Session 2: Massenet's WERTHER, 1978

ACT I

In the garden of his home, the Bailiff is teaching his younger children a Christmas carol. A widower and father of a large family, he reminds them that their elder sister Charlotte is within earshot and will not be pleased with their performance. His two friends, Johann and Schmidt, come to lure him away for an evening at the local inn, but he says he must first see Charlotte safely off to a ball given by friends in town. She is being escorted by Werther, an idealistic young man, in place of her fiancé Albert, who is away on business. The bailiff promises to meet his friends later and they leave as Werther comes to call for Charlotte. Overcome by the rustic charm of the surroundings, he extols the beauties of Nature. On being introduced to Charlotte, he is immediately struck by her warmth and innocent beauty, and dreams of passing a life of happiness at her side. They leave for the ball. Charlotte's sister Sophie, remaining home to take care of the children, insists that her father go to meet his friends. When all have left and Sophie is alone, Albert returns unexpectedly, eager to see his betrothed and to know what has been happening during his six months' absence. Not finding Charlotte at home, he leaves, promising to return the next day.

Charlotte and Werther return from the ball lost in each other. She tells him of the shock of her beloved mother's death, and Werther declares his love. The Bailiff's voice interrupts announcing Albert's return, and Charlotte tells a stunned Werther of her promise to her dying mother to marry Albert.

ACT II

It is Sunday before a service, which will be followed by the celebrations for the pastor's 50th wedding anniversary. Before entering the church with Charlotte, to whom he has been married for three months, Albert asks her if he has succeeded in making her happy and receives her assurances. Contemplating them from a distance, Werther is distraught at the idea that another man is her husband. At the end of the service, Albert tells Werther that he feels almost guilty in his happiness, knowing that Werther himself must have been attracted to Charlotte. Werther assures him that he has forgotten that dream. They are interrupted by Sophie who arrives eager for the festivities, and Albert tries to make Werther aware of her obvious interest in him. Charlotte leaves the church, having found re­newed strength in prayer, to be met by Werther's unhappy reminiscences and increasingly passionate declarations. Her resistance at the breaking point, she orders him to leave until Christmas. Alone, Werther contemplates suicide and rushes away, to Sophie's distress. As the celebrations begin, Charlotte and Albert discover Sophie crying, and Albert now realizes that Werther loves his wife.

ACT III

Alone on Christmas Eve, Charlotte is obsessed by the thought of Werther as she rereads his many letters. Sophie enters, but her attempts to cheer her sister only result in Charlotte breaking down into tears. Alone again, Charlotte desperately prays to God for strength, and, as if in answer, Werther appears. After she assures him that nothing has changed in the house since he left, he laments, "nothing but the hearts." However, Charlotte's reaction as he recites one of their favorite poets betrays her, and Werther, overjoyed, passionately embraces her. Charlotte, horrified at her momentary weakness, banishes Werther forever, leaving him alone and determined on suicide. Albert enters after Werther's departure and is suspicious of Charlotte's behavior. They are interrupted by Werther's servant who comes asking for the loan of some pistols since his master is leaving on a journey. Albert orders Charlotte to give them to the man, but as soon as she is alone, she rushes after Werther hoping to prevent a tragedy. Charlotte arrives too late. She can do nothing except declare her love. Werther, finally at peace with himself, dies in her arms, while from the distance comes the sound of the children's Christmas carols.

WERTHER
(in French)

Opera in three acts by Jules Massenet
Libretto by Edouard Blau, Paul Milliet, Georges Hartmann
Based on Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers

War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco
November 3, 1978 Broadcast

CAST
(in order of vocal appearance)

The Bailiff
Paul Hudson

Hans (child)
Bruce Boettjer

Gretel (child)
Lynda Poligono

Karl (child)
Douglas Linn

Clara (child)
Shana Downes

Max (child)
Victor Fernandez

Fritz (child)
Perrin Yang

Johann
Stephen West

Schmidt
Raymond Manton

Sophie
Kathleen Battle

Werther
José Carreras

Charlotte
Maria Ewing

Brühlmann
Samuel Byrd

Kätchen
Patricia Schuman

Albert
Allan Monk

CREATIVE TEAM

Conductor
Antonio de Almeida

Stage Director
Sonja Frisell

Designer
Steve Rubin

Lighting Designer
Thomas J. Munn

Prompter
Philip Eisenberg

Musical Preparation
Paul Connelly

Costumes executed by
Grace Costumes, Inc., New York

By Hans Heinsheimer

Goethe’s Novel, which caused a Werther craze to grip the world, was based on real people

Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s most popular and most influential work, the short novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, on which the libretto for Massenet’s opera is based, was written in the summer of 1774, when the poet was 26 years old, within four weeks, in a blaze of creative fury, without an outline or the treatment of any of its parts having previously been committed to paper.  “I worked almost unconsciously, like a sleepwalker,” Goethe recalled many years later.  On September 19^th he sent advance copies to a friend and to the (not yet, but soon after very) famous heroine of the book, Fräulein Lotte Buff in Wetzlar “for the time being only to be read in quiet seclusion,” as if he, like later Verdi, who kept “La donna è mobile” under wraps till after the dress rehearsal of Rigoletto, had anticipated what was to happen, once the work was unveiled. It was published in October in Leipzig, at the time of the Leipzig Fair. Within a few months it swept Europe like wildfire. It was read and discussed everywhere, ecstatically admired and emotionally loved by most, puritanically condemned by others. In less than a year it had more than a dozen printings in Germany and before the end of the century had been published in fifteen French, twelve English and three Italian editions and translated into Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Russian, Portuguese and Hungarian.

Goethe had sold his manuscript to the publisher Weygand in Leipzig for a price "sufficient to wipe out most of the debts I had incurred while working on Goetz von Berlichingen, the play published with stunning effect the year before, which established him, together with Werther, as the greatest German writer of his age. But the shaky copyright laws of the time permitted innumerable pirated editions and in a poem, written in 1778, after he had entered the service of the grand duke Karl August of Sachsen-Weimar, Goethe, acknowledging gratefully the ducal munificence, said, that it benefitted him little that Europe praised, Germany imitated, England received him kindly and "even the Chinese painted, with timid hand, Lotte and Werther on glass."

More than thirty years later, Goethe wrote in his memoirs, significantly and beautifully called Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poesy and Truth): "The effect of this book" (he consistently calls it a Büchlein-a booklet) "was great, even immense, and this particularly because it arrived at exactly the right time. Just as only a tiny spark is needed to detonate a mighty mine, the explosion which it caused among the public was so strong because the young world had already undermined itself, and the impact was so powerful because every reader found expressed in it his own exaggerated demands, unsatisfied passions and imaginary sufferings." He was resigned to the fact that the public looked only at the subject matter, the story, and not at the philosophical parts of the work. "One cannot expect the public to accept a spiritual work spiritually."

Werther was not only an international best seller, its effects were much more far reaching. A Werther fever, a Werther craze gripped the world and lasted for decades. Werther's portrait appeared on ladies' fans, on expensive teacups, on snuff boxes and bonbonnières all over Europe. Lotte, cutting bread from a loaf for her eleven sisters and brothers, became a favorite subject for engravers and printers who sold her sentimental, friendly likeness by the tons. A popular perfume was called Eau de Werther. Young men dressed in Werther's blue coat, yellow vest and yellow breeches, ladies in Lotte's beribboned gown with one of the ribbons snipped off as had been done by Werther in a famous moment in the book. There were Werther cartoons, anti-Werther sermons, a whole library of commentaries, parodies and imitations. When Goethe met Napoleon in Erfurt in 1808, summoned there from his nearby residence in Weimar, the emperor told him that he had read Werther seven times in a French edition and had taken the book with him to the pyramids during his campaign in Egypt, although it was known that he had berated his generals for reading novels instead of books on history or war during the voyage and had their objectionable reading matter thrown overboard. From the day the work had appeared in print, Goethe, to his regret and annoyance, remained foremost the author of Werther and only towards the end of his long life became also the man who had written Faust and whose collected works comprise 32 volumes. Wherever he went, people wanted to know who the real people were behind the famous figures in Werther.

"I tried to save myself by traveling incognito," he wrote in Dichtung und Wahrheit, "but even this manner of escape would be frustrated and thus the author of the Werklein [always the diminutive!] if ever he did something wrong or damaging has been sufficiently, nay, too severely punished by these importunities from which there was no getaway."

What he meant by having done something wrong or damaging was undoubtedly the fact, that "Werther" was responsible for a wave of sentimental suicides. It was a period in time to which the melancholy Hamlet, the mossy tombstones and dark, foreboding nights in Ossian's poems, doomed heroes and dying maidens appealed violently. "In such surroundings," Goethe reflected later, "with studies and hobbies of that sort, tormented by unfulfilled passions, without stimulation from the outside living a dragging, bourgeois existence without spiritual stimulation, one became attracted by the thought of leaving this life as one pleased whenever it was not appealing anymore and by such thoughts helped oneself to deal with the unpleasantness and boredom of one's days." This attitude was so general that "Werther," just for that reason, had the great effect, found an understanding response everywhere and expressed publicly and understandably the essence of a sick, juvenile madness. How precisely the English were aware of this wretchedness is shown by the following important lines written before the publication of "Werther":

To grief's congenial prone
More wounds than nature gave he knew,
While misery's form his fancy drew
In dark ideal hues and horrors of its own.

