The Missing Manuscript

A Story of « the Tales of Hoffmann » by Jacques Offenbach,

a film by Gérald Caillat & Michèle Larivière

Broadcast on Arte: coming soon

"The Tales of Hoffmann" (Les Contes d'Hoffmann) was first performed on February 10, 1881, at Paris's Opéra Comique. Offenbach had been working on his great work for almost a decade, but died on October 5, 1880, just months before its première. Over the years, the score of the manuscript would be unscrupulously modified, cut, stolen and falsified; it would vanish and reappear several times, in several different places around the globe.

This documentary presents the tale of the missing manuscript as a far-reaching investigation - a kind of "musical detective story" - in which all the parties involved (score owners, music publishers, eminent musicologists, opera managers, conductors, stage directors, etc.), from Paris to New York via Hamburg and Burgundy, are questioned and their statements compared.

Excerpts from various productions of "The Tales of Hoffmann" are intercut with the interviews and backed up by a narration. The whole documentary is "impregnated" with the music of "The Tales of Hoffmann", which remains one of the most popular and most widely performed operas in the world. Through this film, we hope to shed some new light on this unclassifiable work whose creation remains shrouded in mystery to this day.