Jules Massenet (1842-1912)
Werther is an unexpectedly successful opera, a rare case of a composer most would not place in the first rank, Massenet, making a touching and enduring work of art from a famous novel by one of the greatest writers, Goethe. The opera Werther may be the only way anyone other than students of history and literature will encounter the novel these days. Yet this was one of the greatest literary sensations, not just of the 18th century, but of all time. The opera is far from being a faithful reproduction of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther – but perhaps that is all to the good. Like many a literary classic, though with better reason, Goethe’s novel is nowadays more often mentioned than read; but after its publication in 1774 young men all over Europe were caught up in a Werther fever, copying Werther's costume (the blue tail coat, yellow waistcoat, and riding boots he was wearing when he first beheld the object of his unhappy love,and continued to wear for the rest of his short life) and even copying his suicide – life imitating art.
Goethe’s portrait of thwarted love struck a chord among his contemporaries; he gave voice to his generation’s rebellion against the stifling atmosphere of German mid-18th century culture, against the formalism, the academic stuffiness and moral bigotry, the rules for life and thought-killing spontaneous experience. Werther, Goethe’s expression of what historians of literature call Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) virtually invented romanticism.
The novel was all the more powerful because it was known to be based on Goethe’s own experience – but this autobiographical dimension has its limits: Goethe, after all, didn’t kill himself, but escaped from his unhappy love by flight. The suicide of Werther, in the novel, was indeed inspired by related events: a young diplomat, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, borrowed the pistols of Councillor Kestner (who married Charlotte, the object of Goethe’s affections) and shot himself, only the least of his reasons being his infatuation with the wife of another man.
But it was the exaggeration and the tragic dénouement of Goethe’s story that took it beyond the ordinary tale of ‘boy meets girl – girl marries another’, and the effect was greatly heightened by Goethe's adoption of a very typical literary form of the time, the epistolary novel. This enabled much of the story to be told in the words of Werther’s own letters, so that along with the events we get the hero’s highly subjective and poetic reflections on them.
We are currently being much reminded of another epistolary novel of the late-18th century, Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses, which also created a sensation, affronting conventional morality. Laclos’ book is more implicitly dramatic than Goethe’s, because the same events are seen from several different characters’ points of view, so it is surprising in a way that only recently has Les Liaisons dangereuses been made into a play, and now into two films, whereas Werther had seven dramatised versions by 1776. Not until Massenet’s opera, however, was a satisfying dramatic version of Werther achieved.
The problem in adapting an epistolary novel is that almost by its very nature, it will be a novel of attitudes to action rather than the action itself. This dimension is partly lost when a dramatic adaptation is made – lengthy monologues would be intolerable on stage or film. The result is that the brilliant intellectual and tactical fencing, in Les Liaisons, of Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil as they assault virtue and innocence, is partly lost when the focus is on the seductions themselves; in Werther his monotonous self-pity and intense subjectivism must quite literally be toned down. That is probably just as well; George Bernard Shaw, whose literary preoccupations always colored his musical criticism, was writing with knowledge of Goethe’s novel when he praised Massenet (a composer he did not usually admire) for ‘keeping up the interest of a libretto consisting of four acts of a lovelorn tenor who has only two active moments, one when he tries to ravish a kiss from the fair aforesaid, and the other when he shoots himself behind the scene’.
Much of Shaw’s praise for Massenet should be shared with his librettists, who made an unpromising story into an acceptable opera, but this is merely a sign how shrewd and experienced Massenet was in ensuring that any task he tackled would be stage worthy and would please. In a psychologically apt move, Massenet’s publisher, Hartmann, returning with the composer from a Wagner pilgrimage to Bayreuth in 1886, took Massenet to Wetzlar, showed him the very house where Goethe had written The Sorrows of Young Werther, then handed him on the spot a copy of the book.
At first Massenet was only mildly interested, but emotion soon got the better of the impressionable composer, who was (as he relates in his own Memoirs) even more sentimental than the young Goethe: ‘such rapturous and ecstatic passion brought tears to my eyes. What moving scenes, what thrilling moments it could create! Werther it was!’ In fact, as his English biographer James Harding points out, Werther seems at first sight a curious choice for Massenet. Admittedly just two years earlier he had his greatest success with Manon, also based on an 18th-century novel. But Werther was very different from the story of the simple country girl who is taken to Paris where she becomes a flirtatious, irresponsible adventuress. It was characteristic of Massenet’s personality and method that whereas in Prévost’s novel the Chevalier des Grieux’s obsessive and self-destructive love for Manon was the focus, the composer made Manon herself the heroine, glittering and touching, with whom women in his audience could identify with an almost titillating thrill. The same treatment could hardly be applied to Charlotte in Werther, devoted altruistically to her younger siblings and to the memory of her mother, whose sense of duty causes her to turn firmly aside, after a moment’s attraction, from the possibility of passion with Werther. Charlotte is not quite the heroine devastatingly portrayed in Thackeray’s lampoon:
Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person
Went on cutting bread and butter.
