It is possible that most Parisians first heard music from Les Contes d’Hoffmann on October 7, 1880, at the funeral of its composer. It was fairly common at this time to use a composer’s own sacred music (or hastily adapted secular music) for such a purpose. Only a few of the funeral’s attendees, however, would have recognized Jacques Offenbach’s final work. Some family and associates might have heard excerpts at a private performance given in May of the previous year. Others may have been directly involved in the early production stages of the new opera. By February 10, 1881, when it premiered at the Opéra-Comique, Les Contes d’Hoffmann differed significantly in conception from the material that Offenbach had left behind. Despite perennial debates regarding how much of the opera the composer personally completed and orchestrated, the fundamental reality is that Offenbach’s final opera is an unfinished work.

Offenbach had been working on Les Contes d’Hoffmann since 1877, an unusually protracted period for a composer known for quick, efficient composition. This lengthy gestation, during which it was frequently shelved for more pressing projects, was perhaps due to the special place the opera held for its composer. Although known for mercilessly parodying his highbrow contemporaries like Giacomo Meyerbeer, Offenbach had himself long sought to premiere a work at the Opéra-Comique, a considerably more prestigious venue than the music halls at which he had found his greatest commercial success. Les Contes d’Hoffmann finally gave the composer this opportunity, which he saw as an attainment of artistic legitimacy, a way of outstripping his reputation as a clever tunesmith and creator of unparalleled light entertainment.

Several musical characteristics reflect this self-conscious elevation, setting Les Contes d’Hoffmann apart from most of Offenbach’s earlier work. Operatic and operetta styles frequently share the stage. For example, while self-contained, versified songs like the villainous Lindorf’s “Dans les rôles d’amoureaux langoureaux” exemplify an operetta style, the complex scenes such as the Finale of Act Four interweave arias, recitative, and ensembles in a far more operatic way. The work also lacks the sustained tone of parody that thrilled audiences in works like Orphée aux Enfers (1858). There are, of course, brilliant flashes of musical humor, such as the aria “Les oiseaux dans la charmille,” in which the composer uses the automaton Olympia to lampoon the mechanized nature of virtuoso coloratura singing. Despite such Offenbachian touches, however, Les Contes d’Hoffmann generally takes itself quite seriously, musically fleshing out librettist Jules Barbier’s examination of the conflicted relationship between romantic love and artistic inspiration.

The libretto was adapted from an 1855 play by Barbier and Michel Carré, itself a loose adaptation of the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). Barbier and Carré heavily altered Hoffmann’s stories for their own purposes. Hoffmann himself became the protagonist, creating a frame structure through which the poet relates to his friends the stories of three unsuccessful love affairs. Thus, in each story, Hoffmann’s desired woman and his sinister adversary are reflections of the “real” characters in the frame. The historical Hoffmann, a prolific writer, lawyer, composer, and music critic had relatively little in common with Barbier and Carré’s debauched dreamer. Nevertheless, their play accurately reflected several of Hoffmann’s literary concerns: the supernatural, the grotesque and bizarre, the inner life of the artist, and the complex relationship between art and life.

Following Offenbach’s death, his son Auguste-Jacques entrusted composer Ernest Guiraud to complete the orchestration and to work with the Opéra-Comique to provide musical solutions filling the opera’s dramatic holes. Guiraud is perhaps best known for composing recitatives to replace the spoken dialogue in George Bizet’s Carmen (1875), recitatives which are often still performed today. Such adaptation was a frequent necessity if a work was to be performed at a venue in which spoken dialogue was deemed traditionally inappropriate. In late 1881, Guiraud performed a similar task for Les Contes d’Hoffmann, creating an entirely sung performance for the Ringtheater in Vienna.

By the early twentieth century, this version had become the basis for most performances, with frequent alterations and the occasional inclusion of new material by other composers. The tale of the Venetian courtesan Giulietta, entirely omitted at the premiere, was restored in Guiraud’s Viennese version and has since become part of the performance tradition, although its tentative state of completion has continued to make it particularly problematic. In the 1970s and 80s, the discovery of several of Offenbach’s completed manuscripts, unused by Guiraud, led to many new performance options in the “Giulietta” act, as well as in Acts I and V. These “framing” acts had been significantly reduced in Guiraud’s reductions, minimizing the role of Hoffmann’s Muse, who vies for his affections with the singer Stella and her three fictional incarnations.

The opera’s incompleteness, along with its unusual episodic structure, has allowed for a number of alternate versions, all of which are dramatically feasible. None of these versions, however, can truly be called definitive. Even if Offenbach had finished the work himself, Les Contes d’Hoffmann was the product of a culture in which an opera was understood to be a flexible thing, adaptable to multiple performance contexts. Despite such uncertainties, however, Offenbach’s final opera has continued to delight contemporary audiences with its strange flights of fantasy, holding a place in the permanent repertoire which, we might imagine, would have afforded its composer considerable satisfaction.