection, the prima donna Stella. Tony Award-winning Bartlett Sher directs, and Marco Armiliato conducts the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in this 2024 production, which was filmed over two performances in early October.
“Tales of Hoffman” (1880) was the last work undertaken by the German-born French composer Offenbach (1819-1880), who died before he was able to complete the work, much less make its Paris premiere, although he did get to attend several rehearsals. It is one of his two or three best-known operas from a body of work that included some 100 operettas — light, often farcical stage works that were the equivalent of an evening at the cinema in mid and late 19th-century Europe.
