A man who puts his feelings first, who doesn’t give up fighting for love even after finding out that the woman he desires is promised and soon to be married to another man. When he realizes, though, that she will not leave her husband for him, death seems to be his only way out.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s scandalous epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired French composer Jules Massenet more than a century after it was first published. Together with his librettists he gave a voice to all of Goethe’s characters and even added a few of his own: among them six children who make up the only choir of the opera. Massenet uses colourful sounds to portray Werther’s effusive love and Charlotte’s inner turmoil.
In cooperation with Neue Stimmen
PREMIERE 14 August 2023 – 7.30 p.m.
DURATION approx. 2 hours and 45 minutes (with one intermission)
Opera in four acts and five scenes (1892)
Libretto by Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann based on the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1744)
