Speaker 1: Aria Code is produced in partnership with the Metropolitan Opera, New York's premier opera company. Learn more and explore the Met's full season lineup AT metopera.org, the Metropolitan Opera. All the Stories on One Stage.

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Announcer: Listener-supported WNYC Studios. Listener-supported, WNYC Studios.

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Matthew Polenzani: It's just a pure outpouring of love. This burning fuse, this fire that's in him. It's lit again. his own art reaches a new level.

Rhiannon Giddens: From WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera, this is Aria Code. I'm Rhiannon Giddens.

Beth Greenberg: We know people like this who live on the edge, who fall in love with all the wrong people.

Rhiannon Giddens: Every episode dives deep into a single aria so we can see what's below the surface.

Francesca Brittan: Darkness, mystery, exoticism, pleasure parties.

Rhiannon Giddens: Today it's Ô Dieu! de quelle ivresse, God with what intoxication from The Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach.

Veronica Chambers: If you were to make a list of the most cringeworthy things that have been done for love, I can guarantee you that I've had at least 15 of them.

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Rhiannon Giddens: All right. Here's something about me. I was a pretty introspective kid. I read a lot, like walking down the hallways of my middle school with my nose in a book a lot. I was really into sci-fi and fantasy. I was obsessed with Robin McKinley, Andrea Norton, Tamora Pierce, so many authors. I'm super excited to talk about this opera inspired by some old-school fantasy writing by E.T.A. Hoffmann. That's Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann if you're wondering. But you can just call him E.T.A.

Well, Hoffmann was a German master of horror back in the 1800s. His stories were out there. Like, there's one where people steal each other's shadows and one where they sing themselves to death. There's another one with doppelgangers who were maybe just split personalities, but you're never really sure. Creepy stories like this had a long history in Germany, but not so much in France. It was like this bomb went off. When Hoffmann's work made its way across the border, it was all out Hoffmannmania.

It's no big surprise that the French composer Jacques Offenbach ended up seeing a play based on Hoffmann's stories. That night at the theater became the inspiration for his final work, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, The Tales of Hoffmann. Over the course of the opera, the hero, Hoffmann, tells his tales to a group of students over drinks. Lots and lots of drinks. These tales of Hoffmann are about three different women he's loved.

None of these relationships was actually consummated. They're mostly just obsessions and they don't end too well. The whole opera is really about misplaced and unmet desires. Take his very brief affair with the courtesan Giulietta. She wants to lure him in so she can steal his soul. Hoffmann sings her this passionate aria, O Dieu, de quelle ivresse, all about how much he loves her, even though he's just met her tenors.

You'll hear more about all that in just a couple of minutes. But first, let's clarify something right off the bat. Hoffmann is both the name of the real-life writer and our protagonist, the passionate, lovesick, drunken poet. I've got four people here to help you make heads or tails of Hoffmann. First, Tenor Matthew Polenzani.

Matthew Polenzani: Let's rock and roll.

Rhiannon Giddens: He's just finished his 22nd season at the Met.

Matthew Polenzani: That seems impossible, actually. I don't understand where the time has gone.

Rhiannon Giddens: But he's been performing for a lot longer than that.

Matthew Polenzani: Yes. I was in a band even in high school. It was called Empty Pockets and we were definitely broke.

Rhiannon Giddens: Next, Beth Greenberg. She directed The Tales of Hoffmann for City Opera back in 1996.

Beth Greenberg: I got it as a last-minute assignment and it was a big five-act French opera that I had never done before.

Rhiannon Giddens: How did she feel about that?

Beth Greenberg: Energized, nervous, thrilled. Everything at once.

Rhiannon Giddens: Up next, Veronica Chambers, a writer and editor for The New York Times, who wrote about her obsession with love for the paper's Modern Love column.

Veronica Chambers: The Modern Love column really divulges what a disaster I was at dating.

Rhiannon Giddens: In a good way.

Veronica Chambers: They talk about dating being like those Dance Dance Revolution games where you're trying to follow the steps and you think you're doing well and then it just gets faster and harder and everything else.

Rhiannon Giddens: Those games are terrifying. Finally, Francesca Brittan, an associate professor of music at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

Francesca Brittan: My work centers on 19th and 20th-century music.

Rhiannon Giddens: She wrote the book Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz, and she's interested in the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann and other fantasy writers.

