‘Hoffmann’ With Hokum in San Diego : OPERA REVIEW

SAN DIEGO —  “I find no excuse for performing any more the unidiomatic version which has become known as Offenbach’s ‘Tales of Hoffmann’ but is full of music that he did not write.”

Thus spake Richard Bonynge in the apologia for his own version of “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” recorded in 1972 primarily as a vehicle for his illustrious wife, Joan Sutherland. The feisty words were reprinted in the program magazine Saturday night when “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” closed the San Diego Opera season with the redoubtable maestro on dubious duty in the pit.

He was correct, of course, to decry the corruption of the beloved fantasy opera in the hoary edition most of us know and love. Offenbach died before the Paris premiere in 1881, and well-meaning hands have been tinkering with the product ever since.

Numerous set pieces have been added, subtracted and shuffled. Recitatives have been interpolated. Rough edges have been smoothed.

Bonynge scraped away most of the narrative sing-song and restored a lot of spoken dialogue. At the same time, he kept some music that the composer did not write, spliced in some new distortions, ignored some important musicological discoveries and passed on many of the bad habits established by that most sardonic of stylistic forces, tradition.

In recent years, scholars have uncovered even more information about the original “Hoffmann” plus volumes of unfamiliar music. (Los Angeles probably encountered too much of it at the Music Center in 1988.) But Bonynge, self-serving to a fault, dismisses all that historical innovation. “Offenbach,” he declares while defending his own corruptions, “wouldn’t have liked it.”

We fear he doth protest too much.

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As presented at the Civic Theatre, his “Hoffmann” keeps getting bogged down in disruptive, slow-moving conversation. Compounding the alienation, the audience reads the English text on a proscenium screen while the non-Gallic cast rambles on in rote French. Dappertutto and Coppelius retain their popular though spurious arias. Nicklausse, a.k.a. the Muse, sings no cavatinas. The Venetian scene comes in the wrong place.

Most disorienting, perhaps, irrelevant doll music returns from Act One to serve as a bridge between the third act and the epilogue. And the erstwhile Venetian septet--now a quartet--turns up in the German beer cellar, where the musical reference to the baracrolle makes no sense at all.

All this editorial hokum could have seemed irrelevant--well, almost irrelevant--if San Diego had mustered a really vital, stylish performance. No such luck.

Bonynge conducted with a lethargic hand. Wolfgang Weber directed traffic clumsily within Gunther Schneider-Siemssen’s time-dishonored, much-traveled sets (cheapo previews of the fantastically lavish designs he created for the Met). Hill Reihs-Gromes’ costumes--attributed to Schneider-Siemssen when last seen here in 1985--looked flimsy as well as gaudy. And the cast wasn’t exactly brilliant.

Advertisements focused on an unidentified photo of Luis Lima, looking suitably romantic in the title role. The arduous duties of the protagonist were entrusted, however, to Jerry Hadley, a wonderful lyric tenor who found Hoffmann’s cruel tessitura and heroic fervor something of a trial. Top tones consistently emerged tight and sharp. Lyricism fell victim to hecticism. Under the circumstances, Hadley’s expressive intelligence and sweetly befuddled demeanor could hardly save the night.

Impersonating the four disparate heroines for the first time, Nova Thomas seemed diligent and possibly overparted. For all her talent and dedication, she may not really be a soprano for all reasons and all seasons.

Remember Sutherland in this bravura test? Remember Beverly Sills? Perhaps it was best not to.

Thomas could barely squeak through the clockwork fireworks of Olympia, even with the crutch of downward transposition. She worked too hard to approximate the push-button sensuality of Giulietta. Apart from some precarious high notes, she sounded radiant as Antonia, and she held her own nicely in the bogus quartet now assigned Stella in the anticlimactic epilogue. Consistency wasn’t her strongest virtue.

Louis Otey, another “Hoffmann” novice, loomed handsomely as the hero’s multi-nemesis and sang most of the music with a handsomely booming baritone. Unfortunately, he confused a few stock cackles with the projection of slimy malevolence (the ghost of Norman Treigle still haunts this opera), and he nearly strangled on the ascending climax of “Scintille, diamant”--a loftier venture than it needed to be.

Graeme Ewer came all the way from Australia to reduce the plaintive servant roles to grotesque burlesque. Cesar Ulloa seconded him as a shamelessly florid Spalanzani.

Happier impressions were left by Jean Rigby, unfailingly sympathetic as the faithful, ever-bemused Nicklausse, and by Herbert Eckhoff, self-effacing whether oddly brutalized as the tavern-keeper or properly troubled as Antonia’s father. Patricia McAfee sounded properly fervent as the miraculously vitalized portrait of Antonia’s departed mother.

All in all, no tall “Tales.”