The "Hoffmann" of our title was a gifted German author, lawyer, composer, literary critic, and caricaturist who was christened Ernst Theodor Wilhdm Hoffmann. He altered his third name to Amadeus out of love for the works of Mozart, of whose Don Giovanni he wrote an influential and highly romantic interpretation. He also wrote the three stories on which this opera is based, though he himsdf was the hero of none of them and though they are far more macabre and romantic than their familiar transmogrifications in the libretto. (For the curious with a literary bent: the titles of the original tales are The Sandman, New Year's Eve Adventure, and Councillor Crespel. They are wdl worth reading.)
 

Thirty years before the opera was produced, its librettists had had performed, at the Od6on in Paris, a not very successful comedy called Les contes d'Hoffmann, in which the three young heroes of these tales were transformed into Hoffmann himself, thus making a kind of pun on the title’s preposition: they are tales “of’ Hoffmann because they are both by and about him. When the comedy was quite dead, Barbier reworked it into libretto form and offered it successively to Hector Salomon, Charles Gounod, and Jacques Offenbach. Salomon was very much attracted but graciously turned over the opportunity to his colleague, Offenbach.
 

At the time, Offenbach was the most brilliantly successful composer of French operettas—and no one has begun to rival him since. He had produced almost a hundred of these confections, but never a serious work. He therefore set great store by this effort, worked very hard at it, and, being seriously ill at the time, only prayed that he might live to see it on the stage. He did live to see a private run-through with piano accompaniment, and then went back to work to rewrite the role of Hoffmann, which had been intended for a baritone, into a tenor role. But he did not live to see its immensely successful premiere, or even to complete the orchestration. The first act he did himself; the balance had to be completed for him by Ernest Guiraud, who performed an analogous service for Carmen when he composed its recitatives after Bizet’s death.
 

The opera was enormously successful from the beginning, in Paris, where it received 101 performances in its first season. On its first trip outside of its native country, however, it encountered an ironically tragic fate. During its second performance at the Ringtheater in Vienna, the house burned down and there were many fatalities. This is precisely the same fate that had befallen Hoffmann’s own masterpiece Undine sixty-five years earlier in Berlin. The parallel, which would have appealed to the imagination of Hoffmann himself, impeded the quick success of the Tales in Germany. But eventually it became part of the permanent standard repertoire in that country, as it had meantime everywhere else.
 

The original intention, seldom carried out today, was to have the roles of Lindorf, Coppdlius, Dapertutto, and Dr. Miracle sung by the same baritone, thus showing Hoffmann’s series of evil geniuses to be the same person in disguise. Similarly, one soprano was supposed to impersonate Stella, Olympia, Giulietta, and Antonia—all four the loves of Hoffmann. But the vocal requirements for these roles vary so much that few modem baritones or sopranos can be found to cope successfully all evening. However, if one remembers the original intention, it may lend a fresh, if possibly spurious, dramatic perspective to the tales. An analogous intention for the secondary tenor roles of Andres, Cochenille, Pittichinaccio, and Frantz seems to be inspired more by economical than by dramatic interest.