Francesca Brittan: I think that all of us want to believe and have an intuitive sense that there is another world. There is enchantment. There are wondrous sounds and smells and other selves.

Rhiannon Giddens: You are about to enter another dimension. That's the signpost up ahead. Your next stop, The Tales of Hoffmann. [laughs]

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Beth Greenberg: An opera fantastique. That's what Offenbach called The Tales of Hoffmann, a work unlike any he had ever written before. The stories themselves by E.T.A. Hoffmann are so rich that you go back to them and you find new things all the time.

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Francesca Brittan: E.T.A. Hoffmann was a really compelling figure. He was working in the early part of the 19th century and he was one part author, one part critic, one part composer.

Beth Greenberg: Painter, poet, conductor.

Francesca Brittan: He was also a trained lawyer.

Beth Greenberg: Also, an opera composer of some success.

Francesca Brittan: He was a theater director.

Beth Greenberg: Scenery builder, theater manager.

Francesca Brittan: He was also a drinker and had a grotesque sense of humor. He was a central contributor to the German romantic movement. We know him now primarily as the author of a collection of fantastic tales. Their defining characteristic is that they hover between the domain of reality and the domain of the unreal.

Beth Greenberg: Some of them feel like episodes of The Twilight Zone where you're going along and everything is normal and then the rug is just pulled right out from under you. I think that was what people began to love in the theater or as an outgrowth of romantic literature.

Francesca Brittan: Fantastic tales often start, especially in Hoffmann's writing, in identifiable places like Venice. You know where you are, you're in the real world. They're sometimes quite prosaic. They describe what people are eating or what they're wearing or their jobs. Suddenly, without any warning, supernatural events or people enter the landscape and disrupt our sense of normalcy.

Matthew Polenzani: That's part of the appeal of the opera really is the fantastical, the unknown, The Twilight Zone-ness of it all.

Francesca Brittan: The tales start in the middle and end sometimes before they really resolve, so from a narrative perspective, it's a very fantastic opera. Hoffmann is a narrator of the tales of woeful love that dominate The Tales of Hoffmann. But he's also a fictional character within these stories. It's never quite clear are we encountering Hoffmann, the historical real figure, or are we encountering fictionalized stories in which he plays a role.

Matthew Polenzani: Hoffmann is an artist who has a deep-seated need to be loved and to love.

Beth Greenberg: Hoffmann is everyone's favorite romantic hero. The poet with his cowboy boots with a beat-up guitar in Washington Square Park. He's our teenage idols. He's our Elvises, all those bad boys that we fall in love with.

Matthew Polenzani: He's a little touched in the head, which is good for any artist. It's good to have just a little edge of craziness there because it means that you've got an access into the fantastical. You need to be able to reach down into depth so you can pull stuff out that people find interesting.

Beth Greenberg: He's trying to create art, but then just finds himself falling in love with all of the wrong people who are all eventually destroyed in one way or another. He in turn, is destroyed as well.

Veronica Chambers: I'm really embarrassed to say how long I had been obsessed with love, like our poor guy in this opera. I think really since I was a teenager, I was obsessed with books like Sweet Valley High and all of those books about high school and dating. I also went to college, like during the golden age of romantic comedies. I definitely watched them in my dorm, like the When Harry Met Sally and all that stuff. But there is, I think, a perennial optimism underneath all that romanticism, which I think translates to a lot of different things.

I was obsessed with love, but I was also obsessed with becoming a writer. I had all this hope about having a book someday. I remember thinking, I want to go into the New York Public Library and see a book with my name in it. Like, that's as crazy as I just saw a guy on the subway and I'm totally in love with him, and how am I going to get his number and how are we going to connect? I just feel that optimism translated from one thing into another into another. Some of it was foolish and some of it was ill-placed, but it does give you a certain energy. It gives you something to be excited about.

[silence]

Matthew Polenzani: Well, when we meet Hoffmann, he's come into the bar with his friend Nicklausse, and he's in a black mood like he needs his Xanax or something. Boy, that seems to be true of quite a few of these tenors for some reason. I don't know why that could be. Anyway, his friends eventually ask him to tell a story. He's a storyteller, he's a poet, and they depend on him for entertainment. What comes out of him is just this little story about a dwarf, Kleinzach. But he interrupts himself along the way, and he gets stuck in this reverie thinking about Stella.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Beth Greenberg: This is also a very interesting dimension in terms of the writing because we begin to get into split personalities. We hear about Stella first, who's around the corner performing in Don Giovanni. He also goes into a reverie about a young girl that he fell in love with. He starts the stories of these three women who embody Stella, Olympia Vidal, Antonia, the sick singer, and Giulietta, the courtesan.

