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Phantasmagoric Realism Vienna
Volksoper
06/07/2026 - & June 11, 14, 22*, 27, 29, 2026
Jacques Offenbach: Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Attilio Glaser (Hoffmann), Katia Ledoux (La Muse, Nicklausse), Josef Wagne (Lindorf, Coppélius, Le docteur Miracle, Dapertutto), Robert Bartneck (Andrès, Cochenille, Frantz, Pitichinaccio), Anna Siminska (Olympia), Axelle Fanyo (Antonia), Hedwig Ritter (Giulietta), Delia Blacher (La voix de la mère), Aaron‑Casey Gould (Nathanaël, Spalanzani), Pablo Santa Cruz (Hermann), Michael Arivony (Schlemil), Alexandre Fritze (Crespel), Sarah Lakatha (Stella), Markus Lipp (Luther)
Chor der Volksoper Wien, Roger Díaz‑Cajamarca (chorus master), Orchester der Volksoper Wien, Emmanuel Villaume (conductor)
Lotte de Beer (stage director), Frédéric Buhr (co‑stage director), Christof Hetzer (sets), Jorine van Beek (costumes), Alex Brok (lighting), Peter te Nuyl, Christian Longchamp (dramaturgy)
A. Glaser, K. Ledoux, A. Siminńska (© Marco Sommer/Volksoper Wien)
Both Jacques Offenbach (1819‑1880) and Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1766‑1822) were ardent admirers of Mozart. Hoffmann, who added Amadeus to his birth name, was a jurist, composer, musician, caricaturist, poet and a major writer in the fantastic (horror) genre, a quintessential element of romanticism. Offenbach’s opera uses three of his works, Der Sandmann (1816), Rath Krespel (Councillor Krespel or the Cremona Violin) (1818) and Das verlorene Spiegelbild (The Lost Reflection) (1814) as the basis for Les Contes d’Hoffmann’s three acts, making E.T.A. Hoffmann the protagonist in all three.
The influence of Hoffmann in literature and on culture in general cannot be underestimated. Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker is based on Hoffmann’s Nussknacker und Mausekönig (1816); Delibes’ ballet Coppélia is based on Der Sandmann; Schumann’s Kreisleriana (1838) is based on three of his tales; and the supernatural elements in Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander (1982) derive from various stories by Hoffmann. The author’s stories of the supernatural could be considered precursors of the horror and science fiction literary styles. His short story Vampirismus (1819) preceded Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) by almost eighty years.
Few operas are as intoxicatingly strange, and as precariously assembled, as Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann. It is at once a fantastical entertainment, a love story in fragments, a meditation on artistic obsession and, not least, an act of posthumous mythmaking around its composer, who died before the score was completed. Productions often emphasize one side of the piece at the expense of another: the glittering theatricality, the supernatural whimsy, the romantic decadence, the tragic self-portrait of the artist. The challenge is to make those elements feel not merely adjacent but inseparable.
The current production at the Volksoper Wien, directed by Lotte de Beer, does not solve every problem in this unruly masterpiece. But it does something more valuable than offer a tidy solution: it takes the opera’s confusions seriously. De Beer approaches Hoffmann not as a sequence of divertissements loosely tethered to a poet’s heartbreak, but as a sustained reckoning with the ways artists turn experience into self‑dramatization, and self‑dramatization into art. That may sound forbiddingly conceptual. In fact, on Monday night, in a performance led by the ardent tenor Attilio Glaser and the commanding mezzo‑soprano Katia Ledoux, it yielded an evening of real theatrical pulse, vocal distinction and, in its strongest stretches, moving emotional clarity.
The basic premise of the staging is both simple and searching. Hoffmann’s three great loves – Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta – are not presented as neatly separate episodes in a picaresque tale of erotic disaster. Instead, they emerge as facets of the same recurring obsession, variations on a single pattern of longing, projection and loss. The Muse, who in this opera disguises herself as Hoffmann’s companion Nicklausse, is not merely a benevolent observer nudging the poet back toward art. She becomes a central dramatic force: part conscience, part tormentor, part guardian of the very imagination that is ruining him. This is de Beer’s greatest creative idea.
This shift in emphasis is a shrewd one. Offenbach’s opera has always suggested that Hoffmann is not just unlucky in love but constitutionally incapable of loving anything that does not first pass through the distorting lens of his own imagination. De Beer makes that idea explicit, sometimes perhaps too explicit, but she also gives it stage life. At times, the Muse is explaining too bluntly to Hoffmann and to the audience the poet’s predicament.
