Massenet: Werther [DVD] [2005]

Like the previous reviewer, I had never seen any other production of Werther to spoil my enjoyment of this one. I thought it was wonderful! The music was powerful. The parts of Werther and Charlotte were sung beautifully and passionately by both Marcelo Alvarez and Elina Garanca. The acting was perfect. All the singers were good.

I was sort of surprised to see the 50s setting and costumes, but this is a timeless story, so...what does it matter? The staging with the gigantic tree was quite cleverly done, I thought. The changing colors of the leaves showed the passage of time. It was odd to have Charlotte's living space appear beneath the tree in Act III, but this is opera. By Act IV, the tree looked like a monstrous spider, and there lay Werther, bullet hole to the chest, dripping with blood. It took the entire act for him to die! With Albert lurking in the background and Charlotte mashing herself into Werther's bloody body...weird? Yes. Opera? Yes. I loved it!

I agree with the reviewer who calls this a 'questionable' production. The characters were occasionally pushed beyond their character type. For instance, Werther is extremely irritated with Sophie and her happy singing in Act 2, whereas Werther would never be so unkind. And at the beginning of the opera, Sophie and Charlotte seem to be quite annoyed with one another, whereas Charlotte is supposed to be the loving nurturer of all the younger ones in the family. She comes off as neurotic and self-centered, and I'm pretty sure that is not how Massenet intended Charlotte to be protrayed. Also, the fact that Albert seems to be present all during Act 4 is downright weird.

I thought both Alvarez and Garanca followed the direction carefully and for the most part, it did work, even if the director's ideas rubbed a bit against the music. The chemistry between the two of them seemed real and it was easy to suffer along with Werther. His singing was lovely and hers was too. Garanca has a rich, low mezzo. The Sophie sang very well also. The Bailiff and the Albert were acceptable.

There was a strange cut in Act 1: the bit where Sophie encourages her father to keep his promise and go out with Johann and Schmidt - an odd little cut.

One more odd thing - in the last act, Werther and Charlotte don't just kiss - they are actually rolling around in the bed together. That seems a bit weird since the man has a gushing hole in his head.

Since the singing is good, and it's the only commercial live production of the opera we can get so far, complete with nice subtitles, I recommend it buying it, as it is certainly one of the most lovely operas ever written.

Where "Werther" is concerned, there's not much competition in DVD format--only the heavily cut and lip-synched 1985 Petr Weigl film, which is still worth checking out for Brigitte Fassbaender's performance but not for much else. All the more reason to be grateful, then, that this 2005 production does not break the spell that seems to have guaranteed good fortune to virtually all the recorded versions of Massenet's most radical and adventuresome opera in both LP and CD formats (my personal favorites: von Stade and Carreras under Colin Davis, and Kasarova and Vargas under Jurowski). The musical values in this DVD set are quite high, with sensitive direction from the podium (Philippe Jordan) and a seamlessly stellar cast--there's not a weak link in the ensemble. Andrei Serban's staging and direction are perhaps not for all markets--this production moves the drama from Goethe's late eighteenth-century setting to the 1950's--but, for the life of me, if there were ever an opera that cried out for and could actually thrive on imaginative updating, it is surely "Werther." Vincent Patterson's recent updating of Massenet's signature opera, "Manon," which views the heroine's career through the lens of various Hollywood stars (Audrey Hebburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman), has received considerable acclaim (see the amazon.com reviews of the DVD); but Serban's vision engages the core elements of the drama in "Werther" far better than Patterson's treatment of "Manon." By comparison, Patterson's "Manon" seems merely clever. Serban's "Werther" is disturbing and profoundly moving, because it meticulously drives home the resemblance between the turmoil registered in the original setting and the soul-killing social and domestic proprieties of '50s-era middle-class culture. While it may be a cliche to think of the 1950s in those terms, this production makes them painfully fresh and real and gives edgy resonance to Massenet's psychologically asute music. The center of gravity does shift, however, but I think this is for the better. In Serban's production, the central character is clearly Charlotte, and the pivot of the drama turns on her (and, in Serban's staging, also Sophie's) unwillingness to acknowledge or act on the true nature of her desire until far too late. As a result, both Werther and Sophie also emerge as more complicated and far less sentimental figures than traditional stagings would allow: here Werther's instability and delusional fugues register powerfully, as does Sophie's painful and frustrated passage into adulthood. In a word, Serban's production does for "Werther" what Douglas Sirk did for filmic melodrama in the 1950s (think: "All That Heaven Allows," not to mention Todd Haynes' 2002 remake, "Far from Heaven"). Marcelo Alvarez captures the danger in Werther with powerful intensity; Elina Garanca's Charlotte is a major incarnation, especially riveting in the harrowing final act. If you love "Werther," you must see this.