And Does She Know that Rome Is Burning?

In which I get ChatGPT to admit that it shouldn't exist.

In the first act of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, our eponymous tortured poet falls in love with Olympia. Olympia is a mechanical doll created by the inventor Spalanzani, but Hoffmann sees what he wants to see. As if to drive this point home, Spalanzani’s partner, the duplicitous Coppélius, sells him a pair of magic glasses that allow him to see Olympia as a human.

“One look alone told me all to light the fire of love,” Hoffmann tells Nicklausse, who is more inclined to see things as they are. In Donald Pippin’s translation of the libretto, Nicklausse responds: “The inflammable heart! And does she know that Rome is burning?”

Olympia’s debut is presented like a prototypical iPhone launch, but Hoffmann sees it as a debutante’s coming-out. The fact that she needs to be continually wound-up during her mechanical aria, to him, is just an affectation b…