CONTEMPORARY ARTS
OPERA
CONGRATULATIONS to Covent Garden on their new Tales of Hoffmann, the first there for seventeen years, are deserved, not so Much for their going back to the original version (the idea for whidh they borrowed, With due acknowledgment, from the Carl Rosa Company, who did it two years ago), as for a magnificently imaginative and luxurious production such as the Carl Rosa have not the resources to attempt. It is true that the producer—Gunther Rennert of the Hamburg Opera, whose work at Edin- burgh made such an impression two years ago—was borrowed too, but loans of this sort are an accepted practice, and this Production, worthy of any great European Opera house at its best, could as legitimately as delightedly (or by extreme patriots grudgingly) be enjoyed as a brilliant feat by, and credit to, the national opera house.
The reversion to the original brought no revelations. The restoration of the correct order of the scenes, with Giulietta after Antonia, makes no difference at all, and the sPoken dialogue instead of the recitative very little. Musically the Giulietta scene is the one most affected, and that may seem to many rather less than more effective than the generally accepted. version. Otherwise the score is much the same Tales of Hoffmann RS we have always known.
On the stage and in the singing it is stimulatingly not that. Hermann Uhde as Lindorf acted and sang so superbly all evening, besides speaking incredibly good English, that he was identified with his parts almost to the suspension of critical observa- tion—when it was not marvelling at his art. As Hoffmann, Patzak was hindered by the English, which sometimes spoilt but never Obliterated the very beautiful line that he is Still able to produce with his remarkably Preserved voice. Mattiwilda Dobbs was an original and little short of mechanically infallible Olympia, and Elsie Morison at once affecting and a potential prima donna, both as herself and as Antonia. Add to all this Barbara Howitt as a personable and sWeet-voiced Nicklaus, four brilliant cari- catures by Geraint Evans (Spalanzani) and ymond Nilsson (Cochenille, Frantz and ntlicliinaccio), and excellent orchestral Playing under Edward Downes, deputising for Inghelbrecht, and it was musically as strong a performance of the work as money and assiduity could produce.
As a spectacle, except in the Giulietta
• Scene, it was still better, and put even the film version in the shade, spilling over, both hi the production and in Wakhevitch's scenery and costumes, with an extravagant invention and fantasy matching Hoffmann's Own. The tour de force was to make such a realistic troupe of dolls from an opera Fhorus and soloists, who, only too wooden 1.11 simulating life, must have worked prodigiously hard, and have horribly .morti- tied their flesh (or muscles) to give here such a life-like (if that is not the wrong ;141ective) imitation of wood. Nobody who !las ever liked anything between, and Including, Oklahoma and Glorlana should Miss this production.
COLIN MASON
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