The Tales of Hoffmann by Offenbach, S 01 feb 2025, No (2024/2025), Režisēja Juana Inés Cano Restrepo, Diriģents Lutz de Veer, Opernhaus Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany

Hoffmann, who once successfully dedicated his life to the art of poetry, has lost his way. He lacks the inspiration for something new. Desperate, he takes refuge in intoxication and hopes that the women who appear in his stories will rekindle the flame of his poetry. What the title character of his Opera Hoffmann's Tales is denied, the opportunity to advance his own creativity and reinvent himself, Jacques Offenbach achieved brilliantly with the composition of this work. He found the model in a play that used several stories by the poet E. T. A. Hoffmann. The fantastically absurd narrative style gave Offenbach's musical ideas wings and the result was "a strange work, unique in its kind, which soon delights us, soon excites us, always interests us, never bores us", according to the critic Eduard Hanslick on the occasion of (world premiere) in 1881. Juana Inés Cano Restrepo's directorial debut in Chemnitz shows that this artistic tragicomedy still fascinates audiences today and also confronts them with existential questions.