(Goethe quotes the original English, without giving a translation).

Suicide, in the wake of "Werther," was not only praised (on the anniversary of the violent death of the young man, whose suicide had served as a model for Werther's, there were solemn memorial services all over Germany and the faithful gathered at his lonely grave), it was also practiced widely. One of the many who did away with themselves à la Werther was a young man who carefully shaved, dressed himself in the famous Werther frock coat, vest and breeches, put a copy of "Werther," opened on page 218 (the suicide) on his table, opened the door to make sure to have spectators and then raised the pistol, as prescribed in the book, to his right eye and pulled the trigger. His and his many co-suicides' fate left at least one German officer cold: "A fellow who kills himself because of a girl he can't sleep with is a fool and it doesn't matter a bit whether there is one fool more or one fool less in this world," he commented. With so much blood being spilled, a Berlin writer, Friedrich Nicolai, wrote a different version, Werther's Freuden (Werther's Joys) with a happy end. Goethe was not amused. "Without any feeling for the fact that there was nothing to smooth over, that Werther's flower of youth was, from the beginning, poisoned by the worm of death, he (Nicolai) leaves my treatment up to page 214. But as the desperate man prepares himself for the fatal step, an understanding physician manages to exchange his pistol for one loaded with chicken blood which results in a messy spectacle, but happily, no misfortune. Lotte becomes Werther's wife and all ends to everyone's satisfaction,” he wrote bitingly. And in order to show his contempt for Nicolai's absurdity, he wrote himself a brief, mocking poem, "Nicolai on Werther's Grave,” which shows Werther and Lotte as a married couple. Lotte has nursed Werther, who only shot out his eyes, not his brain, back to health and they go peacefully to bed together, having made fun of poor, faithful, reliable Albert.

There are few cases in literature, in which the juxtaposition of facts and fiction, of Dichtung und Wahrheit, can be traced as clearly as is the case in "The Sorrows of Young Werther." The hero of the story is a fascinating combination of Goethe himself and a young man by the name of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Goethe, a great dilly dallier with the ladies, particularly those engaged or married to others, which provided him with protection from any consequences or demands he was all his life unwilling to face, ended his flirtation with Lotte (she, too, a real person and daughter of a widowed bailiff in Wetzlar) by withdrawing hastily, just leaving a "sorry" letter behind, when things threatened to become uncomfortable. But young Jerusalem, son of a court preacher in Braunschweig, shot himself, having borrowed a pair of pistols from the real Lotte's real husband, when he realized that his passion for the wife of an army officer (as well as his social and professional ambitions) were hopeless—it was his grave that became the center of the yearly Werther pilgrimage, and it was the room in which he committed the deed which Goethe visited and described in minute detail as the one where the imaginary Werther followed the lead of the real Jerusalem to shoot himself gruesomely. Thus, the Werther who kills himself on page 218 is the unfortunate Jerusalem, while the Werther who, after having given up on Lotte, lives very happily ever after, is no other than Goethe.

Again we can call directly on him, the autobiographer, when probing for the origins of "Werther." He describes them clearly and beautifully. He, Goethe, had come to Wetzlar (it was to be the last attempt of his wealthy father to steer the young firebrand towards a useful career in law, in which discipline he had already obtained a doctorate) to work at the Imperial Law Court where more than 20,000 cases, some of them "already for a century," were waiting to be decided. "Among the many young lawyers who crowded the little town was one whom his friends used to call the Bridegroom. He showed a quiet, stabilized character, had clear views, determination in his talks and actions. His constant assiduity recommended him to his superiors, so that he had been promised an early advancement. Encouraged, he undertook to get engaged to a young woman who completely seemed to agree with his disposition and wishes. After the death of her mother she had proven herself very astute as the head of a numerous family and sustained single handedly the widowed father, so that a future husband could expect the same for himself and his descendants and could look forward to domestic bliss." The 'Bridegroom' was, of course, Johann Christian Kestner, who became Albert in the novel and in the opera. As for Lotte, "everybody had to agree, even without selfishly considering these purposes of her life, that she was a desirable woman, one of those who, while they might not evoke heavy passions, are created to inspire a general liking. A slight, nicely built figure, a pure, healthy disposition, a gay liveliness, springing from it, an innocent way of dealing with daily necessities—all that was given to her.

"This was the betrothed. Her fiancé, in his righteous and trusting way of thinking, introduced everyone who desired it to her and while he took care eagerly of his professional duties most of the day, he liked to see his betrothed after she had attended to her domestic chores divert and amuse herself during walks and parties in the country with male and female friends."