Christof Hetzer’s set consists of a claustrophobic triangular tavern in the Prologue & Epilogue, to reflect the struggle in the poet’s feverish mind. Olympia’s act is the most unreal with a tiny doll and a gigantic doll that become Hoffmann’s centre of attention rather than the flesh and blood singer portraying Olympia. The conclusion of the act is that the besotted Hoffmann rather than the mechanical human‑like doll was the real entertainment at Spalanzani’s party.
Antonia’s act is set in a drawing room adorned with black paintings inspiring mystery. When Docteur Miracle, who enters the room through one of the portraits, invokes the spirit of Antonia’s mother through one of her paintings. We see neither a portrait nor a singer come out of a painting. Only at the very end of that scene is Antonia snatched into the painting by the singer portraying her mother. Antonia, the fragile young singer whose art is inseparable from the illness that will kill her, is the opera’s most openly tragic heroine, and de Beer wisely resists overcomplicating her. Instead, she allows the atmosphere to darken and the emotional temperature to rise. The result is the performance’s most affecting stretch. If the Olympia act reveals Hoffmann’s delusions in comic form, the Antonia act exposes their cost. Love, in this world, is not solace; it is pressure, expectation, one more demand laid upon a vulnerable body. Offenbach’s music here – so yearning, so touched by melancholy – was allowed to breathe.
The sets for the Giulietta’s act were the least satisfactory; by no means did they evoke the seductive charm of La Serenissima. De Beer’s Venice may have been Bielefeld or Hoboken, which is a real pity, as sensuality is essential in that act. Courtesan Giulietta is made into a cheap whore in her undergarments defying the logic of the poet’s rich imagination.
What keeps the production from becoming merely schematic is that de Beer, for all her conceptual rigor, is genuinely responsive to the music. She does not always trust Offenbach enough to let the score make its own points; there are moments when the Muse’s interventions, and the staging’s insistence on framing Hoffmann’s adventures as a kind of ongoing self‑analysis, verge on overstatement. Still, there is seriousness in the way de Beer listens to the opera’s shifts of tone. She understands that Hoffmann is not “about” any one thing. It is a comic opera that keeps turning tragic, a fantasy that continually reveals the bruised human need beneath its artifices.
Italian-German tenor Attilio Glaser, in the title role, gave the most complete performance of the evening. Hoffmann is a punishing part: the tenor is onstage for much of the opera and must move from intoxicated storytelling to lyric introspection to near-hysterical collapse, all while maintaining a coherent portrait of a man who is both romantic hero and unreliable narrator. Glaser managed this admirably. His voice has brightness and a pleasing forward thrust, and what was especially appealing was his ability to color the line according to Hoffmann’s shifting states of mind. However, his diction was not exemplary. Had I not known the text inside out, I could not have always deciphered what he was singing. More importantly, he can sing out with ringing ardour when needed, but he also knows how to let the voice soften and darken, to suggest vulnerability without self‑pity. Dramatically, he was fully engaged in de Beer’s conception of Hoffmann as a man almost helplessly addicted to his own fantasies. The character’s volatility, vanity and pain all came through.
French mezzo Katia Ledoux was an imposing Muse and a warm, attentive Nicklausse. In many productions the role can feel oddly underweighted: important in theory, but dramatically recessive. Not here! De Beer’s conception places the Muse at the center of the evening, and Ledoux had the vocal and theatrical authority to sustain that burden. This is one performance where Nicklausse was only second to Hoffmann. Her mezzo‑soprano has an attractive richness, but more important was the intelligence of her presence. She moved through the performance with a calm, knowing poise, as if she had seen every one of Hoffmann’s delusions before and had long since stopped being surprised by them. Yet she was never merely severe. Ledoux, whose diction and stage presence were exemplary, found a subtle balance between sympathy and exasperation, between tenderness and the harder truth that the Muse, if she is to rescue Hoffmann, must also expose him. Much of the witty text read by Ledoux also expresses de Beer’s own ideas, such as the futility of Hoffmann seeking the perfect woman (in the guise of the talented Antonia) only to want her to stay home. The spoken dialogue, mostly between Hoffmann and his Muse, clarify several details that are often unclear, e.g. Crespel had moved to a different city to avoid Hoffmann. Amusingly but also effectively, this essential spoken text was in German and not in French, the language of Offenbach’s opera.
