Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann

Léon Spilliaert, Self-Portrait in Mirror, 1908

On the face of it, Jacques Offenbach was the least likely composer to create the opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1881). Offenbach wrote dozens of lightly comic operettas that satirized contemporary French political and social life, including Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld, 1858), La belle Hélène (The beautiful Helen, 1864) and La Vie Parisienne (Parisian life, 1866). E.T.A. Hoffmann was the author of dark Gothic stories featuring possession, automata, vampires, doubles, and other elements of the uncanny. Most famously, Hoffmann wrote "Nußknacker und Mausekönig" (Nutcracker and Mouse King), later the basis of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker; the story is much darker and eerier than the ballet.

Despite the apparent clash of sensibilities, Offenbach had apparently nurtured an interest in Hoffmann's tales ever since seeing the play Les Contes fantastiques d'Hoffmann (1851) by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. More than two decades later, Offenbach began composing a serious opera based on the play.

Léon Spilliaert, Night, 1908

But the 1870s were difficult years for Offenbach: he was dogged by financial troubles and failing health. By the end of the decade he had completed most of the vocal score for Hoffmann, but changes required for the staging of the work at the Opéra-Comique—primarily tailoring the vocal parts to its resident company of singers—caused further delay. Offenbach died several months before the opera's premiere and while the score was still unfinished. Offenbach's family hired Ernest Guiraud to complete the orchestration and recitatives (at the Opéra-Comique spoken dialogue was employed). At the behest of Léon Carvalho, the impresario of the Opéra-Comique, Guiraud also made extensive cuts to the score (including an entire act).

As a result, the opera has never had a fixed form, but rather multiple versions. Producers and directors assembled the available materials (some by Offenbach and some by Guiraud and other composers) as they chose. Recently Jean-Christophe Keck and Michael Kaye have produced what they term an "integral edition" that attempts to restore as much of Offenbach's original vision (and music) for the work as possible. Crucially, it includes the Muse's appearance at the beginning of the Prologue and her transformation into Hoffmann's companion Nicklausse, which was omitted from Guiraud's version of the opera. It is Keck and Kaye's edition that was the basis for the striking production by director Laurent Pelly which we saw last week at the San Francisco Opera.

Léon Spilliaert, Vertigo, Magic Staircase (1908)

The opera includes Hoffmann himself as a character and incorporates elements from four of his tales: "Don Juan," "The Sandman," "Councillor Krespel," and "The Lost Reflection." The framing prologue and epilogue take place at a tavern adjacent to the theater where Stella, the object of Hoffmann's unrequited love, is performing the role of Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni. While waiting for the performance to be over, a drunken and despairing Hoffmann regales the bar with the stories of three of his loves. First there is Olympia, who seems like a vision of beauty to Hoffmann, but who turns out to be a mechanical singing doll, and who is ultimately destroyed by the mad scientist Coppélius. Then there is Antonia, a tragically ill woman for whom singing may prove fatal, and who falls under the spell of the sinister Dr. Miracle. Finally, there is the temptress Giulietta, a Venetian courtesan who conspires with Hoffmann's enemy, the evil sorcerer Dapertutto, to steal Hoffmann's soul. As Hoffmann finishes his stories, Stella enters the tavern, sees the miserable and abject Hoffmann, and leaves with his nemesis, the villainous Councillor Lindorf. The anguished Hoffmann is left alone with his Muse as the curtain falls.

Pelly's production is inspired by the art of Léon Spilliaert, a Belgian artist who was born the year of Hoffmann's premiere. Spilliaert's paintings feature eerie landscapes and interiors, sometimes empty and sometimes containing solitary, isolated figures. The connection to the Gothic world of E.T.A. Hoffmann is generally one of mood, rather than specific imagery. Pelly, set designer Chantal Thomas, and lighting designer Joël Adam created some striking stage images involving skewed perspective. But if the virtually monochromatic dark blue sets and stark, angled lighting effectively created an oppressive atmosphere, they became visually monotonous after a time; the billowing green curtains that appear in the Giulietta act were a relief. And there was at least one miscalculation: when the spirit of Antonia's dead mother appears, it is as a skull-like projection that visually echoes some of Spilliaert's self-portraits. But Antonia is supposed to be inexorably drawn to her mother's memory; it's hard to imagine anyone being drawn to this nightmarish image.

