And speaking of Antonio de Almeida leads to one of my very favorite composers, Jacques Offenbach, whose unfinished Tales of Hoffmann has become the playground of scholars, editors, and productions. Pffenbach died before its first performance, so he never had the opportunity to finalize the score. The standard performance edition for the past 100 years was finalized on 1906 or so in Monte Carlo. but since the 1940s there has been an attempt by many to determine "what Offenbach really wanted." De Almeida discovered a trove of performance materials from a reading before Offenbach's death, and he was working on an edition. A misguided German musicologist, Fritz Oeser, who had already misinterpreted Carmen, published "his" edition, and Michael Kaye has been working on his edition now, which was in collaboration with de Almeida, I believe.
So, at this point, Hoffmann's recorded in a number of treatments and the same goes for DVDs.
My two favorite recordings of the "Standard" version are Beverly Sills from the 1970s and the Opéra Comique recording from the 1940s. I saw Sills, Triegle, and a young Placido Domingo do Hoffmann at the Cincinnati Summer Opera around 1971. It was wonderful.
There is a good DVD from the Royal Opera, directed by John Schlessinger, and the wonderfully strange Michael Powell film.