Francesca Brittan: Stella, Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta. These four idealized women or objects of desire.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Beth Greenberg: There's another Woman in the opera, it's the muse.

Matthew Polenzani: She's a conscience, a person who's there to help keep him on track.

Francesca Brittan: We never really know. Are these different women? Are they aspects of the same woman? Are these stories really different or are they just retellings of the same story? I think it forces us to confront the idea that we're not whole, we're not continuous. We are made up of these different voices. that we might meet those other people somewhere, either in the world or in our minds. What will happen when we meet those people?

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Veronica Chambers: I can think about my dating life as these little chapters. Some really feel like tragedies. Like when I dated people who were clearly not in love with me, they were either gay or not out. There were moments where someone fell for me. I was so flattered that I was like, "This can work." Because I thought, "Oh, maybe this is how the story's going to go. I'm just going to follow the DJ down this road where all of a sudden I'm out late at night all the time, and I'm in these dark places that I would normally never be in. That optimism that I think is part of the romantic character can sometimes lead you into weird places.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Francesca Brittan: Act 1. Olympia; is based on Hoffmann's famous story The Sandman, which was glossed by everybody from Baudelaire to Freud. It's been the subject of so much psychoanalytic attention, literary, critical attention, and it centers on a student who falls in love with a woman, Olympia, only to later discover that she's an automaton.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Beth Greenberg: At first, he's a romantic fool falling in love with mechanical doll while wearing his rose-colored glasses.

Francesca Brittan: This is like a moment of irony, I think, for Offenbach. That you look through rose-colored glasses and you see a woman where there's only a machine.

Matthew Polenzani: Sadly, she gets destroyed right in front of him, which is horrible. That's the first story. The second story is about Antonia, who is a singer who he's met.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Francesca Brittan: It's based on a story of Hoffmann's called Councillor Krespel. this is also a very creepy and overtly musical tale. It revolves around a strange violinist called Councillor Krespel. He has a young daughter, Antonia, who's a wonderful singer. He describes her voice as like the sound of an Aeolian harp, or like the crystalline timbres of a magical universe. But the problem is that every time Antonia sings, some of her life drains away, so singing is pathological for her. Finally, she dies.

Matthew Polenzani: The third story is about Giulietta, the courtesan who is really just hired to seduce him.

Francesca Brittan: It's based on quite a long story called the New Year's Eve Adventure.

Beth Greenberg: We meet the character of Giulietta, a courtesan in Venice.

Francesca Brittan: Venice has long been a place in European fiction of this time. It's bound up with darkness, mystery, exoticism, relaxed morals, gondolas, pleasure parties, this kind of thing.

Beth Greenberg: I've only been to Venice once, and I remember I have no idea how I found my hotel at night because it's such a confused mess of little streets and water. Nothing felt solid under your feet there. Anything could happen at any moment. Someone could just jump out of the shadows. Venice is a very shadowy place.

Francesca Brittan: Hoffmann washes up on a gondola to this party that Giulietta is hosting. She's basically a call girl.

Beth Greenberg: She has a couple of goonies hanging around, her friend Schlémil. Then the evil baritone, Hoffmann's nemesis, Dapertutto, a supernatural magician who's there on the scene. He basically bribes Giulietta with this big, beautiful diamond. Jewels. Diamonds are a girl's best friend in this case. Basically, he wants the soul of Hoffmann.

Francesca Brittan: Doctor Dapertutto says to Giulietta, "Your job is to get Hoffmann's reflection and give it to me." In other words, to capture his soul.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Beth Greenberg: She agrees. Somehow, though it's not clearly explained, Giulietta has the ability to steal a man's shadow. She finds the perfect chump in Hoffmann. What she does is promise him a date. She basically promises him sex.

Francesca Brittan: At first, he resists her charms, but Giulietta sings a seduction piece and he succumbs.

