The Tales of Hoffmann: The Ballad of Kleinzach

Offenbach was well known in Vienna, but more for his operettas than for his far more ambitious last stage work, The Tales of Hoffmann, which had only one Viennese performance before the Ringtheater was destroyed by a horrific fire in 1881. It had better luck on its initial run in Paris earlier in the same year, when the Ballad of Kleinzach was greeted as a particularly entertaining episode. With much colourful detail Hoffmann tells a comic story about a dwarf to a group of students in a beer cellar in Nuremberg - much to their amusement in spite of his thoughts drifting off in a romantic direction in the middle.