Les Contes d’Hoffmann Tickets

Les Contes d’Hoffmann Tickets On Sale Now

Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher (South Pacific) directs a vibrant and eerie production of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann in New York. This fantastical opera, inspired by German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories, is a profound and often funny ride through three doomed love affairs, boasting bold staging and zany characters. It is back at the Met Opera for the first time since 2018, giving audiences another chance to experience the bewildering but brilliant world of Offenbach’s final work.

What is Les Contes d’Hoffmann about?

Based on a play in turn inspired by the stories of German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) is three stories unified by their content: doomed love affairs. With a narrative frame that makes Hoffmann the hero of his own writings, this is an imaginative and eclectic work populated by beautiful mechanical dolls, troubled divas, seductresses and villains.

Offenbach was known and celebrated in Paris for his witty operettas. With his final piece, he intended to create a serious opera that was part of theopéra fantastique (fantasy and supernatural) genre. However, he died before completion, and only the prologue and first act were fully finished. Nevertheless, Hoffmann is one of the works he is best remembered for.

Cast and Creative Team

Jacques Offenbach was a German-French composer who wrote nearly 100 operettas between the 1850s and 1870s, in addition to his unfinished Tales of Hoffmann. In public consciousness, one of his most famous pieces of music is the Can Can song, otherwise known as Infernal Galop from his operetta Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld).

Les Contes d’Hoffmann is directed at the Met by Bartlett Sher, who won a Tony Award for South Pacific. Sher has helmed some of the biggest Broadway shows of the last decade, including To Kill a Mockingbird and My Fair Lady.

Marco Armiliato conducts a cast including tenor Benjamin Bernheim as tormented Hoffmann, soprano Erin Morley as mechanical doll Olympia, soprano Pretty Yende as Antonia, and mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine as Giulietta. The company is completed by bass-baritone Christian Van Horn as the Four Villains and mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya as Hoffmann’s friend Nicklausse.

Book Tickets for Les Contes d’Hoffmann at Met Opera Today

Imaginative storytelling, ambitious music and dizzying stage design make Offenbach’s last work a delight. Book Tales of Hoffmann tickets and discover a classic that still entertains with its ambition and romantic fantasy setting.