Poland’s Anna Siminska’s Olympia was a delight. Her coloratura was agile, accurate and bright, dispatched with enviable control. But what made the performance memorable was the way she used that vocal brilliance in service of characterization. This Olympia was not simply a vocal stunt. Siminska made her eerie, seductive and hilariously mechanical all at once, perfectly attuned to the production’s vision of the doll as both comic spectacle and emblem of Hoffmann’s emotional infantilism. It was one of those performances in which technical command becomes dramatically expressive. Moreover, Siminska proved her knack for comedy with her attempts at having Hoffmann show interest in her rather than in the tiny or the gigantic dolls.
As Antonia, French soprano Axelle Fanyo brought warmth, vocal amplitude and unaffected sincerity. Hers was a beautifully judged performance. Antonia can be played as a wan victim, but Fanyo gave her more backbone than that. The fragility was there, to be sure, and so was the vulnerability; yet there was also an artist’s seriousness in her singing, a sense that Antonia understands what music asks of her even as it destroys her. Fanyo’s phrasing had breadth and shape, and in her scenes with Hoffmann she created the rare impression of a woman who is not merely being mourned in advance, but is actively struggling to live. Usually sung by a lyric soprano, Fanyo’s voice was more of a lirico spinto, with a rich and distinct timbre. Hopefully, I will hear her soon in Verdi spinto roles such the two Leonoras, Elvira from Ernani and Elisabetta from Don Carlo.
Austrian lyric soprano Hedwig Ritter’s Giulietta was poised and vocally secure, with an appealing dusky glamour. She did not quite transcend the structural weakness of the act in which she appears, but she gave it focus and style. Giulietta is, in some ways, the most elusive of Hoffmann’s beloveds – less a character than a dangerous atmosphere – and Ritter wisely did not force psychological depth where the score offers little room for it. Instead, she sang with confidence and lent the role an alluring steadiness. Her act was the least effective due to the many cuts, a usual thing in this posthumous masterpiece. Her Barcarolle was shortened and some of her most glorious lines were cut, which was disappointing given her magnetic presence and supple voice.
Austrian bass-baritone Josef Wagner was a major presence in the four villain – Lindorf, Coppélius, Dr Miracle and Dapertutto – and he gave the evening some of its darkest colours. Offenbach’s premise is that these men are all manifestations of the same malign principle, the recurring enemy of Hoffmann’s happiness and perhaps of his sanity. Wagner made that connection clear while still differentiating the roles. His singing had firmness, bite and authority; his Dr Miracle, especially, was chilling without exaggeration. Sadly, his “Scintille, diamant” in Giulietta’s act was deleted.
In the pit, Emmanuel Villaume led a performance of energy and stylistic sympathy. Offenbach’s score, with its quicksilver transitions between wit and yearning, can lose shape if conducted too indulgently or too briskly. Villaume generally found the right balance. He kept the music moving, gave the singers room and drew lively playing from the Volksoper orchestra. One occasionally wished for a touch more refinement in color – more danger in the demonic passages, more weightless elegance in the French writing – and the overall impression was of a conductor who understands that Hoffmann must never become static. It has to breathe and flicker, and that it certainly did.
The Volksoper’s Hoffmann is not a production of easy enchantment. There are moments when the evening underlines what the opera has already made plain, or places one interpretive layer too many between the audience and the raw, unstable charm of Offenbach’s inspiration. And yet there is something admirable – and finally affecting – about the seriousness of this undertaking. De Beer treats Les Contes d’Hoffmann not as a collection of famous numbers wrapped in a supernatural plot, but as a flawed, fascinating meditation on the artist’s inability to separate genuine feeling from the stories he tells himself. With Glaser’s searching Hoffmann, Ledoux’s commanding Muse, and especially the touching work of Fanyo and the brilliant turn from Siminska, the production often rises above its own occasional self‑consciousness.
By the end, when Hoffmann has lost the women and been returned to art, one feels less the triumph of creative transfiguration than the melancholy of a man condemned to keep feeding his wounds to his imagination. That is a darker ending than some productions find in Offenbach’s opera. In de Beer’s production, it felt not only plausible, but true.
Ossama el Naggar
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