Who doesn’t love Hoffmann? It’s the most generous of operas, three complete scenarios stuffed with jovially skewed versions of every last cliché of nineteenth-century opera: the big old roistering drinking choruses, the courtesans and Bond-style casino shtick, the consumptive waif, the soprano shooting off high notes like a Catherine wheel, love and death in fatal harness, all in the service of three uncanny stories by the German Romantic E.T.A Hoffmann, genius of creepy magic realism. In the old days, this was usually all just staged as massive, decorative phantasmagoria, letting the so-called drama take its chances, as in the Powell and Pressburger film and the 1980 John Schlesinger show which this one finally replaces; these days, directors try to find or invent subtexts to address, with mixed results.

And to be fair to them, it’s quite a tricky job, though the opera is a fruitful old beast. Hoffmann, first performed in 1881, is a tease — a huge piece which would seem to be making all kinds of big points about life and love and inspiration, as well as providing a kind of ironic commentary on itself and opera in general. But try to pin it down and meaning slips (with a sly laugh) through your hands. Jacques Offenbach was determinedly creating his artistic testament (and died after writing the last note) as a weighty piece, and yet his real nature as the inventor and perfecter of satirical operetta, the soundtrack of the Second Empire, keeps busting through: so there are also a whole load more registers of actual music than you get in a normal opera of the time, on top of all the crazy variety on stage. (Not unlike, in that way, Carmen of six years earlier — lucky old Paris.)

The director this time is Damiano Michieletto, who has spoiled a bunch of things at Covent Garden since they (and other places like Glyndebourne) apparently fell in love with him ten years ago and showered him with endless chances to repeat the trick. The last one was (funnily enough) Carmen, the worst of the lot, where Michieletto’s interventions came barging through the boundary that separates the fairly pointless — his usual mode — from the fatuous. This time, we’re pretty much back to the former. The trick is to pretend you have something chin-stroking to say about the opera — in this case, “happiness and love are illusions: they don’t exist” — and then to studiously avoid addressing them. Or, really, anything else.

The stage action here is simply desultory: stuff happens, but for no particular reason, and nothing really goes anywhere

The idea, if any, is that Hoffmann, the narrator of these rather superficial retellings of his stories, is a sad old soak in the corner of a pub, muttering out confused memories of his gloomy life-story. Hardly the most promising starting-point for what is at heart a comic opera — but not the end of the world: and you’ve got to do something with the framing device that bookends the three acts. We also get a clue how things are going to go: a bevy of twirling dancer-demons, serving as jokey panto accessories for the villain Lindorf who, in various guises, stalks through the stories with his Hammer Horror laugh and the rest. Hoffmann’s friend Niklausse is somehow reassigned as a parrot, or a person with a parrot — something like that. The Muse the libretto invents to give a gimcrack unity to proceedings is accompanied by green fairies: this is actually kind of witty, since the opera celebrates the idea of booze as the source of inspiration, and, as you know, absinthe was known as la fée verte.

The stage action here is simply desultory: stuff happens, but for no particular reason, and nothing really goes anywhere. Michieletto has a distinct weakness for the cute — remember the ghastly moppets in Carmen? — which plays well with the infantilism of the plutocrat opera gang who in a few weeks will be sitting solemnly through the very expensive children’s entertainment Hansel and Gretel here. The first act, Olympia, is the one about the mechanical doll Hoffmann falls for (the Coppélia story), which the director locates in Hoff’s schooldays — cue the rather elderly chorus in shorts and pinafores larking about with low-level horseplay, chucking around scrunched up bits of paper and so on (you long for some proper bogwashing, ostracism or similar realism). In the Antonia act the fading-away young singer becomes instead a crippled dancer, staggering about on crutches. This lets Michieletto solve the problem of servant Frantz’s inexplicable little ditty (where directors and actor-singers can often conspire to create some decent slapstick) by making him into a ballet teacher with a troupe of impish little girl ballerinas. Not much effort is made to sort out the casserole of the Giulietta act — Venetian casino, and its confused Gogolian narrative of stolen shadows and reflections.

I know, this stuff is traditionally solved through the music. And Hoffmann, lest we forget, is a bountiful feast — a kind of hommage to the whole of Romantic opera from Weber to Tchaikovsky, full of ardent duets, orchestral wizardry with a magical tinge of Olde Germanie, passionate vocal delivery ramping ever upwards, alongside the operetta jinks that Offenbach couldn’t suppress for long. And there is some high-level work here, though again it’s hardly joined-up. Conductor Antonello Manacorda does a better job with French idioms than he did in Carmen, but everything still needs more zip and bounce. Our Hoffmann, Juan Diego Flórez, has been embodying this role for decades but he’s still fresh, charming, achieving stunning things with apparently no effort, though never actually imposing a shape on the character, just singing his bits as they come along. Olga Pudova is admirable as the crazed coloratura doll Olympia. Ermonela Jaho, a singer who always invests her roles with the scary intensity of a Method actor, brings heavy pathos to Antonia, and this is certainly the most operatically gripping part of the evening, with Offenbach in sincere mode and the music drama really building up to something through those flamingly emotional duets and Hoffmann’s trademark upwardly-modulating amorous fever. In the last act Marina Costa-Jackson is a suitably glamorous Giulietta, though a bit eccentric in the voice.  

The thing is (well, it’s pretty obvious really) that Hoffmann works best when the music is actually in the service of something, and that — the dramatic idea, or at least the decorative cornucopia of the Schlesinger staging with its fantastical sets by William Dudley — is what you wait in vain for here. Things look fine, with clean-cut sets by Paolo Fantin, attractive lighting (Alessandro Carletti) and a modicum of theatrical magic, but it is basically culinary, slapped on top, not coming from inside the piece. It’s nice enough in parts, but what’s it all for? The curtain comes down on the pretty cheesy final all-together-now ensemble, possibly sponsored by Hallmark — “Love makes us strong, but suffering makes us stronger!” — and the place erupts. But this staging doesn’t even believe in that rather questionable (ironic?) takeaway: Hoffmann is still a pissed old crock in the corner, his life a failure, the stories or fantasies finally rather tawdry and pointless.

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Tales of Hoffman runs until December 1st at the Royal Opera House