BRIGHTENING up the winter stage of the Joan Sutherland Theatre at Sydney Opera House is a new production of Offenbach’s opera fantastique, “The Tales of Hoffmann”. 

It’s an international effort, a lavish co-production between Opera Australia, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Opéra National de Lyon and Fondazione Teatro La Fenice di Venezia, conducted here by Guillaume Tourniaire and staged by Italian director Damiano Michieletto. The elaborate sets depicting three worlds have been designed and built by the team in Australia and the costumes were made in the Sydney workshops of OA.

“The Tales of Hoffmann” is the last opera of French composer Jacques Offenbach, and has a plot almost too complicated to explain, arising from a tipsy recollection by the poet Hoffmann as he looks back on the four great loves of his life. These are a wind-up doll, a singer, a cruel courtesan and the female muse, who combines them all.

All the stops have been pulled out, with Australian soprano Jessica Pratt returning to play all four women, following the example of the late Joan Sutherland, while the ubiquitous villain is played by Marko Mimica and the titular role by rising young Peruvian tenor, Iván Ayón Rivas. 

I caught up with Rivas recently via WhatsApp in Tokyo while he was taking a break from playing the Duke in “Rigoletto”, one of the great operatic parts and a rare one where the tenor plays the bad guy.

Earlier in the year, Rivas made his Australian debut as the romantic lead, Rodolfo, in “La Bohème” but as Hoffmann, he will be able to extend his dramatic talents to perform – much harder – comedy, as he transforms on stage from old man to the younger version.

He’s been enjoying working with the Tokyo National Theatre, he says, where he’s been excited to find “a new public”. 

The Duke in “Rigoletto” is a cynical cad, but by contrast in “The Tales of Hoffmann,” he tells me, “I’m one of the most normal characters in the opera.” 

In fact, Rivas says: “He presents to us his life experience with the three women… he is so normal I can’t explain it, but what is so wonderful in this opera is that from normality, Offenbach has created a beautiful and fantastic work with wonderful roles in it. 

“Playing the main character will be a different experience for me; it’s in French and it’s not dramatic… everything is in the middle, it’s not so high and not so low… Hoffmann is like a real person.

“Of course, at the centre of it is the comedy, delightful, but a most difficult thing, because it’s hard to make people laugh.” 

Rivas is now 30, entering his mature years as an opera singer and tells me, “It’s a most difficult age… just behind the most famous tenors and maybe one step up from the others…You have to continue at this level, to grow and to do technically more dramatic parts.” 

These days he lives in Italy, where he’s had the chance to study great Verdi roles such as Macbeth and Simon Boccanegra, but he tries to get back to his hometown Lima for major concerts and hopes to be involved in an opera there soon. 

“Being a tenor in Peru is an unusual occupation, but things are improving and the last concert I made was completely full,” he says.

“I went to see an opera in a municipal theatre, a ballet in another theatre and a concert in another, and every auditorium was full.”

“Also, we do have a beautiful tradition of tenors, like Luigi Alva and Juan Diego Flórez, I hope to enter that level of fame,” he says. 

“The Tales of Hoffmann”, Sydney Opera House, July 11-22.