HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Questions for Discussion and Writing
Projects and Further Study

A. SETTING THE STAGE

In 1772, as a young lawyer, Goethe spent some time in Wetzlar, where he fell in love with Charlotte Buff, the fiancée of Goethe’s friend, a local notary named Georg Christian Kestner. When Charlotte finally married Kestner, her decision deeply wounded the poet. A few months later, he learned that a fellow lawyer and poet named Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem had shot himself (with a pistol borrowed from Kestner) over a similarly unrequited love for another man’s wife. Partaking of all these ingredients, the plot of Werther began to take shape in Goethe’s mind. His novel (in epistolary form), Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1744), in which several true life episodes were faithfully enough captured to cause embarrassment to the real Charlotte and Kestner, swept through Europe, was embraced by all lovers and, unfortunately, actually caused a wave of suicides. Surprisingly, it was a French composer, Jules Massenet, who fashioned a successful opera out of this outstanding example of German Sturm und Drang, one of the first manifestations of German literary rebirth.

The libretto of Massenet’s Werther (1892) faithfully follows the novel, allowing for such harmless liberties as turning Kestner into “Albert.” Only the end of the novel -- where the dying Werther is discovered by his servant who then runs to fetch the doctor -- was considered too prosaic for operatic purposes. Massenet’s soaring love music, followed by the painful juxtaposition of carefree singing by children with Werther’s pathetic death, provide the kind of musical invention that has enabled the opera to outlive the impermanent fame of a once sensational novel.

(George Jellinek)


The impact of Werther in Goethe’s time was remarkable and varied. Napoleon took it with him as part of his field-library on the Egyptian campaign, when, said Goethe, “He studied it like a criminal judge reading his documents. He talked to me about it like that too.” Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, on the other hand, calling on Goethe in Jena, proceeded to preach a sermon at the poet accusing him of leading people to suicide. Werther, he said, was a “totally immoral, damnable book.” “Wait a minute!” protested Goethe. “If you talk about poor Werther like that, then what sort of language are you going to use about the great men of the world who, with one stroke of the pen, send a hundred thousand men into battle where eighty thousand of them kill themselves and incite each other to murder, arson and pillage? You thank God after these horrors and sing a Te Deum about it!”

(Spike Hughes)


After running through various German towns and visiting different theaters, Hartmann, who had an idea of his own, took me to Wetzler, where he had seen Werther. We visited the house where Goethe had written his immortal romance, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

I knew Werther’s letters and I had a thrilling recollection of them. I was deeply impressed by being in the house which Goethe made famous by having his hero live and love there.

As we were coming out Hartmann said, “I have something to complete the obviously deep emotion you have felt.”

As he spoke, he drew from his pocket a book with a binding yellow with age. It was the French translation of Goethe’s romance. “This translation is perfect,” said Hartmann, in spite of the aphorism Traduttore traditore, that a translation utterly distorts the author’s thought.

I scarcely had the book in my hands than I was eager to read it, so we went into one of those immense beer halls which are everywhere in Germany. We sat down and ordered two enormous bocks like our neighbors had. Among the various groups were students who were easily picked out by their scholars’ caps and were playing cards or other games, nearly all with porcelain pipes in their mouths. On the other hand there were few women.

It is needless to tell what I endured in that thick, foul air laden with the bitter odor of beer. But I could not stop reading those burning letters full of the most intense passion. Indeed what could be more suggestive than the following lines, remembered among so many others, where keen anguish threw Werther and Charlotte into each other’s arms after the thrilling reading of Ossian’s verses [quotation follows].

And Goethe adds:

“Unhappy Werther felt crushed by the force of these words and threw himself before Charlotte in utter despair. It seemed to Charlotte that a presentiment of the frightful project he had formed passed through her soul. Her senses reeled; she clasped his hand and pressed them to her bosom; she leaned towards him tenderly and their burning cheeks touched.”

Such delirious, ecstatic passion brought tears to my eyes. What a moving scene, what a passionate picture that ought to make! It was Werther, my third act.

I was now all life and happiness. I was wrapped up in work and in an almost feverish activity. It was a task I wanted to do but into which I had to put, if possible, the song of those moving, lively passions.

