What do we long for when we love? And can another person ever truly recognize our deepest desires – let alone fulfill them?

The poet, composer, and illustrator E. T. A. Hoffmann delved into our longings, dreams, and abysses like no other. In THE TALES OF HOFFMANN, he himself becomes the main character: an artist caught between fantasy and reality, between intoxication and disillusionment. Whom does Hoffmann wish to love? Olympia, the perfect yet soulless doll? Antonia, the fragile singer whose art is fatally bound to her life? Or Giulietta, the seductive courtesan who turns love into a commodity? Or is he simply searching for himself in all of this?

Time and again, Hoffmann encounters dark adversaries: characters who manipulate, seduce, and destroy, and who at the same time mirror his inner conflicts. Love becomes a projection screen, art an attempt at salvation, and failure a prerequisite for insight.

Jacques Offenbach, the Cologne-born master of irony and pleasure, knew life – and its darker sides. With THE TALES OF HOFFMANN, he created a unique work that moves between grand opera, operetta-like exuberance, and Romantic gothic tale. His final, unfinished opera is a dazzling play of identities, illusions, and projections. The three love stories appear as variations of one and the same longing – and as stages in the life of an artist who fails in love and transforms that failure into art. Stefan Herheim, one of the most exciting directors of our time, sets out to explore the wondrous workings of the human mind and depicts the unravelling of a man who seeks to recognize himself through his own stories.