The music of Hoffmann covers an extremely wide range of moods, from comic songs and drinking choruses to dark, brooding music reminiscent of Wagner. And it contains one of the most beautiful duets in opera, the famous Barcarolle that opens the Giulietta act (the video below was taken from Pelly's staging of this production at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, six months ago):

San Francisco's cast was exceptional. Matthew Polenzani brought a lyrical tenor and an ardent characterization to his portrayal of Hoffmann. As the four villains, Christian Van Horn's dark voice and tall, slender figure (he towered over Polenzani's Hoffmann and Natalie Dessay's Antonia) made him especially sinister. Angela Brower sang appealingly in the double role of the Muse and Nicklausse. And two of Hoffman's four love objects deserve special mention. As the dying Antonia, Natalie Dessay gave an affecting and movingly sung performance. And Hye Jung Lee deftly handled both Olympia's stratospheric coloratura and strenuous comedy (at one point Pelly has her sailing high in the air on a crane, and at another roller-skating in and around crowds of people onstage, all the while tossing off high notes left and right).

Hoffmann has been recorded many times, but perhaps the first choice remains the 1948 recording featuring the stars, chorus and orchestra of the Opéra-Comique conducted by André Cluytens. It's in mono sound, and uses a "bad" performing edition that includes Guiraud's recitatives, the interpolated "Diamond Aria" and Barcarolle septet, and mis-ordered acts (the Giulietta act comes second, rather than third as Offenbach intended and narrative logic demands). But with performances this good, it doesn't matter. On video, the version staged by film director John Schlesinger at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in the early 1980s featuring Plácido Domingo as Hoffmann, Luciana Serra as Olympia, Ileana Cotrubas as a powerfully affecting Antonia, and Agnes Baltsa as Giulietta, remains a favorite.

Les Contes d'Hoffmann will be performed at the San Francisco Opera through July 6.

Khubsoorat

Khubsoorat (Beautiful, 1980), centers on the friction between generations and sensibilities within a family.

As the hearts dotting the i's and j in his name suggest, Hrishikesh Mukherjee's films don't feature reincarnated sons seeking bloody revenge, villains with secret lairs, or heroes who single-handedly beat up armed gangs. Instead, they feature middle-class families struggling with modest dilemmas that reflect broader social issues, often presented in a gently comic way.

Nirmala Gupta (Dina Pathak) and Dwarka Prasad Gupta (Ashok Kumar) have raised a family of four sons. As is often the case, one of the parents (him) is the indulgent one, and the other (her) is the disciplinarian.

Nirmala enforces household rules of decorum, which include speaking softly, cleaning up after yourself, being on time, eating meals together, and offering food to others before taking it for yourself. She also limits her youngest son's pop music enthusiasms and her middle sons' obsessive bridge-playing. Nirmala's final, impossible task is to keep her husband on the straight and narrow; he has diabetes and a heart condition, but still tries to sneak cigarettes, tea and sweets when she's not looking.

Into this reserved, rule-bound family bursts Manju (Rekha). Manju is the irrepressible sister of the demure Anju (Aradhana), whose marriage with second son Chander has just been arranged. Manju immediately earns Nirmala's disapproval for being loud and boisterous, speaking her mind without hesitation, and generally lacking manners. It's pretty shocking to see a film heroine behave this way, and Nirmala is not amused:

Not everyone in the family has the same reaction, though:

But it's Nirmala's household, and Manju chafes under the rules she imposes:

The youngest son, pop music-obsessed Joginder (Ranjit Chowdhry, later of FIre (1996) and Today's Special (2009), among others), tells Manju how the family manages under Nirmala's benevolent dictatorship:

Can anyone identify the album visible over Joginder's left shoulder?

So Manju decides to organize this hidden resistance to Nirmala's prohibitions. She encourages card- and game-playing, Joginder's music, Dwarka Prasad's gardening and tabla-playing, and the dancing of Sunder's wife (Shashikala)—which she gave up, of course, when she came into her husband's household:

The music was composed by R.D. Burman, with lyrics by Gulzar. The playback singers on "Piya Baawri" are Asha Bhosle and Ashok Kumar himself, with choreography by Gopi Krishna.