Hartmann, Paul Milliet ... and I came to an agreement to take up the task of writing Werther.

... Hartmann had special aptitude for doing his share of the work. He spoke German very well; he understood Goethe; he loved the German mind; he stuck to it that I should undertake the work.

So, when one day it was suggested that I write an opera on Murger’s La Vie de Boheme, he took it on himself to refuse the work without consulting me in any way.

... As I know not only Murger but also Schaunard and Musette, it seemed to me that there was no one better qualified than I to be the musician of La Vie de Boheme. But all those heroes were my friends and I saw them every day, so that I understood why Hartmann thought the moment had not come to write that so distinctly Parisian work, to sing the romance that had been so great a part of my life.

... All the artists for Werther were gathered around the piano when Jahn and I entered the foyer ... The work was absolutely in shape. All the artists could sing their parts from memory. The hearty demonstrations they showered on me at intervals moved me so that I felt tears in my eyes.

At the orchestra rehearsal this emotion was renewed. The execution was perfection; the orchestra, now soft, now loud, followed the shading of the voice so that I could not shake off the enchantment.

(Jules Massenet)


You saw him come in with his head held high, a restless manner, his straight hair swept back, his hands in his jacket-pockets, and always muttering something that ended in an excessive compliment ... He proceeded on the principle that human beings love flattery and needed to be crammed with it to the point of nausea. And he never ran short of it. When he had complimented everyone present on their looks and their accomplishments, he threw himself into an armchair and played the mummy’s darling who wants some milk and a biscuit ... his alert eye ... sought out in earnest some young and pretty thing who had modestly stayed in the background. When he found her he bounded towards her ... and made himself conspicuous by a thousand follies, to the amused or shocked surprise of the young lady who had become his target, his Dulcinea. Truly, this was the inflamed sensuality of the lyrebird or the peacock spreading his tail.

(Leon Daudet)


Leon Daudet, who did not mince his words, nevertheless did not use the one which would come quite naturally from the pen of any present-day commentator -- eroticism. But he saw very clearly that Massenet’s genius (I do not mean his talent) came from this exacerbated sensuality, more or less suppressed, which made him the composer of Eternal Woman ... He was in love with his heroines, not sentimentally in the manner of Gounod, but in a much more downright and earthy fashion. One can understand his enthusiasm for the libretto based on Goethe’s Werther which was offered to him in 1886. Is not this youthful work of the greatest of German writers the drama of desire par excellence? Massenet know how to express it, since he himself could feel the melancholy passion of Werther for Charlotte.

(Maurice Tassart)


In French opera, music has neither the German violence nor the Italian ebullience: it inclines to the condition of lucid speech, and French operatic characters can read letters like Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther or recite poems like Werther himself ...

(Peter Conrad)


Werther is a good opera but one difficult to bring off. Goethe described the book from which it is drawn as “a creation that I fed, like the pelican, with my heartblood,” and told Eckermann that he had reread it but once and would not do so again, for “here are incendiary bombs.” French nineteenth-century librettists were adept at defusing -- reducing the wilder, more romantic flights of man’s imagination to safe operatic platitudes, house-training Benvenuto Cellini, Faust, Werther, Wilhelm Meister, and Hamlet ... But Massenet once declared that he put into Werther all his soul and all his artistic conscience. There is soul in the music of the lovers’ first meeting; in the moonlit orchestral interlude of the first act, leading so tenderly into Charlotte’s “Il faut nous separer” and the subsequent duet; and in all of Act III.

(Andrew Porter)


Goethe’s novel, published in 1774, was about Charlotte’s effect on Werther, who meets her once only; Massenet’s opera is about his effect on her. In the novel, he writes letters to this unattainable object of desire; in the opera, she receives and furtively rereads them. Goethe was concerned with a metaphysical puzzle. The egotistical hero envies the tranquil unselfconsciousness of Charlotte. He wants to lose himself in her, to disappear into her family. Massenet’s interest in the relationship is exclusively erotic. Werther draws Charlotte away from her stolid, grumpy husband. For Goethe, the tragedy lay in the frustrating limitations of the mind. Massenet deals with the delicious weakness of the heart (and, in Charlotte’s “Air des larmes,” with the use of tears as a covert relief). Charlotte relies on religion to save her from herself ... Her strength, she says as she emerges from church, is redoubled by prayer. As soon as Werther shoots himself, she can own up to loving him, reward him with the postponed kiss, and join him in enjoying his agony. “On est se bien ici,” he remarks, bleeding to death on the floor. The realism of ³Werther² is in its analysis of Charlotte’s tactics for punishing the pleasure she must deny herself.