How did these idyllic, innocent pleasures lead to the violent passions of the famous novel? Goethe described the sudden ignition of the spark fascinatingly and grippingly. He talks about his attraction to famous historical suicides, his admiration for some of them, his playing himself with a dagger poised against his heart, and how, at last, he threw away "all the hypochondriac eccentricities and decided to live. But in order to do so with equanimity I had to complete a poetic undertaking where everything I had felt, thought and imagined about this important point would be expressed. But nothing would jell. I was missing an event, a story in which it all could be incorporated. Then, suddenly, I heard about Jerusalem's death and immediately afterwards there was a general rumor and the most detailed, involved description of the event—and in that moment the plan for "Werther" had been found, everything rushed on from all directions and became a solidified mass like water in a vessel which is near the freezing point is transformed into solid ice by the slightest jolt.“

"To hold on to this strange blessing, to visualize a work of such important and diversified content and to execute it in all details was most convenient for me. Because I had again gotten into an embarrassing situation, which left even less hope than the previous involvement."

After he had fled Wetzlar, spurred perhaps by the fear that the "Bridegroom" may renounce his rights in favor of the most consistent and insisting among the male friends Lotte was allowed to amuse and divert herself with, Goethe had entered into a new liaison, just as ardent and just as innocent as the one with the deserted Lotte, who had promptly reported to her Albert when the flamboyant suitor had once kissed her on the mouth. The new, short-lived love was Maximiliane La Roche, and while the real Lotte had blue, house motherly eyes, she acquired her dark, black, lively eyes in the novel from Maximiliane, as well as more nervousness, more temperament. "As I went to work," Goethe reports, not displeased in his ripe age when he wrote Dichtung und Wahrheit with the many models he had at his disposal as a young man, "I didn't ignore the advantage of those painters who composed their Venus from several beauties and thus I took the liberty to build my Lotte on the model of the figures and the characteristics of several pretty maidens although the main character was taken from the most beloved."

Massenet's opera ends with "the most beloved" prostrated over the mutilated body of her dying admirer. Her grief, the novel tells us, is such that "one feared for her life." But the real Lotte Buff had no romantic suicide to wail over but had only to puzzle over the sudden departure of a beau. So it was probably not too difficult for her to live down the brief, slightly, but not too risky flirtation with the flamboyant young man who was to become the greatest figure in German literature, settle down with her Albert and have twelve children with him, the same number her own mother had produced. The world, of course, did not let her forget a romance that had been transformed into the best seller of the century and she lived with her memories in a mixture of pride and embarrassment.

Only once, after she had become a widow, did she try to resurrect the unforgettable past for a brief moment. In 1816, when she was sixty-three and Goethe, at 67, had become a world-famous figure, she travelled to Weimar to see him once again. It was not a very successful visit, a little disappointing and a little embarrassing for the old lady and for the Eminence that Goethe had become. Thomas Mann, in one of his most felicitous and readable novels, Lotte in Weimar (1939) has charmingly fictionalized the visit of the old Lotte, who, in his book, has developed a constant trembling shaking of her head. As she arrives in Weimar and signs the register in the hotel, Hofrätin, widow Charlotte Kestner, née Buff, born 11 January 1753 in Wetzlar, with daughter and maid, the room clerk, immediately recognizing the guest as the Lotte, made immortal through "Werther" and scarcely able to contain his excitement, runs off to put the whole town on alert. But the Wiedersehen with Goethe, at a reception and dinner in his noble house, she being just one of many guests, is still and uncomfortable. The Olympian remains aloof, formal, cold. Only at the very end of her stay in Weimar events take a touching turn. The Herr Geheimrat sends her a seat in his box in the Court Theatre where one of his plays is being performed. After the performance, she finds Goethe's coach waiting for her to take her back to her hotel and as she enters the carriage, notices a dark, lonely figure sitting next to her. It is Goethe. They talk for a long time, at last about farewell and forgiveness. As she leaves the carriage and Goethe drives away into the night, the eager room clerk is there to welcome her. "Good heavens," he exclaims, "Frau Hofrätin, I have to say it—to help Werther's Lotte out of Goethe's coach—it is an event—how can I express it—it is something for the books."

By Speight Jenkins

No more frequent complaint exists than about the adaptation of a favorite book to a movie or play. Indeed, only recently Spanish critics violently protested that the 35-year-old movie For Whom the Bell Tolls, previously banned in Spain, could have taken place anywhere and had lost almost all the Spanish feeling and honesty of Hemingway's original novel. And in opera the favorite game has been for the original author (Victor Hugo, Victorien Sardou, Maurice Maeterlinck or the like) to condemn both the composer and his librettist for fatally injuring their original. One case over a century old still goes on. Because of the popularity of Gounod's music in Faust, the opera has always been given in German-speaking countries, but to this day it is called Margarethe there, because Germans or Austrians feel that Gounod and his two librettists, Michel Carré and Jules Barbier, made Goethe's sublime philosophy into sentimental, trashy romance.