Matthew Polenzani: His heart leaps, he falls in love.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Francesca Brittan: At which point he sings, O Dieu, de quelle ivresse. God, with what intoxication is the translation, and expresses his rapture for Giulietta. He's been sucked in by her. That's the New Year's Eve adventure.

Veronica Chambers: I had a number of New Year's Eve adventures. One New Year's Eve, my then boyfriend said, "What are you doing New Year's Eve?" I told him that I didn't have plans. He goes, "Great. A bunch of us are going to get together. I will text you with the information." He did not text me. I stayed home and I completely cut all my hair off because I was so sad.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

On a different New Year's Eve, I did arrange to meet someone who I'd been seeing. This guy, let's just say in a broad sense, he was a diplomat, and he was very dashing. I was really smitten with him. The party that he invited me to, which was like all of these foreign dignitary types, he showed up with another girl. I stumbled into Times Square at a phone booth, called my friend crying and just was devastated. I couldn't believe it. I was like, I guess we're not dating anymore.

I'm Latin, my family's from Panama. so we're very superstitious about New Year's Eve. You have to have your nails done, and your hair combed, and your house clean. Because the idea is that however, the new year finds you is how the whole year will go. These disastrous New Year's Eve things were doubly devastating because it was like the universe was saying, "Oh, New Year's Eve is ruined. Guess what? The year ahead is going to suck too."

Matthew Polenzani: What we get when he starts in the aria, it's just a pure outpouring of love.

Beth Greenberg: The very first phrase, O Dieu, de quelle ivresse. The melody is such that asks the singer to make a very big leap.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

It is very expressive. In that very first leap, it tells you so much about the way Hoffmann feels about Giulietta.

Matthew Polenzani: This burning fuse, this fire that's in him, it's lit again. He's just been inspired into a deeper, more poetic, more emotional state. His own art reaches a new level.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Beth Greenberg: But it's all a trick. It's always a destructive love. He's constantly frustrated. It's never attainable. He's a tragic romantic poet.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Veronica Chambers: When you fall in like which I think a lot of this is, there is so much self-deception. You make things line up in ways that, like, with a cold, clear eye, they would never really light up. There's also all the masks that we all wear. Sometimes people are trying to charm you, or because of all the ways they've been hurt, they present in ways that aren't their true selves. there's the illusion of what we hope for, and there's the illusion of how people present. There's a lot of room in there to fall and be hurt and just get it all wrong.

Francesca Brittan: Hoffmann sings to Julieta. You fill my soul like a divine concert. Your voice has entered me with a sweet, brilliant fire. My being is being devoured. He's intoxicated by his own longing, ideal longing that Hoffmann has for Giulietta.

Matthew Polenzani: It's overpowering. This is incredibly sexy and beautiful stuff.

Francesca Brittan: The longing is not really about her, and it's not really about any of these other women. It's a longing for longing. What happens is that that longing is projected onto women, these fantasies of wholeness or creative inspiration or spiritual access. This isn't new, the idea of a female muse. These women, even though they're idolized as muses, are also always demonized because ultimately they can't embody these ideals.

Women are up on these pedestals, and not only do they fall off, but they're blamed for those failures, right? They turn out just to be automata or to be courtesans, and they have a femme fatale feel around them. They are emblems of male failure to really access whatever creative wellspring they're looking for. Because no one can ultimately satisfy this longing.

Beth Greenberg: He's in constant pursuit of the infatuation high. He's completely consumed by it. I think that's this ecstatic state is where he'd love to live his life all the time. We know people like this who live on the edge, who fall in love with all the wrong people, who seek experiences through alcohol or other substances, who are looking for ecstatic experiences, things out of the ordinary.

Veronica Chambers: Let's just say if you were to make a list of the most cringeworthy things that have been done for love, I can guarantee you that I've had at least 15 of them. Oh, my God, I did so many things. I got on planes repeatedly because I never saw distance as a barrier. I thought nothing of it. Which sounds crazy now. I never hired a skywriter, but let's just say I did skywriting level declarations of love that were like, what? The other person just had no interest in responding to that whatsoever.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Francesca Brittan: He sings, your glance has poured its fire into mine like radiant stars. I feel, my beloved, your sweet scented breath pass over my lips and eyes.

