AN OPERA GUIDE TO
WERTHER Le Opere
by Giorgio De Martino
WHAT IS IT? This is an opera in four acts, a tragic and yet extremely tender story which transfers the famous German initiation novel of the same name onto the operatic stage filtered through an exquisitely French sensibility. The character who gives his name to the opera is a classic example of the hero of the early romantic period, sensitive, melancholy and passionately in love. Subtle tones, pastel softness and a range of emotions always described with extraordinary elegance and refinement… Werther is all of this and more. It is a late nineteenth century masterpiece which presents the atmosphere (melancholy alternating with elation) typical of the Sturm und Drang cultural movement that had opened the way to romanticism one hundred years earlier. The first performance of Werther was on 16th February 1892 at the “Hofoper” in Vienna.
WHAT DOES THE STORY TELL US? Young Werther is in love with Charlotte, however she feels duty bound to marry Albert. Only when in desperation Werther decides to commit suicide, does Charlotte confess her love to him … The action takes place in Wetzlar, between July and September of an unspecified year, some time in the decade from 1780 to 1789. The denouement consists of the description of the lovers’ fatal meeting. Charlotte and Werther had fallen for each other at first sight but the girl was already betrothed to the serious Albert who, although suspicious of Werther’s feelings, allowed the two to see each other. Charlotte feels increasingly attracted to the young Werther, falls in love and eventually no longer puts up any resistance to a secret kiss. Incapable of controlling his passion and with the terrible certainty of never being able to have his beloved Charlotte as his own, Werther pretends to be called away on a foreign mission and instead takes his own life.
WHO WROTE THE MUSIC? Jules Massenet, a French composer who was born in Saint-Étienne on 12th May 1842 and died in Paris on 13th August 1912. He was the youngest son of a former army officer who went into business and owned a small factory which manufactured scythes. As a young man, his first important springboard to a successful career was winning the Prix de Rome award in 1863. The resulting bursary gave him the opportunity to spend time in Italy and devote himself to composition. Jules Massenet began his career as a pianist and timpanist and then went on to teach at the Paris Conservatory.
He composed twenty-six works for the operatic stage (apart from Werther, some of the
best known include Manon, Thaïs and Don Quichotte), as well as a large amount of symphonic and chamber works. He paid careful attention to the fashions of the time, the tastes of the audiences and even to the management of his own public image. He was a true workaholic and was able to work on his compositions for more than fifteen hours a day. A master of the art of producing melodies,
Massenet succeeded in suffusing any subject he chose to treat with soft and intimate tones through a
finely tuned sensuality preferably against a backdrop of melancholy landscapes which are always drawn with inimitable refinement and a colour palette guaranteed to completely absorb the listener.
A NEW CONCEPT OF OPERA On the whole Massenet’s works for the stage tended to avoid excessive vocal virtuosity and the melodic schematism of “closed pieces”. He instead favours an ariose continuity, tied to the prosody of the French language which is always graceful and “flexible”. It is a type of opera (“lyrique”) which sets itself apart from the others like the Grand Opéra with its lavish sets and intrigues and its spectacular epic qualities or the by now outmoded Opéra Comique with its mix of music and acting. The originator of this new way of understanding opera was Charles Gounod with his Faust in 1859. In this case too the literary source is Goethe and the literary model is used to produce a highly emotional and intimate result. Other composers following a similar poetic line include Ambroise Thomas (Massenet’s tutor) and also Georges Bizet of Les Pêcheurs de perles.
THE BACKGROUND TO THE STORY The text that inspired Massenet’s operatic masterpiece was the epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther) written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1774, at the age of twenty-five. The book, which was first published in that same year, is both a literary work and a social phenomenon without equal in the entire history of literature. In his letters (which draw the reader into the role of the writer’s confidante) the hero, Werther, describes the experience of a great inner release which is conveyed by the simultaneous means of a mystic fusion with nature and by the inebriation of a love story. And yet, due to the cricumstances in which he is forced to live, this release is transformed into a constraint, it becomes a bond which only death can dissolve.
A TIMELESS NOVEL At the end of the 18th century a whole generation could identify with Werther’s fate, seeing in him a reflection of their own circumstance, an expression of the contradiction between the sublime aspirations towards a full and noble life on the one hand, and a world made of social barriers on the other, of that void that crushed the bourgeoisie. However, Werther’s message goes beyond the problems of the Sturm und Drang generation, as indicated, years later, by the words of the poet himself : “the much discussed role of Werther – wrote Goethe – does not belong to the path of the world culture, but rather to the path of the life of each individual, who, equipped with an innate sense of freedom, is forced to fit into
the restrictive rules of an obsolete world. The barriers which obstruct the achievement of happiness, as well as the frustration of the individual’s hopes, are not evils which belong to any particular era, but rather to each individual person. And in fact it would be a shame if everyone could not experience, once in their lives, a time when they might feel that Werther had been written exclusively for them”.
