Tales of H

Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann): “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” (The Birds in the Bower)

The Hoffmann of The Tales of Hoffmann is none other than the E.T.A. Hoffmann whose The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King indirectly inspired Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. Offenbach’s last, serious rather than comic, opera is based on a play which presents Hoffmann as a participant in three of his own stories. In the first of them he falls in love with a remarkably life-like automated doll, Olympia, who has been programmed by her inventor to perform a coloratura aria “Les oiseaux dans la Charmille.” If Hoffmann had had his wits about him he would have realised – from the ingeniously mechnical nature of the music or at least from the tendency of the clockwork to run down – that Olympia was a brilliant fake.