L'enfant et les sortilèges

Instead of doing homework, the child wants to eat cake and play outside. It answers its mother’s rebukes with insolence. When the mother locks it in its room as a punishment the child takes it out on its books, toys and pets. The wallpaper is ripped, furniture tipped over, the pendulum torn out of the clock, the cat’s tail pulled and the squirrel tormented in its cage. But suddenly the child’s victims and their fellows come to life and are full of reproach: the armchair, the chairs, the tattered book and the mangled figures on the wallpaper are all alive and threaten the child. It runs in fear into the garden, but there the cat it maltreated, the dragonfly and the bat are all waiting. They all attack the child, and end up fighting each other. Now the child sees what it has done and tends to the injured squirrel. The other animals all stop in their tracks, moved by this unexpected show of compassion. What will become of a child like this when it grows up? Will it ever be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy? In the second part of the evening, the child has become the young writer Hoffmann. He has been invited to visit the eccentric inventor Spalanzani whose passion is making automatons that look like people. Now he is ready to present his masterpiece as his daughter Olympia. However, he had to call on the assistance of Coppélius, who provided her with human eyes. During the presentation of this mechanical miracle, Hoffmann, supplied with a special pair of spectacles, falls in love with the lady robot since it not only dances the waltz brilliantly but also sings enchanting coloraturas. When Coppélius, whom Spalanzani has cheated out of his wages, furiously destroys the work of art they created together, Hoffmann is brought back to reality with a jolt. Both the child and the writer take a trip into the world of fantasy, with one difference: the child’s urge to destroy takes it to a bizarre dream world that heals it, while for the grown-up the dreamlike vision of his one great love ends in bitter disappointment.