How fascinating then, given the sanctity of Goethe among German-speaking peoples, that the opera taken from his first and most popular novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, not only is called Werther in Central Europe but that it received its triumphant premiere in Vienna. If one answers that the acceptance has to come from the faithfulness of Massenet's librettists (Edouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann) to the Goethe, this fidelity is very much on the surface. From 1774, when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published, until 1892, when Massenet's opera bowed on the Ringstrasse, a century of unparalleled literary and musical activity called the Romantic movement had passed and the difference between the two Werthers give more than a suggestion of how much had happened. During the '90s when the century and the old order were both dying, the public was quite changed from those who first read Goethe's novel in the halcyon days when the Bastille was unthreatened and the Age of Enlightenment was in full flower.

In both novel and play Werther loves Lotte insanely from the moment he sees her. He is clearly possessed by her, as indicated by his ardent declarations of love and his frequent discussions of suicide because he cannot have her. Albert in both comes over as a well-meaning and dull if very honest man. He is more obviously annoyed at Werther in the book than in the opera, but in both he basically regards him as a schoolboy who has to be kindly treated until he grows out of his infatuation. It is Lotte in the novel—Charlotte in the opera—who differs so dramatically (and oddly enough is the only character whose name was changed). In the former she is at first seemingly oblivious that Werther is not just a good friend. Then when she realizes that his interest is more than fraternal, she does not reciprocate.

She manipulates him shamelessly (and her very straightforwardness to herself about what she is doing ties the book not to the Romantic movement which it launched but to the more rationalistic eighteenth century from which it came), and the author says, "her secret but sincere desire was to keep him for herself." She wants him to become a brother, but it is clearly implied that he would be a brother who would wait on her every whim and cast longing looks at her. The most she can admit to herself is that "Werther had come to mean a great deal to her," and when she contemplates him banished from her, she describes her feelings as suffused only with melancholy. In the big confrontation scene in which Werther reads her the heated poetry of Ossian, she feels for him and lets him kiss her but the definite implication is that she does not kiss him back. Instead, she pushes him gently away, calling his name in a voice "controlled by the highest sentiments," whatever that means.

Afterwards as she reflects on the moment, she wonders if she was upset at his boldness or thrilled by his passion. When Albert comes home, she is strengthened by his presence and though she doesn't tell him what transpired, she does carry on social conversation with a guest at dinner. The request for pistols from Albert to be sent via his servant to Werther does terrify her, but she does nothing, only worries. When later the news of Werther's suicide comes, Albert rushes off to Werther, not Lotte. "There are no words to express Albert's consternation or Lotte's misery," says Goethe, but all that is said of Lotte's actions afterwards is the impersonal, "They feared for Lotte's life." There is no deathbed avowal of love from her—indeed at no point in the novel does she say that she loves Werther—and she might not have; her basic loyalty to Albert is never in doubt.

Massenet's librettists—aided and abetted by the composer who at this point in his career, with Manon under his belt, knew a good story when he saw one—has Charlotte passionately involved with Werther from their first meeting. By our standards, even by our grandparents' standards, her actions are not easily explicable. Even before she had married Albert after she and Werther have their first date, she hears that Albert has returned after a six-months absence. Upset, she blurts out to Werther that before her mother died, she promised to marry Albert and that while she was with Werther she had completely forgotten her promise, a statement that almost anyone would take as an encouragement to press his suit. The tale of the promise, incidentally, is in the novel but her forgetfulness of the connection to Albert is not.

As the opera progresses, her restraint and dedication to Albert become apparent. The scene before the church particularly carries out her decision to put Werther aside and remain faithful to her good husband. In the poetry reading scene, however, her emotions as described by Massenet's erotic, storm-filled music are very much more intense even before Werther arrives than in Goethe. And Massenet subtly interweaves one of his own favorite themes—religion and sex. Charlotte again and again refers to the pain and terror of her situation and finally prays to God to help her bear her suffering. At the moment of an almost religious ecstasy—expressed vocally by the mezzo-soprano's moving from a flamboyant high forte passage to an intensely quiet section of near whispering—Werther bursts into the room. It may not be the St. Sulpice scene in Manon (with roles reversed) or even the second act of Thaïs, but it was as close as Massenet could get.

In the opera Werther reads a bit less poetry than in the novel, but he does it more pointedly. When he makes his play for her, Charlotte is obviously completely sucked into passionate response, yet like her prototype Lotte only answers with a prayer to God to save her. (The standard libretto here is notoriously inaccurate: the French is not really well translated and implies that Charlotte admits to more than she does, and in the French original there is a ghastly misattribution of one of Werther's most passionate utterances to Charlotte. If she had sung, "Love alone is true because it is the divine word," Werther would have turned into Manon Lescaut, with Albert as Geronte catching the lovers in flagrante.)