Manju and the third son, Inder (Rakesh Roshan), engage in the sort of teasing practical jokes and insult exchanges that immediately signal that they like each other. And, late '70s hair and fashion aside, you can definitely see in Rakesh where his son Hrithik got some of his good looks:

It doesn't take long for the observant Nirmala to realize what's going on between Manju and Inder, and she's not happy about it:

Inder urges Manju to charm his mother, rather than deliberately antagonize her:

But when Manju stages a parodistic play for the other members of the family about the overthrow of a dictator, Nirmala walks in and is offended, hurt, and upset. Her rules, she tells them, arose out of love and concern for her family: she has been trying to maintain Dwarka Prasad's health, Chander and Inder's focus on family and work responsibilities, and Joginder's success in his studies. Manju realizes that she has to leave—but then a crisis occurs that requires all of her boldness, plain-speaking, and lack of deference to authority.

As Manju's reference to martial law suggests, Khubsoorat can be seen as a parable of the Emergency, with the overly strict Nirmala representing Indira Gandhi's government by decree, and the freedom-loving Manju representing the forces of opposition. (The dialogues of the film were written by Gulzar, whose own films often focussed on social issues, and whose Aandhi (1975) was banned during the Emergency.)

At the 28th Filmfare Awards Khubsoorat won Best Film, and Rekha won Best Actress. (Little did the voters know that her greatest role would come the following year in Muzaffar Ali's Umrao Jaan (1981), for which she was nominated but did not win.)

You can watch Khubsoorat on YouTube, with English closed captions, for free.

Gold Diggers of the Gilded Age: Arabella Trefoil vs. Undine Spragg

In 19th-century fiction, a young woman of the middle classes or above faces a stark sexual double bind. As soon as she comes "out" into the marriage market, she has to use whatever exists of her family's social position and wealth and her own personal advantages to try to find a husband—preferably one significantly higher in social and economic standing than herself. Although this quest is understood by everyone around her, she cannot be too open or brazen in her angling for a rich husband without risking social censure. She cannot commit to a potential partner too soon, in case she encounters a better offer, but after she passes her mid-20s her marriage prospects diminish rapidly. And the cost of a mistake is high. A woman who becomes publicly engaged but who breaks it off is considered a faithless jilt; a woman who becomes publicly engaged but whose partner breaks it off is tainted by his rejection.

Anthony Trollope and Edith Wharton each created several characters who skirt (and sometimes transgress) the boundaries of respectability in their search for a husband. In Trollope's The American Senator (1875) we meet Arabella Trefoil, a woman fast approaching 30 who has just engaged herself to John Morton. Morton is an official in the Foreign Office and has inherited a country estate that, on her first visit, Arabella finds disappointingly modest. She then contrives to be thrown together with Lord Rufford, the richest landowner in the neighborhood, by angling for invitations to fox hunts, the homes of mutual acquaintances, and Rufford's own estate (in the company of her mother, of course: the mothers of marriage-eligible women act both as procuresses and chaperones). Arabella has to maintain her engagement to Morton, in case her scheme to hook Lord Rufford goes awry, but must also deny her engagement in order to leave herself free to pursue Rufford.

Arabella is a liar and schemer who has no scruples about using underhanded methods to try to entrap Rufford. But Rufford himself isn't above trying to take advantage of the situation to steal a kiss or an embrace; he's flattered by Arabella's attentions but struggles to avoid committing himself. And as we come to realize, despite her many shortcomings Arabella would actually be a good match for Rufford. Trollope portrays not only her greed, selfishness and dishonesty, but also her courage, her boldness, her defiance of confining social limitations, and her clear-sightedness about herself and those around her. Arabella also changes over the course of the novel, coming to realize that Morton truly loved her.

Perhaps Trollope's own relatively humble origins made him sympathetic to the underdog, but we actually wind up hoping for Arabella's ultimate success. That's not the case, for this reader at least, for the heroine of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913), Undine Spragg. Undine has all of Arabella's faults—vanity, selfishness, venality, dishonesty—but few of her virtues. Undine is also vulgar and ignorant: feigning an interest in the arts (her only real interest is in opportunities for displaying herself and jockeying for social position), she recalls seeing the actress "Sarah Burnhard" (Sarah Bernhardt), and she wants to go see "that new tenor" (presumably Enrico Caruso) in an opera she calls "Cavaleeria" (Cavalleria Rusticana).* Undine is extremely beautiful in face and form, but, along with her fellow Midwestern husband-hunters Mabel Blitch, Indiana Frusk, and Ora Chettle, is intellectually and emotionally vacant.

