Word: hoffmann
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Jacques Offenbach, they said in Paris, certainly can cancan. But could he write serious music? He died trying to finish his one attempt, an opera with a libretto based on stories by Germany's weird. Poe-etic story spinner, E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). The Tales of Hoffmann, first produced in 1881, four months after Offenbach's death, was a smash. The French, who wisely distrust overly sweet wines, have always had a weakness for sweet opera, and much of Hoffmann fits into the sucre fashion of Gounod's Faust, Saint-Saens' Samson et Dalila, etc. When...
Last week, at the opening of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, the Hoffmann score was eminently well played under Conductor Pierre Monteux, who at 80 is the most irrepressible prodigy in the music world...
...Hoffmann had some serviceable singing by the large cast, with Tenor Richard Tucker in particularly mellow voice and French Baritone Martial Singher singing with enormous power and control. Roberta Peters was the pert doll. The standout was Soprano Lucine Amara. who brought to the stage the kind of dazzling vocal splendor that made the Met famous. The sound of her voice was eggshell-fragile, sunset-colored, and so surprisingly powerful that the audience burst into cheers at the end of her big aria...
...Saarlanders' choice became clear, the champions of Europeanization were first to dramatize its impact. Saar Premier Johannes Hoffmann, figurehead of the Saar-for-Europe movement, promptly resigned. From his sickbed in Bonn, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, urgent advocate of a vote for Europeanization, was said to be "deeply disturbed," and he called his Cabinet into emergency session to consider what to do next...
...yearning to own the Saar, but he had not been able to arrest the Saar's own case of Germanic nationalism. Under Schneider's lashing, personal attacks, the European status had become dangerously linked with the uncertain fortunes of its chief proponent, Saar Premier Johannes ("Joho") Hoffmann and his pro-French Christian People's Party. The pro-Germans made up a word for his supporters-Speckfranzosen, i.e., literally, bacon-Frenchmen; loosely, pro-French for material interests. They jeered at the portly Joho as a longtime French puppet, and threw stones and stink bombs to break...