Hoffman’s Tales: From German Into French, From Literature Into Opera, From Opera Into Film

At a time when German Romantic literature was first gaining popularity in France, Hoffmann was still a virtually unknown author, even in Germany. As a result, his work entered French cultural consciousness relatively late, but it left a lasting mark. In this context, we are particularly interested in the thesis, already present among 19th-century French authors (Gautier, Ampère), that Hoffmann’s popularity with French readers is linked to his keen sense of observation and description of everyday life. According to this interpretation, Hoffmann’s short stories and fantasy novels, rooted in reality, are an example of marvellous realism. We are also interested in the thesis that Hoffmann’s fantastical writings are in fact the precursor of science fiction, and in this regard, in the affinities between E.T.A. Hoffmann and Honoré de Balzac. Like Hoffmann, whose fantastical stories almost always offer the reader a scientific, or at least pseudo-scientific, explanation for unusual phenomena, Balzac, a pioneer of the realist novel, felt a strong attraction to the fantastical on the one hand, and on the other hand, a great respect for science and a particular fascination with pseudo-science, such as F. A. Mesmer’s theory of magnetism. In addition to the short story L’Élixir de longue vie (The Elixir of Long Life), which could almost be considered a plagiarism of Hoffmann, the novel La Peau de chagrin (The Magic Skin) is undoubtedly the most Hoffmannian of Balzac’s texts. We also discuss the biographical reading of Hoffmann’s work, which is particularly characteristic of 19th-century France. This reading, according to which Hoffmann is the hero of his own works, gave rise to the dramatic text Hoffmann’s Tales by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, produced at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in 1851, which also served as the basis for the libretto of Jacques Offenbach’s opera, produced at the Opéra-Comique in 1881. Hoffmann first became known in France thanks to the translations by François-Adolphe Loève-Veimars, published between 1829 and 1837. But it was mainly thanks to Offenbach’s opera that Hoffmann became so deeply rooted in French, European and even German cultural consciousness. In addition to countless theatrical productions, the opera Hoffmann’s Tales has been the subject of several film adaptations, the most important of which is probably the 1951 film by Powell and Pressburger. The theme we would like to address is some of the transformations that Hoffmann’s text undergoes as it moves from one language to another, from one culture to another, from literature to opera, and from opera to cinema. While the dramatization and the resulting opera place strong emphasis on the biographical element (the poet Hoffmann as a dramatic hero), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film version emphasises the theatrical aspect. The filmmakers retain the fundamental nature of Hoffmann’s literature, the explainability of the fantastic. However, viewers of their film will no longer find explanations for the unusual events in science, pseudo-science or science fiction, nor in psychology, more specifically in the psychological profile of the main character. For Powell and Pressburger, the fantastical elements in Hoffmann’s tales are the result of a theatrical illusion and are therefore a phenomenon specific to the theatrical space.