The discordant names and the risible malapropisms all too clearly signal Wharton's own contempt for these characters, and for Undine in particular. And here Wharton—born into a socially prominent old-money New York family, the Joneses—seems to betray her own class prejudices. She even has a minor character, Charles Bowen, explain how the commercial values that drive American society have marginalized women. Money is the bribe wives receive for remaining incurious about what their husbands are doing all day at the office, and results in a feminine fixation on clothes, jewelry, cars, and other visible signs of wealth. Undine, Bowen says, is "a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph" (Chapter 15).

Unfortunately, Wharton's disdain for Undine means that she is allowed no redeeming features. She is utterly self-absorbed and cares nothing for her husbands, her lovers or her son; they are merely the means for her social advancement. And most of the men in her life are equally cynical. For them Undine is a trophy, one more beautiful possession to place among their pictures, porcelain or tapestries—just another manifestation of their material dominance. It would be a devastating portrait of pre-war society, except that Wharton so clearly disapproves of most her characters. She tells us all too explicitly what we should think of Undine, and her judgments tend to close off our engagement with her characters.

Ironically, while Wharton herself had experience of the double bind (and the double standards) of the marriage market, it is Trollope who is able to portray a woman caught in the implacable forces of that market with the greater understanding. Both Arabella and Undine are women who trade on the promise of sex to try to make their way in a man's world, but only Arabella ultimately engages our sympathies.

Both novels are available for free in multiple formats from Project Gutenberg.

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* Oddly, Wharton gives us a scene at the opera house that doesn't fit with the work she has named. The narrator tells us that there are three "entr'actes": "the curtain fell on the first act," "the curtain fell again," and "when the last entr'acte began..." (all quotes from Chapter 5). However, Mascagni's one-act Cavalleria is usually performed with a second two-act work, a combination that would result in two intermissions (one between the operas, and one between the acts of the second opera). And, indeed, the work that was paired with Cavalleria during Caruso's 1908 Metropolitan Opera debut in the role of Turiddu was Puccini's two-act Le Villi. There are no performances by Caruso in Cavalleria at the Met before the publication date of the novel which would have had three intermissions.

Amar Prem

As someone whose short list of favorite Bollywood movies would include Devdas (2002), Umrao Jaan (1981), Mughal-e-Azam (1960), and Sadhna (1958)—don't ask me for the other titles on the list right now—I've clearly got a major weakness for tragic-courtesan-with-a-heart-of-gold stories. And the creators of Amar Prem (Immortal Love, 1972), director Shakti Samanta and writers Arabinda Mukherjee and Ramesh Pant, know exactly how to push my emotional buttons.

Mukherjee was the writer and director of the original Bengali version of the film, Nishipadma (1970), which was based on the short story "Hinger Kochuri" by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. (Hinger kochuri is a typical Bengali dish of fried dough stuffed with lentils and chickpeas.) If Bandopadhyay's name sounds vaguely familiar, he was also the author of the novels Pather Panchali (1929) and Aparajito (1932), which Satyajit Ray adapted as The Apu Trilogy (1955-1959).

The childless Pushpa (Sharmila Tagore) is violently driven away from her village home by the brutality of her husband and his second wife. As Pushpa is about to commit suicide, a solicitous neighbor, Nepali Babu (Madan Puri), stops her and offers her a job in Calcutta. Of course, the job is fictional, and Pushpa discovers too late that she has been sold to a brothel. On the first night that she performs for the brothel's clients, singing "Raina beeti jaye, Shyam na aaye" (The night has passed, and Shyam (Krishna) has not yet arrived), the drunken Anand (Rajesh Khanna) follows the sound of her voice and is instantly smitten:

Tawaif movies tend to have excellent music, and Amar Prem is no exception. The songs were composed by R. D. Burman, with lyrics by Anand Bakshi, and were performed by Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar and R. D. Burman's father S. D. Burman.

The wealthy Anand is trapped in an unhappy marriage to a faithless wife, and has been drowning his sorrows in drink and the allurements of the pleasure quarter. He immediately becomes Pushpa's patron. Although they quickly fall in love, they each recognize that they'll remain forever separated by caste and status. The melancholy mood is beautifully sustained in "Chingari koi bhadke" (A raging fire), as Anand and Pushpa drift on the Hooghly River at night:

Meanwhile, the Sharmas, a couple from Pushpa's village, move in across the way from her. Their 8-year-old son, Nandu (Bobby), is mistreated by his stepmother (Bindu) and finds a refuge with Pushpa. She, in turn, sees in him the child she never had, and lavishes affection on him.