Matthew Polenzani: In each phrase, Offenbach takes it a half step higher.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Each one of them he's reaching a new height in his art, a new height in his poetry. Then he literally yells out;

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Your breath passes over my lips and my eyes. For him, it's like a smell of heaven. It's manna. It's love. It's purity. Oh, it's lust too. God, don't forget this. It's the highest level of poetry we've seen from him, yet.

Beth Greenberg: This is the most expansive, the most erotic of all the music that he sings.

Francesca Brittan: It seduces us. We ourselves are characters in that story of seduction.

Beth Greenberg: Offenbach begins the aria in key of B-flat, very ordinary key, the key of the good old Star Spangled Banner. But as the vocal line climbs and moves towards the climax, it modulates to the very sexy key of D-flat major.

Matthew Polenzani: It's hard the way it climbs at the end up to the top A-flat. It's just difficult to remain in control and not let emotion get the better of you. I'm sure that I would speak virtually for every tenor in saying that we're all really glad it's short. Then he brings it all down to piano again, and he starts the aria again.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

He just brings it home to her in a way that leaves no possibility that she could not understand exactly what she did to him. Then she throws him over. She gives him this magic mirror, and it steals his reflection, or we can say his soul, which leaves him a little bit crazed. We see her at the end of the scene leaving with Dapertutto. Hoffmann's just left in his misery.

Beth Greenberg: Nicklausse, who is also Hoffmann's muse, she's the one who literally saves him at the end, who brings him back to his art form.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Francesca Brittan: His muse reasserts herself and says to him, "Now give up all of these foolish diversions and focus your attention on me so that we can really get on with producing some good art."

Matthew Polenzani: He's turning to art and poetry, but it's only because he's been inspired again and he's doomed to chase love. It's an imperative for him. It's imperative for most human beings. Nearly every one of us needs that feeling of being loved and of loving. Even though he has been inspired to write more deeply and to let stuff pour out of him, I think it only will last until he's met the next one.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Veronica Chambers: After, like 10 plus years of dating, really horribly, I gave other parts of my life more value. I was really in love with my work. I had also started traveling by myself. I was playing tennis and I'd started boxing, and I was so much more at home in my body. My then boyfriend proposed to me six months after our first date. I was like, "Are we really getting married? Do you know how badly I've done at this?" Now we've been married for 18 years.

I do believe that the continued practice of keeping your heart open, even after you've been heartbroken a lot of times is actually very powerful. You don't always have to be good at dating to fall in love with a quality human being and have them fall in love with you.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - "O Dieu, de quelle ivresse"]

Rhiannon Giddens: That was New York Times writer and editor Veronica Chambers, tenor Matthew Polenzani, music professor Francesca Brittan, and stage director Beth Greenberg, decoding-

Speaker 1: You're listening to Aria Code, produced in partnership with the Metropolitan Opera. Visit the Met and experience an exciting mix of bold new works and timeless classics. Buy tickets, watch videos, and learn more at metopera.org, the Metropolitan Opera. All the Stories on One Stage.

Rhiannon Giddens: -Ô Dieu! de quelle ivresse from The Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach. Matthew will be back to sing it for you after the break. Here's Matthew Polenzani singing Ô Dieu! de quelle ivresse from The Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach.

[MUSIC - Jacques Offenbach: The Tales of Hoffmann - Ô Dieu! de quelle ivresse]

Rhiannon Giddens: How Giulietta could have stolen his soul after hearing that aria, I will never know. That was Matthew Polenzani singing Ô Dieu! de quelle ivresse, Hoffmann's passionate love song from The Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach. I hope it swept you off your feet. If it did, tell us. Let us know by posting on social media. Tell your friends and leave a review at Apple Podcasts. It really helps to get the word out about the show.

For example, Susie the Bear left us a review that was the most beautiful story about how she struggled to like opera her whole life and how this podcast was the thing that got her over to the other side. We just want to thank you Susie for telling us your story. It means so much to our whole team.

Now, speaking of that team, Aria Code is a co-production of WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera. The show is produced and scored by the very fantastical Merrin Lazyan. Emily Lang is our associate producer, Brendan Francis Newnam and Helena de Groot of Public Address Media are our editors and Matt Abramovitz is our executive producer. Sound design and mixing by Matt Boynton and Ania Grzesik and original music by Hannis Brown. I'm Rhiannon Giddens and I'll see you next week for the last episode of season two.

[laughs]

 

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