Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann

Offenbach had little time for serious opera until, three years before his death, he started work on The Tales of Hoffmann, based on three stories by the German writer and composer E.T.A Hoffmann. Although it wasn’t quite finished when he died and has been reworked in a variety of more or less (usually less) plausible versions, it has outshone all but a few of his hundred or so operettas and comic operas. Indeed, one number – the Barcarolle in the fourth act - is probably even more popular than the famous can-can from Orpheus in the Underworld. It seems so perfectly appropriate for the opening of an act set on the Grand Canal in Venice that it is difficult to believe, though true, that the Barcarolle was originally written for an earlier attempt at the grand manner, Les fées du Rhin (The Rhine Fairies), which had proved to be such a sad failure in Vienna in 1864.