Salzburg Festival

A loser has to play a film director

(Bild: Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus)

Mariame Clément stages Jacques Offenbach's "Contes d'Hoffmann" - and once again sends the title character to a film set. The plan doesn't work out. The audience was not sparing with boos. Instead, Benjamin Bernheim was celebrated as Hoffmann.

The previous year, Christoph Marthaler made a mess of "Falstaff" by misinterpreting Verdi's opera as a film shoot. This year, Parisian Mariame Clément pays homage to this annoying directorial fad and botches "Les Contes d'Hoffmann": film director Hoffmann, a bourgeois neurotic whom #MeToo campaigners wouldn't even ignore, captures his wives' tales - and fantasies - on celluloid. The loser acts like a star. Interesting? No.

The three thrillingly beautiful, tragic love episodes in the work become superficial shoots in which the relationship tragedies are lost along with the passion, delusion and demonization. Nothing shakes in Julia Hansen's indifferent, gray stage sets. Offenbach's fantasy, pathos and wit remain stuck in the cliché of the script. Where is the scene of rage with the destruction of the doll Olympia, where is the shattering mystical death of Antonia?

The poet E.T.A. Hofmann as film director (Kathryn Lewek and Benjamin Bernheim)(Bild: Monika Rittershaus, Salzburger Festspiele)

Salzburg debutant Marc Minkowski's conducting of the audibly annoyed Vienna Philharmonic sounds rather staid. His attempt to bridge the gap between original sound and opéra fantastique does not succeed. The fact that he chose the recitative version is a good thing.

More pleasing is the cast, led by the fabulous French tenor Benjamin Bernheim as Hoffmann with warmth, luminosity and nobility of timbre. Soprano Kathryn Lewek struggles through her arias in the original key: sometimes virtuosic, but not very French in her feats of strength between drama and coloraturgical elegance.

Kate Linsey is a lively and amusing muse. Christian Van Horn sings the first version of the famous mirror aria as Dapertutto. His Lindorf, Coppelius and Miracle are hardly demonic. As is "Spalanzani" Michael Laurenz. Solid: Marc Mauillon, Geraldine Chauvet, Jérôme Vernier. Often imprecise: the State Opera Chorus.