Werther; The Adventures of Mr Broucek
Opera North
The Truth about Love
Linbury Studio
Massenet’s Werther is a tricky opera, in fact may well not be susceptible of more than a production which leaves you feeling that you could easily live with its not very numerous highlights. One of its chief problems is highlighted in Gerald Larner’s incisive notes to the new Opera North production: ‘The problem with a Werther opera is that no libretto, unless it completely traduces Goethe’s original, can compensate for the obvious disadvantage that, because Charlotte is either engaged or married to Albert and is determined to give Werther no encouragement, there can be no mutual declaration of love, no full-scale duet for the two protagonists.’ Opera, as trendy theorists incessantly remind us, is crucially concerned with transgression, but in Werther there is none, so we have to make do with a hero who moves from misery to suicide, and the only climax Massenet can contrive is an inordinately protracted death scene (24 minutes, according to the producer Tom Cairns).
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