Where Massenet differs violently from anything in Goethe is in the final scene. All that is implicit in Charlotte's conduct and barely suggested in the novel is laid out baldly. Instead of worrying all night about what Werther would do with Albert's guns that he borrowed, she rushes to his house to try to save him at the end of Act III (and so sets up something dramatically implausible: when she follows the servant by only a few minutes, how has Werther had time to dismiss the servant, load the gun and do the deed?). When she arrives and finds Werther laid out at the point of death, she says again and again that she has loved him from the first day they met and that she deliberately kept him around her because she couldn't stand to lose him. She indeed promises to be faithful to his image and to love him forever.

Making such changes in a well-loved classic could have caused a riot, yet one of the most conservative opera audiences on earth cheered Massenet's Charlotte to the rafters. The acceptance, I believe, came partly because of the opera's more modern perception of the love relationship. Particularly in the novel Werther falls for Lotte more as a mother than as a girlfriend. His first view of her—slicing bread for her large brood of siblings—sends him into a transport of delight. In fact, he is forever discussing her as such a wonderful woman because of her maternal ways. As a paragon of virtue, unsoiled by even a suggestion of sexual desire, she became the Romantic woman.

How different is Lotte from the wonderfully human characters, more than a decade in the future at the time of her creation, of Lorenzo da Ponte and Mozart. None of the women in Don Giovanni, not even Donna Anna whose actions the fatal night when the Don came into her bedroom are highly in doubt, deserved the kind of apostrophizing Werther (and Goethe) gives to Lotte. And the liveliness and reality of the Almaviva household in The Marriage of Figaro has everything to do with the age in which a rational look at people was all.

Lotte's existence on the pinnacle on which Werther places her makes her a sister of Leonore, whom Beethoven idealized for giving up everything and risking her life for the man she loved. Equal nobility can be found in early Wagner (Senta of Der Fliegende Holländer and Elisabeth in Tannhäuser) and many Italian operas, such as Gilda in Rigoletto or even Aida. But as Romanticism waxed, the constant literary and dramatic creation of woman as plaster saint became dull.

Then along came Tristan und Isolde, and nothing was really ever the same again. It did not glorify love as an ideal but idealized sexual love itself. Though it was far clearer in Wagner's music than in his typically convoluted text, Tristan and Isolde were both sexually crazy about each other—long before the love potion—and both longed to live in a condition of constant sexual stimulation. Audiences did not often accept this interpretation (some still don't), but both musically and dramatically Tristan made the public very nervous. Unsatisfied longing was definitely expressed by a woman, and the sexual relation was as real as it had been with Shakespeare.

Tristan, though first performed in 1865, really came into its own during the decade of the '80s. Massenet as an ardent Wagnerite knew it well and has to have been influenced by it. When he turned to Werther, he was willing to accept that Charlotte would choose not to leave her husband for a thousand reasons and that Werther would love her for her maternal ways, but in his music he made it clear that at least from the end of their walk in the garden in Act I she really wanted Werther and no one else. To the Viennese of 1892, this interpretation simply made sense, a carrying out of what they probably felt when they read the book. And, additionally, they were possibly gratified by having Massenet do something so utterly un-French. Instead of making the story more subtle, he made it less so. Instead of suggesting half-answers to all the questions, as Debussy might have done, Massenet unambiguously spelled it all out.

With all the changes in Charlotte to suit the times, the symbol of Werther as the embodiment of total infatuation remained the same. That this kind of love almost never works over a long period of time is a truism. That it is almost always selfish in that the lover views the object of his affection as an extension of himself or his own thought (Charlotte may not have liked taking care of the children or even slicing their bread but Werther didn't care) has been proved by our own analytical age. But most people still long for the experience of being as much in love as was Werther. When it happens and the person for whom the lover eats, drinks and breathes rejects him, few kill themselves, but they want to do so. And when the tenor rises to sing "Pourquoi me réveiller" to Charlotte in the opera's bedroom scene, the passion that pours out describes that wild, dizzying kind of feeling that at least once in a lifetime is enriching—as long as you don't have a loaded pistol around.

By Allan Ulrich

Massenet’s Charlotte is within the category begun
by Cornelie Falcon in Paris

If you turn elsewhere in this magazine, either to the company roster for the season, or to the cast listing for this performance, you will notice that the editors are observing a time-honored tradition. After the names of the singers, they have carefully omitted any indication of vocal categories. Surely, there is a note of diplomacy in this move: assignments of official vocal categories may, in some cases, conflict with how the artist believes he or she should be described. But the omission also hearkens back to that period, over a century ago, when arbitrary distinctions in voice ranges, at least on the female side, simply did not exist.

