Strangers in a Strange Land, Part 2

In many 19th-century works, politics and/or warfare are often the driving forces behind the selection of locale –- consider, for instance, the military presence in such works as Delibes' Lakmé or Bellini's Norma, or operas that concern the exploits of historical explorers such as Vasco da Gama in Meyerbeer's L’Africaine. These kinds of operas use cultural clashes as the basis for stories about forbidden love. Were their male leads not imperialistic figures or nobly-born female leads not pressed into submissive status, the inappropriateness of such dalliances would not necessarily leap to sufficient operatic proportions to sustain an evening's interest.

Characters' voluntary travel, though, is another matter. Offenbach's 1881 Les Contes d'Hoffmann, for instance, is subtly distributed among four different cities: the Olympia act in Berlin, the Giulietta act in Venice, and the Antonia act in Munich, bracketed by the Prologue and Epilogue set in a tavern in Nuremberg. The spreading out of the locations is important to underscore Hoffmann's feverish quest for his ideal woman –- not quite the same thing to merely chase her around one town. In the Prologue, he tells us how the chase began: After glimpsing her as a young man, "Je quittais comme un fou la maison paternelle/Et m'enfuis à travers les vallons et les bois" –- he dashed from his familial home like a madman to pursue her through valleys and forests. Although in the Venice act the languor of the famous duet would seem to echo the watery setting, we have very little overt sense of local color in the opera's score, and nearly no reference to locale in its text. And yet, how right it seems that the Olympia act have a metropolitan as well as mechanical spirit to it, as surely typified early 19th century Berlin, as compared with Giulietta's decadent and mysterious Venice and the lugubriousness of Antonia's Munich. Just try to imagine his encounter with Olympia taking place in Venice, or with Giulietta in Munich, and you'll see what I mean. We should take note that, although the genuine Hoffmann, whose fantastical stories are adapted for this opera, indeed nursed an unrequited infatuation for a female schoolmate while in his teens, his travels to several countries thereafter were rather more practicably commercial than is the operatic Hoffmann's obsessive pursuit of the Muse.

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