Werther

Werther -- In the third act of Jules Massenet’s opera, Werther, singing and music represent various species of passion. In the dark, at the Ordway Theater, I wrote down the different forms of passion portrayed in that act: there is passion concealed within domesticity, disappointed passion, passion that is premonitory of the evil that will flow from its expression, defiant passion, confused passion, passion that would like to act but can not (or is afraid to act), icy passion, cruel passion, burning passion, passion that awakens as Spring awakens from the grip of winter – in short, just about every conceivable mutation and variation on the notion of yearning both requited and unrequited. It is clear to me that 19th century opera-goers were connoisseurs of desire and that they must have enjoyed immensely the representation of yearning in all its variegated forms in their art. Werther, an adaptation and vulgarization of Goethe’s novel, tells the story of young man who falls in love with a woman betrothed and, then, married to another. He continues to pursue her. She rejects his importunate advances, pleading her obligations as a wife. Werther borrows a pair of dueling guns, maliciously sent to him by the aggrieved husband, and shoots himself in the belly. It’s a typical 19th century wound, no deterrent to his subsequent pre-mortem long and passionate aria and, then, duet with Werther’s beloved, Charlotte. Charlotte regrets not betraying her husband. “Love alone is truth,” she declares, but also cries “Save me from myself.” Werther dies. In Massenet’s version of this simple and unpromising story, Werther intimates that he will be saved and admitted to heaven notwithstanding his self-murder. In what seems to be an echo of the famous last scene in Goethe’s Faust, the existential authenticity of his love, his willingness to wager everything on passion has saved him – one imagines the Ewig-Weiblich leading him upward in his ascent into heaven. The first half of the opera is dull but the second part, in which the stakes are higher and more intensely dramatic, is quite powerful. Of course, no modern director has figured out how to stage the extended death scenes involving much tenor bleating without inspiring a callous laugh from the audience. When Charlotte gazing at the wounded Werther (he is apparently comatose) says something like: “I am too late. He can’t speak to me,” this provokes an extended and complex aria from the dying man attended by a big laugh from the audience as the doomed youth gathers his courage and his strength for yet another series of high notes. Did these kinds of scenes seem risible to 19th century audiences? How was this staged? Or was it a convention that was so engrained in performance practice as to be invisible? The opera as staged by the Minnesota Opera Company features an elaborate superstructure of industrial scaffolds and metal stairs, the kind of millwork you might imagine around the pipes and tubes of a gas refinery and a backdrop showing some kind of grim-looking factory. The famous linden tree integral to the plot is set within a little lawn incongruously located under the metal walkways and stairs – the tree isn’t anchored too securely and when people sit on the bench built around it, or stroll in its vicinity, the plastic leaves twitch ominously. The last scene takes place in an aquarium-sized white cubby-hole, a little Spartan shed in which Werther shoots himself with bleached walls on which someone (Werther?) has scrawled Liebe oder Tod, a slogan that looks a bit like the writing on one of Cy Twombly’s canvases. The claustrophobic room has a severely foreshortened forced perspective and it is an effective way to isolate Werther from the industrial landscape around him. The tenor playing Werther was once extraordinarily handsome, but he has gained lots of weight and so he has to storm around the set in long, flowing coats designed to disguise his girth – but when he shoots himself in the stomach, triggering an apron of red blood, this wound has the effect of merely emphasizing that the slender youth has become unfortunately corpulent.