LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN

Shortly before his death in 1880, Jacques Offenbach, the master of operetta, finally ventured to write the grand opera of his dreams, the premiere of which he did not live to see.he wanted to bring fantastic stories from the pen of E.T.A. Hoffmann to the stage - with a frame story in which the figure of the legendary author of black romanticism as the title hero performs his stories under the influence of alcohol and drugs in an inn, blurring the boundaries between dream and reality.

The cast of this production by David McVicar, which was largely considered very conventional by critics, promises a great opera and singers' festival: the American star tenor Neil Shicoff sings Hoffmann, Ruggero Raimondi acts as the demonic antagonist, and around this Hoffmann such ladies and soprano stars as Waltraud Meier as Giulietta or Angelika Kirchschlager as La Muse and L'ubica Vargicová as Olympia act as sparkling objects of his dreams or his desires.Kent Nagano is on the podium of the Vienna Philharmonic.