The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (57 page)

The High Priest goads Dalila to take revenge on Samson, whose amazing strength has just led to the defeat of the Philistines in battle.
Dalila, a patriot, needs no encouragement. Samson appears, determined to put an end to his dalliance with Dalila and lead the Hebrews on to total victory, but again she seduces him, and ekes out the secret of his strength – his long hair.
Philistine soldiers arrest Samson.
His hair is shorn and he is imprisoned, blinded and forced to drive a mill-wheel.
Overcome with remorse, he decides to sacrifice his life to save his people.

Inside the temple of Dagon, the Philistines exult in an orgy.
Samson is led in to be mocked, and Dalila reveals the plot behind her treachery.
But Samson finds his way to the two marble pillars which support the temple, and after a prayer to God, manages to muster enough strength to push the pillars down and destroy the temple, thus massacring the pagan revellers as well as putting an end to himself and Dalila.

What to listen for

Samson
et
Dalila
offers the tenor and mezzo-soprano taking the title roles a magnificent series of vocal opportunities: for Samson the virile declamation of his opening address to the Hebrews and his noble Act III mill-wheel lament; for Dalila, three gorgeously sensual arias, ‘Printemps qui commence’, ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre’ and ‘Amour!
viens aider’.
Red-blooded voices are required to ride the sumptuous orchestration, but the only drawback is that the opera is in French, a language which few non-native speakers can enunciate with any eloquence or subtlety.
Wagnerism manifests itself in the use of motifs and in the dramatic musical dialogue between Samson and Dalila in Act II.

The chorus is the opera’s third principal character: as the Hebrews in Act I, it has been suggested, they sound under the austere influence of Bach, while as the Philistines in Act III they become more rumbustiously Handelian.

In performance

Most productions have apparently been directed in the spirit of Cecil B.
de Mille, with the Act III Bacchanal providing the perfect excuse for a display of cavorting flesh, floating veils and spangled jockstraps.
Sadly, today’s rigorous health and safety regulations generally prevent the final collapse of the temple being the
coup
de
théâtre
that Saint-Saëns must have envisaged.

One successful attempt to reinterpret the ideology of the opera’s scenario was Barbara Mundel and Veit Volkert’s production in Frankfurt in 1996.
Here, the setting became Paris around the time of the Franco-Prussian War, and the Philistines were shown as the decadent bourgeoisie of the Second Empire confronted with the stern (Hebrew) socialists of the Commune.

Recording

CD: Jon Vickers (Samson); Rita Gorr (Dalila); Georges Prêtre (cond.).
EMI 7 475895 8

Jacques Offenbach

(1819–80)

(
See
also
Part Five, Operetta)
Les Contes d’Hoffmann
 
(
The Tales of Hoffmann
)

Five acts. First performed Paris, 1881.

Libretto by Jules Barbier

After the fall of the Second Empire in 1869 – the regime with whose spirit his operettas were so closely identified – Offenbach went out of fashion.
He spent much of the last period of his life working at a grand opera, based on a play drawn from the short stories of the eccentric German writer, E.
T.
A.
Hoffmann.
But Offenbach died during rehearsals, leaving the score slightly incomplete, and subsequently the opera became a prey to scholars with radically different ideas of what form the opera should take.
Manuscript discoveries in the 1970s and 1980s have continued to fuel the controversy, but most productions follow one of the two major new editions by Fritz Oeser and Michael Kaye.

Plot

In Luther’s tavern in Nuremberg, the Muse of Poetry laments the time Hoffmann spends pursuing the prima donna Stella, when he should be writing verse.
The Muse then transforms herself into Hoffmann’s friend Nicklausse, who accompanies Hoffmann when he appears in the tavern in a desperate state.
Hoffmann is further unsettled by the presence of Lindorf, his rival for the love of Stella, who is singing in
Don
Giovanni
at the opera house next door.
The drunken Hoffmann explains to his fellow-drinkers how his love-life has been thwarted by several Lindorfs, and proceeds to tell them three stories, which become the opera itself.

