between duty
and the devil
by Douglas Messerli
Jules Massenet (music), Edouard Blau, Paul Millet, and
Georges Hartmann (libretto, based on Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), Werther / 1892 / broadcast as a Metropolitan
Opera HD-live production on March 15, 2014.
The Metropolitan Opera’s new
production of Werther makes it clearer
than ever that Werther (the remarkable Jonas Kaufman) and his beloved Charlotte
(Sophie Koch) belong together, while standing apart from the others of the
work. As my spouse Howard commented, both are costumed in clothes—mostly gray
with a white bodice in Werther’s case, and pearl-white or white with a dark
overcoat in Charlotte’s—that stand in opposition to the others of the work.
Although the melancholic Werther is willing to risk everything for love, he is,
nonetheless, like her, a man who adores children and believes in duty. Indeed,
his absolute love for Charlotte is based on her conventional values, her
determination to care for her brothers and sisters after their mother’s death
and to remain true to her promise to her mother that she will marry Albert, a
kindly militarist, who by opera’s end all but accuses his wife of
unfaithfulness, forcing her to herself send the pistols for which Werther has
asked in order to kill himself since Charlotte has refused to give into his
sexual assaults.
What became more apparent than ever in this production is that, as
opposed to the conventionality of both Werther and Charlotte, most of the rest
of the opera’s figures—despite their outward celebration of the local parson
and clichés of cultural obedience—are far more willing to bend to the joy of
daily pleasures. Several times in Werther,
characters sing out in praise of Bacchus, particularly early in the opera when
we first meet The Bailiff’s (Jonathan Sommers) friends, Johannn (Philip
Cokorinnos) and Schmidt (Tony Stevenson), who while mocking Werther’s
seriousness, themselves sing of the wine and crayfish they are looking forward
to at the local pub. Despite the Bailiff’s more serious demeanor and his
insistent demand that his children perform adequately a Christmas carol he
currently teaching them, he too speaks of Bacchus and, through his daughter’s
Sophie’s encouragement, is easily convinced to join his friends at the pub.
Although both Werther and Charlotte may see the children as “angels,”
the children themselves act up and mock several of their superiors behind their
backs. Only in Charlotte’s gentle care to they truly act angelically.
Charlotte’s 15-year-old sister, Sophie, is a pleasant and
gentle girl who, when Charlotte is away at the ball, lovingly cares for her
siblings; yet she has her own way of not taking things seriously, at the pastor’s
wedding anniversary party singing of the joyfulness of the day and weather,
while flirtatiously inviting Werther to dance with her at the celebration. In
Act III she, similarly, attempts to cheer up her distraught older sister, who
has now realized through Werther’s anguished epistles how much she is in love
with him rather than with her often fatuous and inattentive husband, Albert
(David Bižić).
In such a bacchanalian world of wine, women, dance and, in Sophie’s
case, just the joy of living, the two heroes of the piece become tragic
representatives of conventional faith and duty, a fact that, by opera’s end
Charlotte has come to realize—that she was forged her with chains to Werther
from the first time she set eyes upon him. Two of Werther’s most touching
songs—his Act II disquisition on God’s response if he were to commit suicide
(Werther’s version of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be,” “Lorsque l’enfant revient
d’un voyage”) and his stunningly sad recitation of one of his translations of
Ossian—center on death, as does Charlotte’s Act II aria (“Va, laisse couler mes
larmes”), a prayer for moral fortitude. While the others dance around them with
the zest of living beings, these two suffer, mostly in silence—except to the
opera’s audience—unable to survive in the devil’s bacchanal of daily life.
Although seen as everyone else as models of moral certitude, they are, in the
real world in which they are forced to live, the most tenuous of beings. Is it
any wonder, then, that they end their lives in a passionate embrace and kiss
that resembles the high Romantic sacrificial pattern of “love, death, and
transfiguration.” Although Massenet’s work is far more intimate and modest that
Wagner’s great Tristan and Isolde, it
is, at its heart, a similar tale, a tale of two lovers doomed by social and
cultural conventions they feel are beyond their control, while the others,
those on the side of the devil—according to Werther and Charlotte’s way of
seeing things—are free to enjoy their lives and survive.
As Jonas Kaufman suggested during an intermission discussion
of this HD presentation of the Met production, in this pre-Freudian drama,
there is no way that Werther or Charlotte might see the error of their ways, to
psychologically comprehend their entrapment in the dichotomy of “Totem and
Taboo.” The problem for modern audiences, accordingly is to try to maintain
Werther (and also Charlotte) as credible figures, despite their manias, with
whom we can identify. Both Kaufman (in one of the best operatic performances of
the year) and Koch accomplished that!
Unfortunately, in the last moments of Werther’s death, when the two sing
of their passion and Werther is transfigured by the sound of the children
singing, once again, “Noel Noel Noel,” the sound of the broadcast disappeared.
Several members of the contemporary audience with whom we shared the theater
suddenly became like children, shouting out for others to sing, or—in the most
disgusting of experiences—two elderly women stupidly commenting in loud voices
on the slow death of Werther: “Is she dead too? Oh, he’s still living! She’s
covered with blood. Oh he’s still singing. Is she going to shoot herself?” etc.
etc. Most of the audience members tried simply to imagine the emotional impact
by following the subtitles, but for these adult-children the grand opera had
simply fallen apart, the credibility that Kaufman had so brilliantly worked
towards completely disappearing from the art. At times like these, one can only
wonder why some people had been attracted to such a memorable opera broadcast
in the first place, leaving the theater as they cried out, “I want my money
back!”
Los Angeles, March 16, 2014
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (March 2014).