(Peter Conrad)

B. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND WRITING

1. Why did this story -- that is, the novel on which the opera is based, published a century before the opera was written -- have such a dramatic effect on its readers, especially young (that is, adolescent) readers? (They imitated Werther’s style of dress and expression, and committed suicide in sufficient numbers that the book was actually banned in some cities for that reason.) Are there books or films or television shows that have had a comparable impact in our own day?

2. In the novel, Werther is a hypersensitive young man and Charlotte a conventional middle class girl. (In the opera she is somewhat different, as Conrad points out.) The conflict, then, has something to do with conformity and nonconformity, with society and the misfit. With whom do we sympathize or identify? Is Werther foolish, or heroic? Is Charlotte sensible, or insufficiently sensitive? What’s the better way to choose, Werther’s or Charlotte’s?

3. Do you have to be extreme, crazy, or suicidal to be a poet (or other artist)? Does it help?

4. If Werther had been granted his desire, had actually been able to marry Charlotte, what would their lives have been like?

5. Why doesn’t anybody (except scholars and college students with an assignment) read this book nowadays?

6. If Massenet, as his autobiography tells us, hadn’t composed Werther, he would have set La Boheme to music before Puccini did (or Leoncavallo, Puccini’s contemporary, or in our own day Hans Werner Henze, not to mention Jonathan Larson -- as Broadway’s Rent). You are probably familiar with that story, and with Puccini’s opera or Larson’s musical.

Would Massenet have been better off setting that story? Why or why not?

7. Is Conrad right in saying that the opera focuses less on Werther than on Charlotte?

C. PROJECTS AND FURTHER STUDY

1. Read Goethe’s novel and compare it to the opera, not so much in details of the plot but in overall intention and effect.

Goethe is to German what Shakespeare is to English. His range was vast; it has been claimed that he was the last man in Western society to know everything that could be known in all fields of learning in his day. As a man of letters, he was novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, critic, historian, and philosopher. Read some Goethe.

2. Goethe is the source for other significant operas, notably French ones: Gounod’s Faust and Thomas’s Mignon. His lyric poetry was set as art song (“lieder”) by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and virtually every other German composer who wrote songs. The text of Faust is the basis of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, of Schumann’s Scenes from Faust, and of the last movement of Mahler’s 8th Symphony (Symphony of a Thousand). These will reward your listening.

3. In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, the creature finds a cache of three abandoned books in the woods. One of them is Goethe’s Werther (the others are Plutarch’s Lives and Milton’s Paradise Lost). Having learned to read, he reads them, and they affect him profoundly. Find the relevant passage in Frankenstein and consider what in Werther appeals to the creature. (And if you haven’t read Shelley’s novel in its complete original form, you’re missing something great, so put it near the top of your list.)

4. Massenet was a prolific opera composer, highly successful in his day, and in recent years many of his neglected works have been revived on stage and in recordings. His most celebrated opera is Manon (from the same source that Puccini used for Manon Lescaut). See the study guide on this site. Some Massenet operas are still scorned by critics, but all are worth hearing. There is wide variety among them in style and choice of subjects. Dive in.

5. Letter scenes are featured in a many operas. In addition to the letter scene in Werther, there is one in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (a very famous one), Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Verdi’s Macbeth and Luisa Miller. These are all in the Met repertory; you’ll find study guides for most of them on this site. The use of letters -- writing or reading them -- for dramatic purposes has a venerable stage history, and is worth studying.

6. Teenage and young adult suicide is unfortunately a significant problem in our society. There has been much research and debate on the subject. Read about this problem, and see whether Werther can shed any historical light on it.