Welcome home to the historic Opéra Comique! The Tales of Hoffmann, the ravishing yet shambolic swan song Jacques Offenbach never managed to complete, received its posthumous premiere on this stage in 1881. Now, a new four-way coproduction by Lotte de Beer, artistic director of the Vienna Volksoper, opens a new season. Sorry to say, the unveiling of the show in Strasbourg some months ago reaped glum reports. The eponymous romantic poète maudit, it appears, comes before us this time as a basket case sifting through the wreckage of his serial amours, attended by a shrink we used to know as Hoffmann’s youthful companion Nicklausse, who in truth is the Muse in disguise. Jan Sébastien Bou appears as the Four Villains who personify Hoffmann’s inner demons, a gig that brought him kudos in Strasbourg, but the other principals have been recast. Amina Edris—the original Queen of the Nile in the recent John Adams adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra—gets to display an extra shot of “infinite variety” as Hoffmann’s four loves: a windup doll, a consumptive shut-in who sings at peril of her life, a scheming courtesan, and an opera star in her glory. Speaking of infinite variety, the self-styled baritenor Michael Spyres—whose rep ranges from filigreed bel canto to heroic heavyweights—assays the lavish lyric part of Hoffmann. (That’s hardly the expected warmup for Wagner’s Tristan, which is on Spyres’s dance card this season at the Met, opposite Lisa Davidsen, the Isolde the world is waiting for.) Héloïse Mas doubles—or does she in De Beer’s show?—as Nicklausse and the therapeutic Muse. —Matthew Gurewitsch