Massenet: Werther (Complete Opera)

Romain Rolland once claimed that the spirit of Massenet sleeps at the heart of every Frenchman. The most successful opera composer of his generation in France, Massenet wrote music that has sometimes inspired cynicism and hostility through its particularly sensuous beauty, a quality that has to some seemed facile and superficial. The criticism itself may now appear in the same terms. Massenet coupled technical command with a gift for graceful melody and exercised a strong influence over his successors, perceptible in the work of Debussy and of Ravel, as of Puccini. The very charm and grace of his music was to earn him the nick-name bestowed on him by his enemies, "la fille de Wagner".

Jules Massenet was born in 1842, the son of a foundry-owner whose prosperity relied on the production of scythes. A decline in business led the family to move in 1847 from Saint-Etienne to Paris, where Madame Massenet supplemented the family income by giving piano lessons, her youngest son among her pupils. At the age of eleven Massenet entered the Conservatoire, where, in 1863, he won the Prix de Rome, his residence in Rome bringing some respite from the period when, as a student, he had found it necessary to support himself by serving as a percussionist at the Opéra and as a café pianist.

Success came to Massenet through the support of his teacher at the Conservatoire, Ambroise Thomas, and of his enterprising publisher Georges Hartmann. In 1872 he won his first operatic triumph with the Victor Hugo adaptation Don César de Bazan, followed, in 1873 by the sacred drama Marie-Magdeleine, a choice of heroine that was characteristic in an age that made much of the repentance of a fallen woman. Manon, in 1884, established his position without question, although the next opera, Le Cid, staged at the Opéra in 1885, failed to please. The coincidence of a new libretto, based on a medieval romance, and a meeting with the young American soprano Sybil Sanderson, lay behind the opéra romanesque Esclarmonde, in which the title rô1e was designed to exploit the remarkable range and quality of the young prima donna. The work was staged at the Opéra-Comique in 1890 and impressed a Parisian audience increased by the Exhibition of 1889.

Massenet's opera Werther has a libretto attributed to Edouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann, based on the immensely influential novel by Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). Written in 1774, published in the same year and revised in 1786, the novel, regarded by many as epitomizing the Sturm und Drang period of German literature, deals with events supposed to have taken place in 1771 and 1772, reflecting to some extent Goethe's own experiences in Wetzlar in the latter year. There he had fallen in love with Lotte Buff, whose situation was similar to that of the Lotte of the novel. Lotte Buff, on the death of her mother, had taken charge of her sixteen younger siblings and was engaged to Johann Georg Christian Kestner, whom she married the following year. Kestner's friend, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, had been in love with another married woman, borrowed pistols from Kestner, and shot himself. Both situations are used in Goethe's book, which caused Kestner some offence. Its effect on its wider readership, however, was even more considerable, as young men dressed in the style of Werther, with a blue coat and yellow breeches, and young men and women contemplated suicide for love, an act that the novel seemed to encourage, or, at least, to condone.

The first suggestion of a libretto on the subject of Werther had come from Milliet and Hartmann in 1882 and by 1885 something had been produced, allowing Massenet to begin work on it. He was influenced by a visit with Hartmann to Bayreuth in 1886, when he saw Parsifal and, returning by way of Wetzlar, read Goethe's novel for the first time, in a French translation, if Massenet's own account of events is to be believed. The French text is by Blau and Milliet, while the publisher Hartmann, generously credited with a share in the authorship and with the provision of the original stimulus, may have sketched out the scenario. Massenet completed the score in 1887, and after earlier refusals and hesitations in Paris it was accepted for Vienna, after the success there of Manon in 1890, to be staged at the Court Opera in a German version in 1892. It had its first performance in Paris by the Opéra-Comique at the Théâtre Lyrique in January 1893, but was withdrawn from the repertoire the following year. There were performances abroad, however, and in other towns in France. It was only ten years later, in a revival under Albert Carré at the Opéra-Comique in 1903, that the work struck home, to retain a firm place ever since in French operatic repertoire. The year was one of continuing success for Massenet, who had four of his works billed at the Opéra-Comique in one week. It also brought sadness in the early death of Sybil Sanderson, who had created the rôles of Esclarmonde and Thaïs, and had achieved such success in Manon. In 1902 Massenet arranged the tenor rôle of Werther for baritone, a version that is sometimes followed.
- Keith Anderson