FROM THE BOOK TO THE STAGE The sensational success of Werther lead to a number of stage adaptations over the years that followed, occasionally taking bizarre forms such as wax figurines or the even fireworks displays which attempted to suggest the meeting of Werther and Charlotte in heaven! Tragedies, vaudeville shows, parodies and farces were all written in the name of Werther. In one play staged at the beginning of the 20th century the part of Werther was played by the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt. Most of the stage adaptations were in German but there were also some in other languages.
FROM THE BOOK TO THE OPERA Goethe’s name had already featured on the Parisian opera billboards from the time of Gounod’s Faust (in 1858) and Thomas’ Mignon. It was therefore a guarantee of a surefire success in France and this fact was clearly recognized by Georges Hartmann, the musical publisher and librettist, a very clever man who recruited Bizet, Charpentier, Lalo and even Debussy. It seems that Hartmann had astutely employed a stratagem to lead his favourite writer, Jules Massenet, to The Sorrows of the Young Werther. At that time Goethe’s epistolary novel was rarely used as a source by composers. Three attempts to turn it into an opera are known, none of any particular artistic merit: Werther and Charlotte by Rodolph Kreutzer (1792), Charlotte and Werther by Carlo Coccia (1814) and a Werther by Raffaele Gentili (1862). Hartmann took the composer to see Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayrouth, with the secret intention of introducing a diversion on their return. In fact they returned by way of Wetzlar, in the area where Goethe had conceived and set his initiation novel. Massenet himself reported: “we visited the house where Goethe had conceived him immortal novel. I was already familiar with Werther’s letters and had a recollection of being extremely moved by it. To find myself in the very house that Goethe had made famous through his hero’s experience of love made a deep Impression on me. I have what can complete the visible emotion you are feeling, said Hartmann to me as we left. And he drew a book from his pocket which turned out to be the French translation of Goethe’s novel”.
THE LIBRETTO The job of writing the libretto for the opera was entrusted to Èdouard Blau and Paul Milliet (in collaboration with Hartmann himself ). Milliet left an interesting testimony on what the composer and that pool of literary gentlemen were looking for in the text: “In Werther the enchantment and the desolation of nature is mixed into the human drama. The immensity of the world with its captivating or plaintive murmurings, with its harmonies, its light and shade, feels as though it is associating with the sensations, ideas and sorrows of the hero”. As for the tragic finale, “Werther’s denouement is a liberation, it is a salvation. Werther dies in his inner wound. When the Christmas night descends on him, a light of forgiveness dissipates the dark shadows into which the world disappears and, for Werther, as for Tristan, the music of the souls begins to sing in the silence where mortal voices have become mute. The librettists condensed the story of Werther into four separate situations in which the discontinuous character is already evidenced by the titles of the acts: “La maison du Bailli” (The Bailiff’s House), “Les Tilleuls” (The Linden Trees), “Charlotte et Werther” (Charlotte and Werther). The fourth act is divided into two scenes: “La nuit de Noël” (Christmas Eve) and “La mort de Werther” (The death of Werther). We remember how the linden trees – under the fronds of which so many love stories have been played out – are the variety most dear to the Romantic period.
WHY WAS THE FIRST NIGHT IN VIENNA? Following several years of gestation and after a couple of years of actual writing, in May 1887 Jules Massenet finished the score and went to see the director of the Opéra Comique, Léon Carvalho, and presented his new opera to him by singing all the vocal parts and accompanying himself on the piano. Carvalho found the work excessively introverted and did not display much enthusiasm for it, probably as a result of disappointed expectations of another score on the lines of Manon. Any hope of Werther reaching the stage was further dashed a few hours later by an accident. A fire the following night irreparably damaged the theatre and totally extinguished any chance of the opera premiering in Paris. A few years passed and, thanks to the good offices of a tenor by the name of Ernest van Dyck, the score was finally accepted for performance by the Vienna Opera, where it opened on 16th February 1892. In the audience were Johannes Brahms and the greatly respected critic Eduard Hanslick. The Viennese production raised many doubts, especially regarding the fact that the libretto had taken a great many liberties with Goethe’s novel. Moreover Massenet’s interpretation emphasized the more colourful aspects of German family life, representing in a genial but sharply observed way the petit bourgeois mentality of the biedermeier and the general incomprehension when it came to Werther’s feelings.
