Background

Cirque d'Hoffmann - a background

Connecting circus, theatre and opera is something I have long been looking for. Coming across Jacques Offenbach's opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann, which combines a realistic plot with fictional stories, seemed to be an ideal happy coincidence.

Originally, French playwrights Jules Barbier and Michael Carre created a "drame fantastique en cinq actes", which opened at the Theatre Odeon in Paris in 1851. They drew material from the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose surreal and mystical stories were immensely popular in France.

Nearly thirty years later, Jacques Offenbach was inspired to transform it into an opera. His "phantastic opera" saw its world premiere at the Opera Comique in February 1881. Offenbach however had died shortly before, thus leaving his unfinished masterpiece for others to complete. Since then, the Tales of Hoffmann were subjected to numerous changes and rearrangements. The fact that the two world premiere theatres in Paris and Vienna burnt down - thus destroying all the original orchestral scores - fuelled the myths and superstitions around it.

In Cirque d'Hoffmann the original music has been molded into a new soundtrack aiming to create something in its own right, not to compete with the original. Spoken dialogues for the narrative parts combine with music and physical performance for the emotional and surreal states, reflecting Offenbach's original intention. He did not compose music for the couplets, but kept them as spoken dialogues. Only after his death have other composers written music for most of these dialogues, to please the fashion of the time.

MJ

Max, from Germany, trained as a circus performer in Brussel's Ecole sans Filet, and studied directing in Ulm. Max has directed Physical Theatre for The Wrong Size and many plays for the European Theatre Company. His work in Germany includes Amphitryon (Heinrich v. Kleist) as well as directing his own adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris and the world premiere of contemporary opera Zauberflote 2.2