There were contraltos, of course, their presence due to the disappearance from the scene of the male alto and Rossini's conscious decision to exploit the lower register for both its comic and florid possibilities in such zany masterpieces as L’Italiana in Algeri and Cenerentola.

And there were sopranos. Not mezzo­sopranos, dramatic sopranos, lyric sopranos, coloratura sopranos, spintos, lirico-spintos, or what have you—just sopranos. Adalgisas sang Norma, Ebolis sang the Trovatore Leonora and Carmen was impersonated by everyone from Brünnhildes to Butterflys.

The fact of the matter is that we are not dealing merely in vocal extremes; if we were to take that mechanical approach, we would find that the role of Brünnhilde descends further down the scale than either Fricka or Erda. We should consider instead the approximate average range or tessitura of a role. By 1840, the peripatetic opera­goer realized that many of the more prominent composers of the era had been smitten by a particular kind of female voice, not quite what we today would consider a "dramatic soprano," yet not precisely a "mezzo-soprano," either.

Word of her origins circulated from Paris; the maturing Verdi and the verismo composers in the latter decades of the century exploited her talents. Her greatest inroads, however, were made in her native France. Berlioz, who had heard the prototype of this new kind of soprano in the flesh, surely remembered her when he created his Marguerite for La Damnation de Faust, and he gave her two opportunities to shine in his epic Les Troyens. Jules Massenet continued within the tradition; even in 1892, the year of Werther's premiere, the Falcon retained her influence on the musical stage, with such formidable artists as Pauline Viardot having done their very best to keep her there. And, although Massenet's Charlotte has been incarnated in our century by such disparate voices and temperaments as the dramatic mezzo of Giulietta Simionato, the more flexible mezzo of Conchita Supervia and the almost lyric soprano of Ninon Vallin, there can be little doubt who inspired her creation.

The lady who lent both her name and her talents to this new breed of singer rose and departed from the skies over the Paris Opéra with the speed and brilliance of a comet. Yet, although she appeared before the public for all of a decade, her contribution to the French Grand Opera tradition was as important as any other single artist's. Marie-Cornélie Falcon was born in Paris, the daughter of a tailor, on 28 January 1812. From the beginning, it would appear that she was destined for a career in music. She studied first at a convent school, and was enrolled in the Conservatoire in 1827. There she learned solfège under Henry, singing under Pellegrini and Bordogni, and what was called "lyric declamation" from the great and unstable tenor, Adolphe Nourrit, with whom she would appear in public, on an equal footing only a few years later.

The Falcon talent was recognized early. She won first prize for vocalization at the Conservatoire in 1830, while taking the honors in a singing contest the following year. She was beginning to attract the attention of all the right people.

One of them was Dr. Louis Véron, the current impresario of the Paris Opéra, the company that was most reaping the benefits of the business and professional class, the "true bourgeoisie" that had arisen since the July Revolution. Véron realized quickly that his female roster could use some additional star power. True, he had retained the services of Mlle. Julie Dorus­Gras and Mlle. Laure Cinti-Damoreau, but the competing Théâtre-ltalien boasted the services of both Maria Malibran and Henriette Sontag.

So Véron gambled on Falcon, hiring her in 1832, and casting her immediately as Alice in Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable, until then the exclusive property of Dorus-Gras. There were audible complaints from the latter, but Véron responded by immediately raising Falcon's stipend, which had been fixed at 3,000 francs. She suffered perhaps from some early miscasting. For operas like Spontini's Fernand Cortez and Rossini's Moïse, she possessed neither the lightness of emission nor the fluidity that had marked the contributions of her predecessors, and only rarely did she return to the Rossini roles of Adèle in Le Comte Ory and Mathilde in Guillaume Tell.

Instead the Opéra plied her with premieres. There were two in 1833. Auber's Gustave III, to a Scribe libretto reached the boards on Feb. 27; it was adjudged by a contemporary critic as the most energetic of the composer's operas (Verdi, of course, had his innings with story in Un Ballo in Maschera). Falcon sang Amélie, Nourrit sang Gustave, and there were some sensational ballets by Taglioni for the climactic confrontation. By the beginning of 1837, the work had tallied one hundred performances.

Less successful was Falcon's other new opera that season, Cherubini's Ali Baba, its July opening meeting with a frosty reception, it’s writing considered magisterial, its vitality almost nowhere in evidence.

