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Weekend Opera: 'Werther': fatal attraction, 19th-century style
Friday, March 10, 2000 By Andrew Druckenbrod, Post-Gazette Classical Music Writer
While Jules Massenet's "Werther" isn't obscure, it definitely is one of the lesser-known repertory operas. "Manon" is still the Frenchman's most popular piece. So it's ripe for a little background.
Rather than just plunder the history books, we thought we'd let two integral parts of the Pittsburgh Opera's new production lend a hand: tenor Jerry Hadley, cast as Werther (pronounced VER as in very -- TEAR as in rip), and the conductor, Opera Resident Conductor Brian Garman. If you don't want to know the plot (which, unlike film, is actually good to know going in), stop reading now.
The opera is based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther." The romantic work was popular outside Germany, prompting Massenet to set it with the help of three librettists. It was premiered at the Imperial Opera in Vienna in 1892.
The story line involves a young woman named Charlotte, who had made a promise to her now deceased mother to marry a certain Albert. However, she meets a young, introspective poet named Werther. An unspoken, burning love kindles between them.
Nevertheless, Charlotte honors her mother's wishes and marries Albert, sending the distraught Werther away. When he returns after agonizing and philosophizing about his heart's predicament, she again rejects him, leading him to shoot himself. Only then does Charlotte confess that he was her true love.
"In many ways I think [the story's] a product of its time," says Garman. "We certainly don't have the social constraints that they had back then. Werther loves her so passionately, she also for him, but she's married. They can't do anything about it -- they don't even kiss until the end of the opera when he's dying."
Hadley concurs. "We live in a time when 'there are many fish in the sea' -- that's what they tell us when we're children," he says. "Well, if that one doesn't work out than move on to the next one. Not with him."
Both think that it's crucial to understand this cultural difference. If you don't, Werther can come across as a mopey whiner who just can't deal with rejection. "We would want to avoid that person, to be sure," says Garman. The character is much deeper than that, however, and the opera has a plot type found in most operas. "In the final analysis," he says, "whether the social customs and strictures are different than what they were or not, we are still talking about basic human emotions of love, passion, unrequited love, which haven't changed in the past 200 years."
The key, then, is to portray Werther in a way that illuminates the nobler aspects of the character. Hadley relates that the great Swedish tenor Nicolai Gedda once discussed the role with him.
Gedda said, "You have to remember that Charlotte and Werther are people that possess unbelievably high moral standards for themselves. If they didn't possess them, there would be no tragedy, because they would allow themselves to consummate what they feel for each other." Gedda added also to keep in mind that "They are living in an age when making a promise and taking a vow meant a whole lot more than it means today."
Of course not everyone was honorable back then, nor everyone dishonorable today, but Gedda's words cut through the cultural and time barrier between the opera's devout folks and we of the "marry a millionaire" world. To get the point across Hadley usually plays coolly at first to show Werther's restraint. "If you can keep it reigned in for those first two acts, the music [does] all the work for you."
This time however, he says that director Tito Capobianco has given him "eye-opening revelations" about the part. These have led him to animate the character more -- "inject into it the archetypal romantic that we associate with full-blown 19th-century romanticism." It's all in the spirit of translating the past to the present so the audience can grasp the action in the best possible manner.
Garman pointed out an interesting detail of the libretto that's easy enough to miss. In the final act, when Charlotte sits with Werther as he slowly bleeds to death, the two finally converse using the familiar French form of "you." Prior to that Charlotte has always addressed Werther with "vous" instead of "tu," and he did as well for most of the opera. The change is just one of the ways that their intimacy is portrayed in the final act.
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