Romantic, fantastic and, in the end, humanly tragic, Jacques Offenbach’s opera “The Tales of Hoffman” turned out to be an apt ...

Strauss was tempted (particularly by his first wife, the noted mezzo-soprano Jetty Treffz) to try his hand at operetta in the style of Offenbach and the Austrian composer Suppé. After two unremarkable ...

Some of these were turned into a play, which the German-born French composer Jacques Offenbach turned into an opera which received its premiere in February 1881, four months after the composer died.

The Tales of Hoffmann’, an ‘opera fantastique’, was Jacques Offenbach’s valedictory work and an attempt by the composer, the ...