New production directed by Ted Huffman
Werther is an idealistic, sensitive and exalted young artist. As soon as he arrives in Wetzlar, where he plans to settle, he is dazzled by a scene of family happiness, with Charlotte at its center. Their love of poetry immediately brought them together. But Charlotte has made a promise to her dying mother to marry Albert…
Massenet is the composer who did most to make the Opéra-Comique a major house of creation. Paradoxically, his adaptation of Goethe’s first novel was rejected by the director of the time, who preferred to offer his bourgeois audience happy love stories. The Viennese triumph of Werther soon opened the doors of our institution, where it has become one of the most frequently performed titles.
After his Lakmé in 2022, Raphaël Pichon continues his exploration of 19th-century lyrical drama. Ted Huffman reveals Massenet’s incomparable sense of theater in a staging that is as close to the emotions as possible, where Pene Pati, Adèle Charvet and Julie Roset are sure to move us.
Lyric drama in four acts and five tableaux, with libretto by Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann, inspired by Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sufferings of Young Werther.
Premiered in Vienna on February 16, 1892 in a German translation by Max Kalbeck, and performed at the Opéra-Comique on January 16, 1893.
Dates
