Brand-new remastering in 4k
The legacy of legendary stage director Walter Felsenstein is available with new audiovisual material for the first time
New remastered and digitalised from the original 35mm film in 2020
Cultural-historical Highlight of the opera history of the 1970s
A milestone for the preservation of this important German film heritage
Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, opéra fantastique, is an unfinished work. When Felsenstein decided to produce Hoffmann, there was little source material to go on. However, not even he could have guessed that preparatory work on that opera would take over a year. He asked the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris to prepare copies of the original piano score of the first performance, the libretto from the first performance by Jules Barbier (Calmann-Lévy Éditeurs) and the five-act play of the same name, a drame fantastique, by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. Using this material as a starting point, Felsenstein created his own German five-act version based on the five-act play – the work he considered closest to Offenbach’s intentions. In this version, the recitatives added by Ernest Guiraud have been completely eliminated to allow the text of play to be developed more fully. Referring back to material dating from the fi rst performance, Felsenstein found himself in complete agreement with Offenbach, who sought “a dramatically convincing sequence of spoken word, music and song, and not a through-composed opera.
Artists
Hanns Nocker (Hoffman), Melitta Muszely (Stella/Olympia), Rudolf Asmu (Lindorf/Coppelius), Werner Enders (Cochenille/Pitichinaccio), Vladimir Bauer (Spalanzani), Alfred Wroblewski (Crespel), Horst-Dieter Kaschel (Schlemihl), Sylvia Kuziemski (Niklaus/Muse), Uwe Kreyssig (Nathanael), Heinz Kogel (Lutter), Orchestra From the Komischer Oper Berlin, Karl-Fritz Voigtmann, Walter Felsenstein (stage director)
