Text/Lei Jian
An essential part of a trip to Venice is to rent a boat, swim in the waterways of Venice, and listen to the boatmen sing the tender gondola songs. If you're lucky, you might even hear handsome shipwrights singing the "boat song" from of the Offenbach opera Hoffmann's story.
Speaking of Offenbach's "The Story of Hoffmann", the story between them is very poignant. It was Offenbach's last and the only one of his more than 90 operas that he had not written. In 1851, the play Hoffmann's Fantasy Story, based on several novels by the German Romantic writer Hoffmann and his own, was premiered at the École d'Odeon in Paris, based on several novels by the German Romantic writer Hoffmann and his own story. The strange plot of the play and Hoffmann's love story impressed Offenbach, so he took this as a theme and rewrote the play into an opera and composed music for it. Unfortunately, before he could finish the entire work, Offenbach died. His good friend, the composer Ernest Giraud, wrote of of-fenbach's nearly completed work.
Born on 20 June 1819 in a family of musicians in the Synagogue of Cologne, Jacques Offenbach played the violin at the age of 6, experimented with composition at the age of 8, and dropped out of the Conservatoire de Paris in 1833. In 1849 he became conductor and composer of the Comédie de Paris, but the Opéra de Paris never performed his work, so he decided to start a new one. He wrote in his autobiography: "I have a stroke of genius, since the Opéra de Paris no longer performs any opera, since the funny, cheerful, witty music is gradually being forgotten, and since the things that are being written to the Opéra de Paris are actually only a few smaller operas, then it is up to me to create my own musical theater, and no one will ever produce and perform my works anyway." In 1855, he founded the Paris Harmonic Theatre and served as his manager, and the premiere on July 5 included two of his works, a sad pastoral drama "White Night" and a burlesque play "Two Blind Men", which were great successes. Offenbach wrote 102 works of stage music in his lifetime, including more than 90 operettas. Two operes, Orfeo in Hell, composed in 1858 and Beautiful Helen in 1864, made him a world-class composer and is known as one of the founders of classical operetta. "Orpheus in Hell" was initially unremarkable in 1858, but a bad review by the music critic Jules Janan in the "Debate" aroused the curiosity of the audience, and people flocked to it. Rossini went to the theater to see the performance and gave Offenbach a high evaluation, calling him Mozart of the Champs Elysées. But Wagner hated of Offenbach's work and everything about the Parisian Harmonic Theatre, scolding in his harsh language that Offenbach's music was a piece of that makes all the pigs of Europe roll on it. However, this did not affect of Thefenbach's mood, because "Orfeo in Hell" was performed 228 times in a row. The audience's willingness to come to the show is the best affirmation.
With honor comes the accumulation of overwork. After writing more than 90 operettas, Offenbach did not want to write any more operettas, but wanted to have a masterpiece. "Hoffman's Story", whether it is the strangeness of the storyline, or the variety of character images, the fullness of the character's personality, all have the foundation to write a masterpiece.
E· T· A Hoffmann (Ernst Theodore ArmadHoffmann) was a representative of German Romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, both a writer and composer and a music critic, as well as a theater manager, singer, conductor, and government official. In 1813, in an essay about Beethoven, he said: "Music is home only in the kingdom of Romanticism... [Music is] the most romantic of all the art disciplines— in fact, you can almost say that it's the only art that's truly romantic..." His work is unique, with storylines mostly dreamy and bizarre, whimsical and even a little absurd. The stories in his work have inspired many composers to create a series of masterpieces, the most famous of which are Schumann's Chrysler's Eight Fantasias, Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker, and Offenbach's opera The Story of Hoffmann. Western music historians believe that Hoffman's interpretation of the term "Romantik" introduced the realm of German romantic literature into the world of music and opened the precedent of German musical romanticism.
Offenbach's opera The Story of Hoffmann consists of three acts plus a prologue and epilogue. In the prologue, at the Hotel in Lüt in Nuremberg, Hoffman tells a group of university students his three weird love stories. In the first act, he falls in love with a mechanical puppet, and in the second act, he falls in love with Julietta, a famous venetian prostitute, but is dumped. In the third act, Antonia, who falls in love with lung disease, dies again, leaving a sad Hoffman. The first act is in the living room of the Italian scholar Dr. Spalanzani, where the magician Goperius sells Hoffman a pair of "magic glasses". Hoffman put on his glasses and saw that Spalanzani's daughter Olympia was incomparably beautiful. Olympia sang the famous flower cavity aria "The birds in the forest sing the song of longing" in the living room, which made Hoffman fall in love with Olympia uncontrollably. When the round dance music sounded, Hoffman put his arms around Olympia and danced, who knew that Olympia could not stop at all, and threw Hoffman down and broke his glasses. After losing his magic glasses, Hoffman realizes that Olympia, whom he fell in love with, is a mechanical puppet. The second act is in the home of the famous Venetian prostitute Julietta, and "Boat Song" is the duet "Night of Love, Night of May" from the Venetian River at the beginning of this scene:
Beautiful night, love night,
Smile at our joy.
The night is sweeter than the day,
On this beautiful night of love.
Can't stop time from flying by,
Take away our tenderness.
The Promised Land is gone,
Can't stop time from flying by.
Intoxicating breeze,
Embrace us gently.
Please give us the kiss,
Hold us, kiss us.
Love Night, Beautiful Love Night.
Offenbach's The Story of Hoffmann is considered by music historians to be a masterpiece of French opera and has been popular all over the world for more than 140 years since its inception. This "Boat Song" and the soprano aria in the first act are the most popular segments of "Hoffman's Story", beautiful and romantic, full of color. "Boat Song" adopts a gondola tune, the melody is smooth and feminine, and the soul is fascinating. The music is played by flute and clarinet, sparkling and scaled, and the addition of strings adds a layer of fantasy to the melody. When the female duet theme melody sounds, in the channel of Venice, the ancient buildings sway in the waves, and the lights blink and make people dreamy.
To this day, "Hoffmann's Story" is a regular repertoire of major opera houses in Europe, "Boat Song" is of course also a frequent repertoire at concerts, sung by vocals, more is an orchestral version without human voice, and the orchestral version has two different versions of the theme melody played by the violin and the theme melody played by the oboe, the violin is affectionate and soft, the oboe is clear and quiet, and the sound is different.
【About the Author】
Lei Jian, media person, philharmonic person. Since 2019, he has written articles to interpret Western classical songs from the perspective of reading original literary works, and has become a series.