THE FRENCH DEBUT Meanwhile the Opéra Comique was finally restored. The director of the theatre wrote a note to the
composer inviting him to “come back to us and repatriate this Werther who you have rendered French by your music”. At last the Parisian theatre performed Massenet’s opera on 16th January 1893. In spite
of a terrible blizzard causing a good part of the audience to be forced to spend the night in the theatre, the French premiere was met with great enthusiasm. However, the work struggled to make an impression in its own country and following the first series of performances in 1893 it was not to be staged again for a whole decade. Then in the next century – along with Manon - it became Massenet’s most popular and respected opera and by 1938 it had been performed one thousand times. It is an opera which survived even those periods when interest for almost all of Massenet’s work fell out of favour. Finally, in the 1970s, Werther enjoyed a great renaissance, partly due to the popularity of the recordings.
MASSENET’S WERTHER The opera and the novel are completely separate entities. This fact is stressed by the musicologist Maurizio Modugno when he writes about how «Goethe’s Werther operates within the setting of an autobiographical protoromanticism, or better: he marks the lavish beginnings of a genre, that of the initiation novel, the stories of the first experience of love, which tell a story of a real life experience and offer a morality tale, the expression of a condemnatory judgment on the individual’s own spiritual parable. Goethe uses Werther to tell a story about himself and his own early experience of love. The protagonist’s suicide is a metaphor for an inner death of his own (…). Massenet looks towards completely different horizons. He is not interested in associating his tragedy with the “aim” of inner growth, nor in projecting himself into a symbolic experience. Instead he casts his pitiless yet simultaneously involved gaze on the subject and object of a passion, without issuing any verdict, and in fact secretly espousing the cause of the loser”.
A MUSICAL THEATRE FOR “THE CHAMBER” The action is focused – in a tragic crescendo which escalates throughout the entire length of the opera - on the two protagonists, Werther and Charlotte, the tenor and the mezzosoprano. The story also presents an antagonist (Albert, baritone) and another character, Charlotte’s younger sister Sophie, soprano, who, while she holds a certain importance, could in dramatic terms be described as a “stooge” or “foil”. In this opera there is no chorus other than that of the white voices that sing the famous Christmas carol. Werther has been described as an opera of “closed situations”, a sort of tense and intimate chamber piece. Massenet seems intent on doing away with any temporal indications and although the setting seems consistent with Goethe’s original one there is never any mention of the eighteenth century. There are some who see the French composer’s work as a demonstration of great modernity as it would appear to represent the provincial nature of the bourgeoisie at the time of the Third Republic.
CHARLOTTE Werther’s librettists frequently stress facts that are not explicit in the novel and which the writer had left to the reader’s imagination. In particular, Charlotte’s feelings for Werther, which are only just lightly hinted in the book, are rendered explicit in the opera. Here Charlotte is tied to her husband not only by her promise of marriage but also by a vow she had made to her mother on her deathbed. The significance of the opera can be summarized in the four duets sung by Charlotte and Werther in the course of which it is possible to follow the young woman’s passage from innocent young girl to heroine who comes to understand her deepest feelings when Werther is breathing his last. If the first three duets end with separation, the fourth one finally leads to recognition of their mutual love.
THE ORCHESTRA IN WERTHER From the first notes of the prelude which opens Werther, during which there is a contrast of two emotionally opposite themes (the first is a passionate theme in a minor key and built on chromaticism, the second is in a major key and is decidedly contemplative), we can see how the protagonist’s conflicted soul is witnessed and brought to light by the orchestral music. In Werther the orchestra provides a sort of emotional resonance. It has been noticed that Massenet’s orchestral treatment, with its range of autumnal tones, contains references to Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms but it also has some expressive devices recalling Tchaikosvsky and a chromatic predilection of Wagnerian range.
THE ROLE OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN WERTHER The setting has a very important role in Massenet’s Werther: the harmonious and loving atmosphere of Charlotte’s father’s family and of their neighbours is evoked. This harmony serves as a counterpoint to our heroes’ destructive passion and their hopeless situation. The antithesis of the two spheres forms the opera’s dramatic foundation. Local colour is used in intimate measure when we are given glimpses of joy (the children’s Christmas and the drinkers, Sophie’s song). A “picturesque” moment regularly interrupted as we plunge back into the world of Werther and Charlotte’s feelings.
Le Opere
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