Hoffmann and His Muse

Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera

Jacques Offenbach’s masterpiece “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” is an existential psychological comic opera, a morality tale about an aesthete who destroys himself over a fanciful love of three women. In the last episode of Season 3, Marc Eliot Stein talks about Jewish composers in Paris, “Faust”, drinking songs, Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, Zarzuela, sex dolls, synaesthesia and the opera novels of late New York City writer Richard P. Brickner.