Tom's Life Bits

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===== Tales of Hoffman =====
We attended the best staging of this opera that we have ever seen. The surprise was the Muse sung by Kate Lindsey. She was portrayed as a jealous love of Hoffman although she was his friend. We loved it. It was supposed to be a snowy day but after 15 minutes of flurries yesterday we had rain and nothing else. The production was perfect technically - no glitches. What a glorious piece of music.

[[NY Times Hoffman Review Dec 3, 2009]]

[[Daves Blog Hoffman Review Dec 20, 2009]]

Libbie and I discussed the role of the muse. I learned a new term, androgynistic, which means neither male nor female. At first the muse seemed in love with Hoffman thenn seemed to plot against him on the side of the vil;ains. This post has an interesting interprteation:

Nicklausse/Muse's apparent 
     collusion with the Villains should be especially controversial. I see it as 
     part of Sher's extremely Muse-centered interpretation: it's all about the 
     competition between the Muse and Stella for Hoffmann's love. The Three 
     Heroines have no real existence, and Sher's staging of the Prologue makes 
     clear that both the Muse and Stella know what's at stake in Luther's tavern 
     that night.

The Muse doesn't really collude with the Villains (well, except maybe when 
Nicklausse lends Dr. Miracle his wrist to take "Antonia's" pulse). But she 
wants to see Hoffmann through to the far side of each (imaginary) affair. 
For that reason, it's natural that the Villain of each tale takes Nicklause 
into his confidence. They have aligned interests, but for different reasons.

I explain this more in the blogpost.  Ultimately I don't particularly accept 
or reject Sher's interpretation: it's just one more way to interpret an 
extremely interpretable opera.  Some of you may remember that in one 
iteration of Capobianco's production at NYCO, he had the Villains in 
collusion, not with Nicklausse, but with the Heroines!  Each act ended with 
the heroine and the villain laughing at Hoffmann: not only Giulietta, where 
it's written that way in the Guiraud/Choudens version; but also a 
re-integretated Olympia -- and even Antonia, who, instead of dropping dead, 
walked through the painting of her mother to join Dr. Miracle in joint 
derision of the hero.  (It wasn't always done that way, but it definitely 
was on one of NYCO's LA tours. Maybe they thought everyone in LA was stoned 
and would prefer an approach like this.)

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