Mad Loves:Women and Music in Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann.(Brief Article)(Review)

Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann by Heather Hadlock Princeton Univ. Press, 165 pp. $29.95

"It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other." That eminently postmodern sentiment, voiced by Michel de Montaigne more than 400 years ago, comes to mind when considering Heather Hadlock's Mad Loves. Indeed, this brilliant study is likely to peeve opera-lovers of a traditional mindset precisely because it operates much of the time at several removes from Offenbach's beloved opera fantastique. Hadlock's more expansive perspective, though, allows for a penetrating intertextual analysis of Hoffmann and its most important sources: the 1851 drame fantastique of the same name by Jules Barbier and Michel Carre and the E.T. A. Hoffmann tales from which both the play and the opera derive, with a nod to Mozart's Don Giovanni, as well.

While Hadlock's reading of Hoffmann against its sources affords many keen insights, her reading of the opera against itself is even more revealing. She teases out the varied and sometimes contradictory thematic and meta-thematic issues raised by the different versions of this "unfinished and disorderly work," from the time of its premiere up to the recent editions prepared by Fritz Oeser and Michael Kaye -- ...