No. Falcon's was a very special voice and temperament, more specifically pathetic and dramatic than her. colleagues'. Its possibilities grew apparent in her Donna Anna at a March 1834 revival of Don Giovanni. Perhaps one should say Don Juan; for, although the music was, roughly by Mozart, the text was certainly not Da Ponte's, but a concoction of the French littérateur, François Castil-Blaze. The tessitura of the libertine’s part had been elevated to accommodate Nourrit, but, in the throat of Falcon, the elemental quality of Donna Anna's rage remained undimmed from the original. In the Journal des débats, an enthusiastic Berlioz observed that "Mlle. Falcon sings it with love, with passion; one observes the emotion which torments her, the trembling of the voice in certain touching passages, the energy with which she attacks certain notes and the ease with which she illuminates various details of the portrait which most of her rivals are content to leave in the shade." Reviews like that were enough to drive Dorus-Gras almost to desperation and Cinti-Damoreau to the stage of the rival Opéra Comique.

Falcon became the darling of the daily press and the mémoiristes. Later Maxime du Camp would recall that "she had an Olympian profile, a little cold, but admirable. Her black eyes, black hair, firm lips, her tall figure and her elegant bearing reminded one of a Roman empress."

Alphonse Royer's verdict ran to superlatives. "Her singing," he claimed, "was a model of diction and of expression . . . before Cornélie Falcon, there had not been seen on the stage of the Académie Royale an artist who united in one person so many natural means, so much talent of execution, so much distinction and beauty." Eugène Briffault's comment was more succinct, but the message was the same: "No longer could it be said that the Opéra is supported on the legs of its dancers."

La Vestale was soon revived for Falcon, but the parts that brought her immortality lay just around the corner. They were Rachel, the eponymous heroine of Halévy's La Juive (1835) and Valentine in Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots (1836). Almost overnight, French Romantic Opera reached its apogee.

What one critic had called "that bombastic and degenerate declamation which belonged neither to tragedy nor to music" had been grafted on to a warmer, more pliant, more Italianate bel canto style. The stiffness of the French tradition prevented singers like Nourrit and Falcon from attempts at excessive embellishments in their interpretations. It was the lesson of Rossini comprehended with superb intelligence and exquisite taste. But the dramatic response was a purely instinctive one.

So thought "the supreme pontiff of criticism," Jules Janin, when he wrote in Journal des débats, after the premiere of La Juive:

"Mlle. Falcon sang like she acted. Who would guess on seeing her in such a performance, in seeing her alternately tender, excited, joyous, suffering, resigned, that this child, who is also a great tragedienne, had never seen the great Talma perform?"

Two other premieres awaited Falcon. The first was Esmeralda, drawn from Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Mlle. Louise Bertin in 1836. Her last role was as Léonor in Louis Niedermeyer's biographical Stradella. It was at a repeat performance of this now forgotten work that tragedy struck.

Near the end of the first act, as Falcon opened her mouth to sing, nothing came out but a distressing gurgle; she paled, and Nourrit, who was singing the title role, gripped her shoulders to keep her from collapsing. She withdrew from the company, consulted physicians and voice teachers and hoped that a trip to Italy, with its balmy weather and famed coaches, might rebuild her technique. She stayed 18 months and returned to the Opéra in a hastily arranged benefit evening, featuring scenes from some of her most beloved roles.

Hopes were high, but disappointment was not long in coming. Almost 30 years later, Nérée Desarbres reminisced about that sad occasion:

"Scarcely on the stage, exciting to virtual paroxysm the enthusiasm of the entire auditorium, the singer was taken with a loss of voice. Alas, three times, alas, that, of this splendid voice, which was scarcely applauded, there existed still only a few isolated notes, of this acting style, which had once impressed so vividly, there remained but a shadow. The divine instrument had lost its soul, the sublime artist had just said her final adieu to the Opéra."

Despite this tragedy, it was soon evident how much French operatic life and the plans of its composers had been built around the Falcon throat. Although she never sang in a Donizetti premiere, he had intended Pauline in Les Martyres for her; and had re-written the three-act L'Ange de Nisida into the four-act La Favorite to suit her talents. She, of course had to be replaced before the opening. And there are few documents in all of operatic lore of a more pathetic nature than the one that Donizetti sent to tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez in the spring of 1838:

" . . . I come now to speak to you about Mlle. Falcon. She would be absolutely delighted (she says) to have me write an opera for her talents, but on that score, it seems to me that we can't count much. I think that she needs a lot of rest because after she has sung a short time, her voice becomes veiled. Would to God that she was cured now! I knew her and heard and appreciated her as the beautiful Jewess. Who knows? She could be cured by this good weather."

The lady, however, retired to her villa outside Paris, where she survived until 1897. Her triumphant career had been restricted to the Opéra and it had endured but an agonizingly short five years. That austere critical eminence, Fétis, could lament as late as 1869 in his monumental Biographie Universelle des Musiciens that no other talent of comparable quality had succeeded Falcon at the company, and Fétis was scarcely a sentimental man.

Yet she left her mark on the composers and singers who followed. This heroine of this performance remains to testify of her durability.

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