‘Belle nuit, Ȏ nuit d’amour…’ You may not know the words, but all the world knows the gently lilting tune, which is one of the loveliest moments in the next opera at Covent Garden.

Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann will mark the high point of the venue's autumn season. It has a crazy plot, which begins and ends in a wine-cellar where Hoffmann - an alcoholic poet - dreams up some unlikely amorous exploits.

His quest for happiness is constantly derailed by an enemy who assumes fantastical disguises. The first woman he falls in love with turns out to be a doll, but he only realizes this after she has dazzled him (and us) with her astonishing vocal artistry, when her maker smashes her to pieces.

Next he falls in love with a frail girl suffering from TB who has been told she will die if she sings; Hoffmann is induced by his enemy to make her sing, so she dies.

Finally he pursues a glamorous Venetian courtesan, but once more his shape-shifting enemy upsets things by getting the girl to steal Hoffmann’s shadow - to steal, in effect, his soul.

Hoffmann tries to recover it by fighting a duel, but to no avail. His muse explains that all three women were incarnations of his temptress, who tantalizingly sails off with his enemy to the seductive sound of ‘Belle nuit’.

Hoffman’s muse tells him to buck up and write more poetry, now enriched by sorrow.

With its entrancing music, this opera is one of the most popular in the canon, but Covent Garden’s new production has particular promise, thanks to the people involved.

The electrifying Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez - famous for his effortlessly sweet high C’s - will sing the title role, while the bewitching Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho will incarnate all three of the poet’s hopeless loves.

Meanwhile director Damiano Michieletto is the wild card, on past form guaranteed to astonish, and maybe also to shock.

"The whole thing is a musical journey, full of paradoxes," he says.

"It’s by turns sweet, mystifying, and bitter. And at the same time it’s profoundly surreal. These qualities are what I want to realize on stage."

Tales of Hoffmann runs at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden from November 7 until December 1.