The sorrows of the Met's Werther – past report 3/15/2014

Saturday afternoon at the Met: Werther. Goethe wrote in his novel The Sufferings of Young Werther that revising a published story was bound to fall flat, because the original version would be strongly imprinted in the reader’s mind. I had a similar experience seeing the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Massenet’s Werther. I had recently watched a DVD of the 2010 Opéra de Lyon staging with German tenor Jonas Kaufmann as the title character and French mezzo Sophie Koch as his unattainable love Charlotte. The sets used broad, sparse images that allowed emotions to fill the stage. A sudden swell of light on the words “And you, sun, flood me with your rays” reminded us that this was an impressionistic world where the senses govern reality.

Kaufmann and Koch reprised their roles at the Met, but this production left no element of the storytelling to the imagination. During the overture we were given a pantomime show of the actual moment of death for Charlotte’s mother, her funeral procession and the family’s return from her grave. The widowed father is distraught, the children are sad. Got it? In the prelude to Act Two we see video projections of the change of seasons and Charlotte signing the wedding register with her long-betrothed Albert. All of these events happen “off camera” in both Massenet’s opera and Goethe’s novel. The event is not as important as how it affects the central characters.

Act Two is framed by the preparation of a festival banquet to celebrate the local pastor’s anniversary. The Met made a showcase of setting up the trestle tables, spreading the tablecloths, laying the plates, the napkins, the silverware, placing the chairs. The stage was populated with supernumeraries that had no vocal existence in Massenet’s score. They spent most of the act milling around up left. I fully expected them to sit down to dishes of buttered peas and then floss and brush their teeth. That’s what people do, isn’t it? In trying to show the society that Werther didn’t fit into, the Met lost sight of the tragic hero’s isolation.

During the prelude to Act Three in the Lyon DVD Charlotte stands with her back to the audience in sidelit solitude. We are left to ponder her thoughts and emotional state through the flow of the music. In the Met production Charlotte goes to the parlor stove with Werther’s letters, opens the stove door to burn the letters, stops midway, then pulls back and shuts the stove. She goes to her desk, writes on a blank piece of paper, reads what she has written, then crumples it up and throws it away. She takes a book from atop the harpsichord, flips through some pages, tosses the book aside. She is agitated, indecisive and distracted. Got it?

By Act Four I was so inured to the external world that I couldn’t focus on Werther’s final moments before death. What were those two trombonists talking about in the orchestra pit? It seemed important. My one consolation is that this performance was part of the Met’s HD broadcast series and will eventually make its way to DVD. It will be interesting to see if the stage concept satisfies more in a cinematic framework.