Werther Jules Massenet Two Hundred Seventeenth Program of the 2013-14 Season ______Indiana University Opera Theater Presents
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2013/2014 Photo © 2012 Michal Daniel 3 Werther Jules Massenet Two Hundred Seventeenth Program of the 2013-14 Season _______________________ Indiana University Opera Theater presents as its 432nd production Werther Music by Jules Massenet Libretto by Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet, and Georges Hartmann Based on the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Ronald Zollman, Conductor Candace Evans, Stage Director Allan Moyer, Set and Properties Designer Jessica Jahn, Costume Designer Patrick Mero, Lighting Designer Gary Arvin, French Diction Coach Brent Gault, Director of IU Children’s Choir Cori Ellison, Supertitle Author Heugel Edition used with the permission of Alphonse Leduc – Robert King, Inc. Scenery, properties, and costumes for this production are owned by The Minnesota Opera and were constructed by The Minnesota Opera Shops ____________________ Musical Arts Center Friday, October Twenty-Fifth Saturday, October Twenty-Sixth Friday, November First Saturday, November Second Eight O’Clock music.indiana.edu Cast of Characters (in order of appearance) Friday, October 25 Saturday, October 26 Saturday, November 2 Friday, November 1 Le Bailli . Brayton Arvin Reuben Walker Johann . Keith Schwartz Scott Stauffer Schmidt . Michael Day Travis Bloom Sophie . Martha Eason Elise Marie Kennedy Werther . Michael Brandenburg Lorenzo Miguel Garcia Charlotte . Rachel K . Evans Jacquelyn Matava Brühlmann . Edward E . Graves Edward E . Graves Käthchen . Madeline Ley Madeline Ley Albert . Jeremy Johnson Mark Davies Supers . .Kaitlin Jellison, Deiran Manning, Jim Nelson Will Perkins, Bruno Sandes, Leslie Spitznagel IU Children’s Choir . .Alice Barbe, Marielle Berin, Brittany Dobbins Grace Golden, Niccolo Miles, Elah Unger Additional Singers (Act IV) . .Hayley Lipke, Synthia Steiman, Olivia Yokers BRAVO STARTS HERE Discover degrees and careers in arts management www.indiana edu/~artsadm/ Synopsis by Molly C . Doran Act I Charlotte’s widowed father, discombobulated ever since the untimely death of his wife, teaches his younger children a Christmas carol in July . Werther, a sensitive young poet, arrives to escort Charlotte to a ball as a substitute for her traveling betrothed, Albert . During the ball, Albert arrives unexpectedly after a six-month trip and expresses disappointment at Charlotte’s absence . Charlotte’s younger sister, Sophie, consoles Albert and bids him goodnight after he decides to return in the morning . Finally, Werther and Charlotte return from the ball . Werther, already sure of his undying love for Charlotte, despairs when his companion explains that she promised her dying mother that she would marry Albert . Act II Three months later, a depressed Werther follows the now-married Charlotte and Albert to church, where he looms outside and remains inconsolable despite kind words from Sophie . An increasingly panicked Werther stops Charlotte when she exits the church, but she firmly asks the frantic young man to wait until Christmas day to see her again . For the first time, Werther considers the option of suicide, and in this upset state, he again encounters a concerned and confused Sophie . After Werther rushes away, leaving a tearful Sophie to be comforted by Charlotte, Albert finally begins to realize that the poet loves his wife . Act III On Christmas Eve, an emotional Charlotte rereads old letters from Werther . Sophie briefly visits, and she wonders why Charlotte has stopped visiting the family, expressing how much they miss their older sister . After Sophie leaves, Werther suddenly appears . When Werther makes clear his fragile mental state, Charlotte, attempting to calm him, hands him his own translation of a work by Ossian and asks him to read it . Werther chooses to read a dark passage about an inconsolable poet awaiting death, and Charlotte eventually begs him to stop . At this moment, Werther realizes that Charlotte returns his love, and he attempts to embrace and kiss her in the heat of overwhelming passion . A distraught Charlotte bids Werther a final farewell and flees, leaving the poet alone . Werther leaves, determined to give himself over to death . Albert returns home to find Charlotte distraught . The couple receives a message from Werther asking to borrow their pistols, and Albert, realizing in anger that Charlotte loves the poet, demands that she herself send the weapons . Although Charlotte does her husband’s bidding, she hurries off to Werther’s apartment after Albert leaves . Act IV Charlotte arrives at Werther’s home only to find him already on the brink of death after having shot himself . Werther begs for forgiveness, and Charlotte finally admits to loving him, offering him a kiss . Werther, now at peace, prepares to breathe his final breath . He dies with Charlotte at his side as Sophie and the younger children sing in the distance the Christmas carol introduced during the first act . Program Notes About Werther by Molly C . Doran Jules Massenet’s Werther premiered at the Hofoper Theater in Vienna in February of 1892, over 100 years after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published the sturm und drang novel from which the composer drew inspiration . Written in epistolary form until its final pages, the novel presents a collection of letters composed by Werther, a sensitive young man and poet, to a close friend . In the semi-autobiographical novel, Goethe traces the ultimately damaging effects of the poet’s unrequited love for Charlotte, a young woman idealized by Werther . The series of letters reveals the poet’s gradual psychological decline, apparently caused by his consistent refusal to step outside of his own imagination and consequent inability to function within any sort of shared human reality . Massenet first conceived of creating an operatic version of Goethe’s novel in 1880 but did not begin the compositional process until 1885 . In 1887, the Opéra-Comique’s director deemed Werther too depressing, despite the fact that Massenet’s earlier and similarly gloomy and small-scale work, Manon, had premiered there with wild success in 1884 . Nearly a year after its Viennese premiere, Werther finally received its Parisian début . Although Werther did not experience the overwhelming success of Manon, it still received performances throughout Europe and America, firmly claiming a place in the international opera repertory . Werther simultaneously demonstrates Massenet’s familiarity with the compositions of Richard Wagner as well as his preference for intimate drama and colorful, typically French orchestration . The composer had close contact with the music of Wagner most of his life; as a student, he may have played percussion in the Opéra orchestra for an 1861 performance of Tannhäuser, and he visited Bayreuth to see Parsifal in the midst of composing Werther. Like Manon, Werther presents small-scale drama that sets it apart from much nineteenth- century French opera . In fact, Massenet highlights dramatic movement throughout the work, slowing action through the use of arias only to reveal Werther’s poetic and increasingly disturbed perception of reality . With its constant dramatic motion, emphasis on realistic character interaction, leitmotivic reminiscence motives, and expansive harmonic language, Werther becomes almost Wagnerian . Massenet’s four-act opera, appropriately labeled a drame lyrique, cleverly expresses the novel’s central tension between Werther’s imagined reality and the actuality of his situation as understood by both the other characters and the audience . In order to highlight this tension, the composer crafts various distinct sound worlds that combine and overlap throughout the opera, producing a rich musical landscape . The first of the sound worlds consists of the comedic music of Schmidt and Johann, drunken friends of Charlotte’s father . Ridiculous figures of old men had been staples of comic opera since the genesis of opera buffa in mid-eighteenth-century Naples, and Schmidt and Johann certainly provide much needed comedic relief in Massenet’s otherwise dark work . The second sound world involves music Werther associates with the purity of children and contains the music sung by Charlotte’s youngest siblings and by Sophie . Rich lyricism, the opera’s love music, marks the work’s third sound world, while the fourth and final sound world represents Werther’s imagined reality—this music reveals to the audience, and sometimes to the other characters, the poet’s gradual loss of sanity . fasindy.org The moments in which these sound worlds collide and overlap become the most effective of the opera . Indeed, the instant in which Charlotte finally takes up the dramatic intensity of Werther’s music during their passionate meeting at the end of the third act powerfully demonstrates how the poet’s skewed sense of reality and damaged subconscious have finally extended beyond himself, seeping into and gradually destroying the other characters’ psyches . In the opera’s final moments, the dying Werther experiences a moment of ecstasy when he hears Charlotte’s younger siblings sing a Christmas carol in the distance . Here, Massenet juxtaposes sound worlds to great and disturbing effect: the terror of Werther’s suicidal death and its appropriately unsettling music, when paired with the sound of innocent, childish song, highlights the poet’s fashioning of a false and ultimately dangerous sense of reality and also emphasizes the extent of his psychological decline by inviting Charlotte and the audience— along with Werther—to recall the now distant and much happier context