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1. If you were to select fictional characters to represent aspects of your own real or imagined lost love, who would they be and what would they represent?
- What about other people in your life—coworkers, friends, teachers? How might you cast those people in your life using characters from fiction?
2. One singer plays the four loves, another the four villains, and a third sings the roles of the four servants. What if your life were an opera: are there people you have known at different times in your life, or in different situations, who might all be played by one person?
3. Hoffmann was a well-known writer of surreal stories. The original audience for Les contes d’Hoffmann would have recognized him and his work. How might familiarity with Hoffmann affect our experience of the opera?
4. What past or present authors could you imagine as opera protagonists, interacting with their fictional work? How would the opera plot unfold? What might the arias be? Here are two ideas to get you started:
- Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn, with other characters from Twain’s works
- Nancy Drew and the many authors who share the Carolyn Keene pseudonym
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