:27:00
when a gentle-Iooking little man
with an umbrella comes by.
:27:03
He sees the teamster's
pleasure in this torture.
:27:07
Quietly he takes his umbrella,
thrusts it between the teamster's legs,
:27:11
gives him more than a wedgie, allowing
Claudin to escape in the confusion.
:27:15
Thankfully, this was broomed.
:27:19
Let's return to the Jacoby script.
:27:21
Following his injury, Claudin takes refuge
in the opera in this 1941 adaptation,
:27:26
concealing his injury
beneath a hideous painted mask.
:27:29
And he promotes Christine's rise
with a reign of terror.
:27:32
During the annual masked ball he abducts
her and reveals their relationship.
:27:37
But a performance of his symphony
lures him back to the stage,
:27:40
where he's gunned down by the police.
:27:42
In a nihilistic
and wholly extraneous finale,
:27:45
Christine's debut in the world premiere of
Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann
:27:50
ends badly when a coal fire in Claudin's
catacomb ignites the building.
:27:54
Christine, her foster parents,
and her boyfriend Raoul
:27:57
are the only survivors
as the building burns to the ground.
:28:01
The final image is a manuscript,
Claudin's modernist symphony,
:28:04
blackening and curling in the flames.
:28:07
Jacoby's time line was skewed.
:28:09
Les Contes d'Hoffmann
premiered at the Opéra Comique
:28:13
in 1881, months after
Offenbach's death, not in 1873.
:28:18
And while the Opéra Comique didn't burn,
:28:20
there was a historical basis
for Jacoby's conflagration.
:28:23
On December 8, 1881 in Vienna,
:28:26
at the second performance
at the Ringtheater,
:28:29
the theatre did burn
with a tremendous loss of life,
:28:32
beginning Tales of Hoffmann's
reputation as a jinxed opera.
:28:37
Time magazine's reviewer
called Phantom's sewer
:28:39
"the best since Les Misérables".
:28:41
In the 1880s,
where antibiotics are unknown,
:28:44
one has to wonder
at Claudin's frolic in the sewage
:28:48
and the effect of bacterial infection
on his festering wounds.
:28:54
The directors of the opera are played
by comic supporting actor Fritz Feld
:28:59
and the rather bulky character actor
J Edward Bromberg.