Ger­man author E T A Hoff­mann (1776–1822) was one of the major writ­ers of the Roman­tic move­ment and his sto­ries of fan­ta­sy and Goth­ic hor­ror high­ly influ­enced 19th-cen­tu­ry lit­er­a­ture. For exam­ple, Tchaikovsky’s bal­let The Nut­crack­er is based on Hoffman’s novel­la The Nut­crack­er and the Mouse King, while Delibes’ 1870 bal­let Cop­pélia is based on the short sto­ry, The Sand­man. Inci­den­tal­ly, this excerpt from the lat­ter sto­ry, describ­ing that folk­loric char­ac­ter the Sand­man, amply illus­trates that the term ‘Goth­ic hor­ror’ is no exag­ger­a­tion (in bygone ages we didn’t half spin some hor­rif­ic tales for our young, eh?):

“Most curi­ous to know more of this Sand­man and his par­tic­u­lar con­nec­tion with chil­dren, I at last asked the old woman who looked after my youngest sis­ter what sort of man he was. “Eh, Nat­ty,” said she, “don’t you know that yet? He is a wicked man, who comes to chil­dren when they won’t go to bed, and throws a hand­ful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleed­ing from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and car­ries them to the cres­cent moon to feed his own chil­dren, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human chil­dren.”

The Sand­man (and two oth­er of Hoff­man’s tales, Coun­cil­lor Kre­spel and The Lost Reflec­tion) also inspired the sub­ject of today’s blog, the opéra fan­tas­tique by French com­pos­er Jacques Offen­bach, The Tales of Hoff­man. Offen­bach (1819–1880) was already a famous com­pos­er of around 100 operettas, such as Orpheus in the Under­world (1858) and La Belle Hélène (1864), when he col­lab­o­rat­ed with Jules Bar­bi­er to bring The Tales of Hoff­man to the stage. It proved to be his final work: know­ing he was dying, he wrote to impre­sario Léon Car­val­ho:

“Hâtez-vous de mon­ter mon opéra. Il ne me reste plus longtemps à vivre et mon seul désir est d’as­sis­ter à la pre­mière” (“Hur­ry up and stage my opera. I have not much time left, and my only wish is to attend the open­ing night”)

But it wasn’t to be: Offen­bach died in Octo­ber 1880, four months before the opera’s premiere…nevertheless, his work entered the stan­dard reper­to­ry and is a pop­u­lar piece to this day. Here, lis­ten to Anna Netre­bko and Elī­na Garanča sing the sopra­no and mez­zo-sopra­no duet, the Bar­carolle (Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour) from Act III. You either know it or you think you don’t know it…but you’ll know it!