(Massenet and his librettists, to avoid the operatic impossibility of Goethe’s ending, in which Werther dies alone, took the dramatic license of making him expire in Charlotte’s arms).
Charlotte is more deeply portrayed in music than most of Massenet’s heroines, but for once the composer seems to have identified more strongly with the leading male protagonist, arriving intuitively at the insight contained in Goethe’s own admission to Benjamin Constant, many years after writing the novel, that the real danger of the work was that it portrayed weakness as if it were strength.
A problem for Massenet, having been won over by the essence of the story, was to make the atmosphere of small-town German bourgeoisie palatable to French audiences. At first it seemed that he had failed: Carvalho, the director of the Opéra-Comique, was frankly disappointed when Werther was played to him: ‘I’d hoped you were bringing me another Manon. This depressing subject lacks interest. It’s doomed in advance’. Carvalho was soon overtaken by other preoccupations: the next day the Opéra Comique burned to the ground, and Werther was first produced in 1892 in Vienna in German translation. The subsequent success of Werther in France, however, shows that Massenet knew what he was doing – the operatic taste of audiences was shifting, and the Viennese critic Max Kalbeck, who translated Massenet’s opera into German, put his finger on how Massenet’s moved with the tide of fashion, writing that Werther ‘inclines more towards the new German school than Massenet’s earlier operas without for a moment affecting the essentially French nature of its composer’.
Werther, said Kalbeck, is compact, never pompous or fussy, exotic or exaggerated, and always says too little rather than too much, ‘and to be properly correct and stylish, i.e. Wagnerisch, Massenet has dispensed with chorus and ensemble, and even the voices of the lovers are allowed to meet only in unison.’ Interesting to note that Massenet, at the time when Hartmann pointed him towards Werther, was contemplating an opera (long before Puccini’s) based on Murger’s La Vie de Bohème, another tale of unhappy love in a middle-class setting. The essence of Werther was to be a series of domestic interiors and ordinary conversations, ideally matching Massenet’s musical language: he had freed melody from limitation by the rules of French classical prosody, achieving remarkable flexibility of phrasing, well described by Lord Harewood as ‘a conversational style flowering continually to arioso’.
The locus classicus of this method, in Werther, is the ‘Moonlight Scene’, where Charlotte and Werther first become aware of their love for each other. The scene is set by the orchestra, playing the theme, yearning and wistful at once, which symbolises their love, until Charlotte's voice unexpectedly enters on the cadence, with the words ‘We must part...’ Fellow-composer Gabriel Fauré caught the measure of Massenet’s achievement in Werther:
‘It takes place almost entirely in an intimate family atmosphere created by fluent and expansive orchestration which remains emphasised by the delightful appearance of Charlotte and Werther by moonlight. At this point the music, blossoming out in gentleness, raises itself to a pitch of the most concentrated, all-embracing and completely with his finest gifts, his most attractive qualities, and an extraordinary sureness of touch.’
By theatrical standards (as James Harding points out) the story of Werther is ‘singularly bare and innocent of surprise’, yet Massenet is able to make it theatrically compelling at every point. This has a great deal to do with his concern for every aspect of stagecraft, and resembles the work of a film director (before film, opera was one of the most complete and compelling forms of entertainment). Massenet’s concern for the right atmosphere extended to his choosing to write the opera in an apartment in Versailles provided by the publisher Hartmann. Massenet overlooked Le Nôtre's gardens, and was surrounded by 18th-century panelling and antique furniture: ‘The table at which I wrote’, said Massenet, ‘was itself the purest Louis XV.’
Each of the scenes of the opera is described as a tableau and given a title; ‘The Bailliff's House’, ‘The Lime Trees’, ‘Charlotte and Werther’, ‘Christmas Night’, and ‘The Death of Werther’. According to Kalbeck ‘the musical draughtsman we may admire in the perspective and grouping of his scenes, which flow so smoothly and easily one into another; the musical colorist we may admire in the lucid, finely applied colour of his orchestra’. Using orchestral interludes to set the scenes and the character of each displays Massenet’s modernity, and owes not a little to the example of Tchaikovsky, whose Eugene Onegin has similarities both in subject and in treatment.
Werther shows a restraint entirely in keeping with the subject, from a composer sometimes led into excess by emotional identification with his subject matter. Of course, there are dimensions of Goethe missing from Werther, just as Pushkin’s ironical detachment is missing from Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, but in both cases this is part and parcel of transforming literature into an opera, and in the case of Werther it may be an improvement! It is curious that the one set-piece in which Werther voices his passion and desperation in conventionally operatic terms, the so-called ‘Désolation de Werther’, was an afterthought, probably added at the suggestion of the tenor Ernest van Dyck, the Werther of the Vienna premiere. The character of Werther needs such an expression – that Massenet did not originally see this is an indication of the sober economy of means which is such a surprising feature of this opera.
First published in Opera Australia, 1989