Director William Friedkin doesn’t put a dramaturgical foot wrong in his Theater an der Wien production of The Tales of Hoffmann and yet doesn’t challenge, or even engage with, any of the opera’s Romantic positions. Did the notion that serious artists aren’t entitled to live life, for instance, ever have much currency outside of the 19th-century? (Photographs of Schoenberg, who took himself with the utmost seriousness, show him perfectly at ease on family beach holidays.) I don’t know if it is a good thing that these questions don’t seem to matter in Friedkin’s production, but then it is so well-crafted, and its three tales of thwarted love follow on so seamlessly from one another, that it covered up its lack of substance without ever seeming unsatisfactory for doing so.
Friedkin does have the one big idea, which is that he sees the character of Councillor Lindorf as a projection of Hoffmann’s dark side, but while this Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy is emphasized at the beginning (Lindorf steps out from behind the stage curtain and serenades an identically-clad Hoffmann sitting in one of the boxes), it’s a thought which is developed more forcefully in his programme note than in the staging itself. The three acts that follow are told in strong narrative style, with all of the detail of the text put on stage with a generous number of creative touches and good dramatic pacing. It was also encouraging to see the direction of the singers clearly responsive to the music and not just the text.
The one fixed object in Michael Curry’s set is a staircase with two divided flights, which sounds innocuous but succeeds in lending continuity to Hoffmann’s narrative: its presence, slightly reconfigured in each scene, is enough to suggest that we are seeing the same tale being told again and again. The Prologue and the crowd scenes in the Olympia and Giuletta acts were directed with an eye to how the various chorus members could participate meaningfully in the action rather than just observe it passively, and there were no supernumeraries involved or indeed anyone on stage who didn’t have some part to play.