Of course, the tenuous happiness of Anand, Pushpa, and Nandu can't be permitted to continue, as it's an implicit critique of the lovelessness of the more conventional relationships that surround them. Anand's brother-in-law (Rakesh Pandey) demands that Pushpa separate from Anand. Meanwhile, Nandu's stepmother forces Pushpa to agree never to see Nandu again; before Nandu's family takes him back to the village, though, Nandu gives Pushpa a cutting of night-blooming jasmine that she literally waters with her tears.

Twenty years later the night-blooming jasmine is a flourishing tree, and the adult Nandu (Vinod Mehra), now an engineer, returns to Calcutta. Will Nandu ever find the woman he thinks of as his real mother...?

Almost every socially-sanctioned union in the film—Anand with his unfaithful wife, Pushpa with her violent husband, and the unhappy Sharmas—seems to offer nothing but misery and emotional deprivation. The only happy marriage in the film is that of the adult Nandu with his wife (Farida Jalal). Amar Prem remains radical more than 40 years on for suggesting that true families are those formed by love.

Thanks to Rajshri Films, you can view Amar Prem online, for free, with English closed captioning.

Handel's Apollo e Dafne and Sileti venti

Apollo and Daphne (detail), Tiepolo, 1744

Repression leads to sublimation. When public performances of opera were banned in Rome by papal edicts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—opera audiences engaged in "casual and promiscuous social intercourse, always noisy, sometimes riotous and indecent" [1]—composers instead turned to the cantata.

Cantatas were a more intimate form for one or two singers with instrumental accompaniment, were performed in private residences, and were not generally staged. But, like opera, they required a very high degree of virtuosity from their performers. And under the cover of portraying mythological or historical figures, cantatas could treat the same subjects that the Pope found so objectionable in opera: lust, madness and death. Cantatas became miniature operas by another name.

When Handel travelled to Italy as a young man in the first decade of the 1700s, he spent much of his time in Rome, a major center of musical patronage, and quickly mastered the cantata form. Before he left Italy four years later he'd written more than a hundred cantatas. (The composer he took as his model, Alessandro Scarlatti, wrote more than 600!) Apollo e Dafne (Apollo and Daphne, 1710) is one of the longest and most richly scored of these.

Apollo and Daphne (detail), Bernini, 1622-25

It tells a story from Book I of Ovid's Metamorphoses: the god Apollo is smitten with the chaste nymph Daphne, and when she resists his advances he pursues her; unable to escape, Daphne prays to the gods for deliverance, and is transformed into a laurel tree. Handel wrote the cantata for soprano and bass-baritone, and it contains some exquisite music, such as Dafne's first aria, "Felicissima quest' alma, ch'ama sol la liberta" (Happy is my spirit, which loves only freedom):

This lovely performance is by Karina Gauvin, accompanied by Les Violons du Roy conducted by Bernard Labadie. Her partner in this recording (Dorian xCD-90288) is baritone Russell Braun, who delivers Apollo's final lament with an understated lyricism:

On a last-minute impulse last Sunday I attended a concert by American Bach Soloists, conducted by founding music director Jeffrey Thomas, that featured Apollo e Dafne along with Handel's sacred motet Sileti venti (Silence, ye winds, 1708) and three arias for bass from Bach's cantatas. The soloists, who were in excellent form, were bright-voiced soprano Mary Wilson and the bass Mischa Bouvier.

Bouvier's voice has a very appealing timbre, warm and robust, and so hearing the Bach cantata arias was a real pleasure. But I do have to question the decision to combine Bach and Handel in the first half of this program. Bach's forbidding Lutheranism was in perhaps too stark contrast with Handel's joyous Italianate sensuousness. In Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben? (Dearest God, when will I die?) Bach set the text "Nichts, was mir gefällt, Besitzet die Welt" (Nothing that delights me belongs to this world). The singer in Sileti venti, by contrast, speaks of the soul's "felicissima laetitia" (supreme joy) as she asks to be pierced by sacred love. The performance in this video is by British soprano Sarah Fox:

In this cantata Handel and his anonymous librettist, perhaps deliberately, suggest parallels between sacred and erotic love. And Wilson's alluring voice and thrilling coloratura only heightened the confusion.

I'm very glad I took the opportunity to hear these rarely performed Handel masterpieces in the serene setting of St. Mark's Lutheran Church, one of San Francisco's best venues for music. It was a delightful way to spend a late spring Sunday afternoon. And it proved that repression can sometimes have its uses.

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1. David Kimbell. Italian Opera. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 108