Offenbach Opera in Hamburg: You are an automaton!

Love and intoxication in times of the AHA rules - how can an opera be brought onto the stage, at the beginning of which invisible spirits of beer and wine appear as people's friends?

An opera in which the narrator tells three stories of the madness-sensual intoxication of love: in Jacques Offenbach's “Les Contes d'Hoffmann” then?

In his Hamburg production, the fourth in the house since 1981, the Swiss theater maker Daniele Finzi Pasca refrains from psychologically complaining about the drama of an artist who is failing in life and fleeing into art.

To the unanimous delight of the audience, he brought a magical, fairytale-like spectacle to the stage with all the colorful means of Theaterzauber.

Hugo Gargiulo has created phantasmagoric places on stage for this purpose: a giant music box from which Olympia emerges and presents its coloratura-studded couplet; a claustrophobically narrow and high tower room in which the singer Antonia gives up her life for art; finally a Venice with imaginative images of carnivalesque and commercial intoxication. They are elegiac images of dreams in which the characters encounter their doubles floating high on ropes through the scene, like in a fairy tale. Even if some of the characters appear as types: The audience was happy not to be exposed to questions about a directional concept or to have to solve puzzles of dark visual metaphors.

Even happier about the ensemble - and especially enthusiastic about Benjamin Bernheim in the title role, but also about some of the singers in the roles that are underestimated as "small".

Particular mention should be made of the tenor Gideon Poppe in the four servant roles.

Frantz's couplet in the Antonia act on the true method of singing, conceived as a parody of vocal ostentation, turned out to be a chanson cabinet piece.

Not all roles were convincing

In the double role of Nicklausse and Muse, the companion and guardian of the strange saint, the American mezzo-soprano Angela Brower succeeded in giving the aria "Vois sous l'archet frémissant" a high-pitched hymn to the power of the violin and at the same time the undertone of a warning that the music can also simulate feelings - this is just one example of the many refractions and ambiguities in music.

In the roles of the devilish adversary, however, the Italian baritone Luca Pisaroni could not quite meet the high expectations: On the one hand, because he was costumed like a villain from the Grand Guignol and had to wave vampire fingers, on the other hand, because he was in his Texts did not hit the tone that corresponds to his self-description: He has “spirit like a devil”, which has to get its sound form when he sings about the “flame eyes” that serve to deceive. When asked by the students about his loved one, Hoffmann replies: “Yes, Stella. . . Three women in one woman! Artist, girl and courtesan. "

Seldom has a singer succeeded in asserting herself in all four parts - they are caricatures of female negativity; who was able to make the sixteenth-note coloratura chains and the staccati of the aria of Olympia glitter or to find the floating tone for Antonia's romance and the lugubre color for the breath of death that ends in a long trill. In the high register, Olga Peretyatko's soprano often sounded angular, as it were with high pressure, in the lyrical cantabile - for example in the romance "Elle fui, la tourtelle" - round and softer, but without a silky sheen, then in the mezzo position the Giulietta overwhelmed.

An ideal singer was found for the hero in Benjamin Bernheim. With seven arias and a number of scenes, Hoffmann's role makes high demands, especially when it is a matter of guiding the voice through the "screw positions" without excessive pressure. In the Molto Lento section of the ballad vom Kleinzack, when the narrator gets lost in his memories, there are long passages in the so-called

. They have to be sung in a slim version, not full-part difficult.

To name just a few details: how delicately dreamy the F sharp formed pianissimo at the end of the phrase “Le nom de la première était Olympia”; What a bright glow when he, deceived by the glasses, sees the doll and goes into the love dream - “Ah! Vivre deux. . . “- lost; What a cry of horror (a flashing high B) when he realizes that the beloved is just “un automate”; How wonderful that he finds a kissing sound for the ecstatic love duet with Antonia (“Ah! Tu doutes de tout”) with the half part, as well as for the recapitulation of “O Dieu, de quelle ivresse”. No reservation? The only thing is that the performer does not (yet) come out of himself as forcefully as the singer.

As for his recording with the Orchestra of the Opéra National de Lyon, Kent Nagano used the edition arranged by Michael Kaye and Jean Christoph Keck. The fact that the Hamburg orchestra could not avoid small wobbles because of the distance rules not fully occupied is not important, only the grace and esprit that make up the magic of Offenbach's music were missing.