Hoffmann’s first story concerns Olympia, the ‘daughter’ of the inventor Spalanzani.
In fact, she is nothing but a mechanical 
doll, invented by Spalanzani in an attempt to recover from a financial disaster.
Spalanzani is in dispute with his former partner Dr Coppelius, who has made the doll’s eyes and a pair of magic spectacles through which everything seems beautiful.
Spalanzani fobs Coppelius off with a worthless cheque, and presents Olympia to a fashionable crowd.
Everyone is impressed by her singing and clockwork movements, but Hoffmann dons the magic spectacles and is bewitched into thinking her to be human.
He dances with her and ends up hopelessly in love.
Coppelius returns in a fury, having discovered that Spalanzani’s cheque is worthless.
In revenge, he breaks the doll and reveals – to Hoffmann’s dismay – that she is nothing but a doll.

In Munich, the widowed violin-maker Crespel implores his lovely but physically enfeebled daughter Antonia not to exhaust herself by singing too much – she has inherited her mother’s chest disease and must not be overexcited.
For similar reasons, Crespel is also trying to keep Antonia away from her admirer Hoffmann, but the latter manages to sneak into the house to see her.
Later, Hoffmann hides away and overhears a conversation between Crespel and the mysterious Doctor Miracle, who appears to have been responsible for the death of Madame Crespel and whose ministrations will either kill or cure Antonia.
Hoffmann persuades Antonia to give up singing, but the charisma of Doctor Miracle is too much for her.
Conjuring up the voice of her dead mother and playing his daemonic violin, Doctor Miracle goads her to sing until she drops dead.

The courtesan Giulietta draws up in a gondola at a Venetian palazzo, where an orgiastic party is in progress.
Hoffmann is one of the drunken revellers, but he is entranced by her beauty.
The sorcerer Dapertutto promises Giulietta a fabulous diamond if she will prise Hoffmann’s reflection away from him – a bargain she has already executed over her current lover, Schlemil.
In her chamber, Giulietta duly seduces Hoffmann and asks that he leaves his reflection behind for her to remember him by.
He agrees, and discovers that he can
no longer see himself in the mirror.
Schlemil enters and challenges Hoffmann to a duel.
But no sooner has Hoffmann triumphed and taken the key to Giulietta’s chamber from the dead Schlemil, than he sees Giulietta falling into the arms of her servant, Pittichinaccio.
Nicklausse drags Hoffmann away, as Dapertutto laughs in triumph.

We return to Luther’s tavern.
Having told his three tales of romantic humiliation, Hoffmann is now in a drunken stupor, and scarcely seems to register his current beloved Stella leaving the opera house on Lindorf’s arm.
Nicklausse transforms back into the Muse of Poetry and implores Hoffmann to draw on his sad experience and rededicate himself to his art.

What to listen for

No two productions of Hoffmann will present precisely the same musical text, and the merits of putting the ‘Giulietta’ act before the ‘Antonia’ act, and vice versa, are still disputed.
The Barcarolle is taken from an earlier Offenbach operetta,
Les
Fées
du
Rhin
(
The
Rhine
Fairies
), and Dapertutto’s ‘Scintille, diamant’, an aria first added to the score in 1904, was adapted from another obscure Offenbach operetta.
Both are sometimes now omitted.
Many other textual problems relate to the ‘Giulietta’ act, which was the least finished when Offenbach died, and which the first production omitted entirely.

Hoffmann is a glorious lead role for the tenor and mezzo-sopranos enjoy Nicklausse (especially now that a recently unearthed aria with beautiful violin accompaniment can be incorporated), but the modern preference for casting one singer as Hoffmann’s three thwarted loves creates all sorts of difficulties: something invariably needs to be cut or transposed, and some conductors prefer to evade the problems by casting three different singers with three different vocal timbres. Olympia’s coloratura aria is horribly difficult to sing with total needle-point accuracy, and some sopranos omit the even more hair-raising ensuing passage in which the doll is meant to fly out of control.
An even more complex coloratura aria for Giulietta, also recently discovered, is
probably just too tricky and exhausting to catch on.
For Antonia, a full lyric voice is required for the climactic trio.
Offenbach seems to have wanted one singer for these three roles (as he did for the three bass-baritone villains), but did not live to make the necessary adjustments to range and weight.