Offenbach: Les Contes dHoffmann – Wallberg

German record buyers of a certain generation grew up believing that Hoffmann’s demons spoke their language, and this Electrola set — long buried in the vaults, now resurfacing — makes the case with surprising conviction. Offenbach never lived to settle the matter himself. He died leaving sketches, drafts, whole scenes in states of undress, and it fell to Ernest Guiraud, the same accommodating hand that supplied recitatives for Carmen, to stitch together the version that held the stage for a century afterward. Scholars now wince at Guiraud’s solutions. Audiences, for the longest time, did not.

That is the version used here. The Giulietta and Antonia acts appear in their old, “wrong” order, a sequencing error so entrenched in interpretation history that several generations of opera-goers assumed it was simply how the piece went. It is not, structurally speaking, defensible. Dramatically, though, there’s an odd logic to it: Antonia’s death scene lands with more finality as a penultimate tragedy than Giulietta’s comparatively brittle seduction plot ever could as a closer. Fritz Oeser tried to fix all this in 1977; Kaye and Keck would eventually go further still, working from manuscript sources Guiraud never saw. Neither existed yet when this disc was made. So we get the old warhorse, scars and all, including, gratifyingly, the Muse’s return at the very end, a passage many “authoritative” recordings still find ways to shortchange.

The German translation is the real curiosity, and I confess I came to it skeptical.

I have spent too many evenings squinting at surtitles, waiting for the joke to land two bars after the punch line has already gone by, to be anything but a partisan of vernacular opera when it’s done with intelligence. This is done with intelligence. Siegfried Jerusalem’s Hoffmann is sung with a tenor of unforced brightness, not the heroic weight some Wagnerians bring to the role by force of reputation, but something more vulnerable, more susceptible to ruin. The German text sits naturally in his mouth rather than being fitted to it afterward. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, predictably, is the singer who makes you forget you’re hearing a translation at all. His villains, and yes, in this old Guiraud tradition all four are his, have that unnerving parlando specificity Fischer-Dieskau brought to everything from Schubert lieder to Verdi. Each syllable is weighted, colored, placed exactly where it does the most damage. His Dapertutto is genuinely chilling. His Coppélius has the sour comic malice of a man who has done this trick before and grown bored of it.

What’s lost, inevitably, is the Gallic wit, those little verbal shrugs and double meanings that only work in French, that make the Olympia act something closer to satire than horror. Jeanette Scovotti’s mechanical doll is sung with bright, pinging precision, coloratura kept admirably tight even at speed, but the joke of her, the uncanny-valley comedy of it, doesn’t quite translate along with the words. Norma Sharp’s Giulietta fares better; sultriness needs less linguistic footwork than farce does.

Heinz Wallberg conducts with a heavy hand, in the old Kapellmeister manner: thick orchestral textures, a chorus that sounds like it’s singing from inside a cathedral rather than a Venetian palazzo. Some will find it lumbering. I found it, more often than not, dramatically persuasive. This is Hoffmann as continuous nightmare rather than a sequence of picturesque tableaux, the seams between spoken drama and lyricism smoothed by sheer orchestral insistence.

Is it a first recommendation? No, not against the best French-language sets, not against the textual scholarship now available. But as a document of how German houses understood this opera for the better part of a century, sung by artists who treat the language as a living thing rather than a translation exercise, it has genuine, stubborn value. Fischer-Dieskau alone is worth the detour.