Werther

The young Werther falls in love with Charlotte, who has promised her mother on her deathbed to marry Albert. Now Charlotte is torn between this promise and the feelings she has developed for Werther. When Charlotte ultimately rejects him after a moment of closeness, Werther sees no way out of his emotional distress: In a letter, he asks Albert for a pistol. When Charlotte learns of this, she rushes in horror to Werther's apartment and finds him gravely injured. Werther dies in her arms.

“These moving scenes, these captivating images,” is said to have exclaimed Jules Massenet when “The Sorrows of Young Werther” came into his hands in 1885. Goethe's epistolary novel from 1774 is a “drama of pure humanity” in Massenet’s opera, as the librettist Paul Milliet said, in which Werther, at the end, desperately recites Ossian texts in Charlotte's arms, while she also confesses her love to him in the face of death, and in the distance, children begin to sing Christmas carols. Through sensitive instrumentation on one hand and broadly sweeping dramatic gestures on the other, Massenet manages to bring the core idea of unrequited passionate love to the operatic stage.

The management team of the Koblenz production has previously impressed in recent seasons in opera and theater productions through the sophisticated interweaving of the aesthetic levels of acting performance, elements of puppet theater, and the reflection or enlargement of the events through the medium of live camera. The meticulous work at the intersections of various art forms is perfectly suited for Jules Massenet's “Werther” and will provide the audience with an intense auditory, spatial, and visual experience.

Info: https://theater-koblenz.de/werther/

Tickets: https://www.ticket-regional.de/events.php