Werther

“Werther has caused more suicides than the world’s most beautiful woman,” wrote Madame de Staël. Indeed, Goethe’s first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther , published in 1774, was a literary and aesthetic shock for an entire generation, foreshadowing Romanticism. Composed a century later, at the end of the 19 th century, Jules Massenet’s opera, inspired by the novel, dissects the nature of love. The fatal passion between Werther and Charlotte is embodied in lyrical music that is alternately melancholic and fiery, marked by the famous aria “Why wake me, O breath of spring?”. This masterpiece of French opera is returning to the Paris Opera in a new production. Seeking to restore the epistolary form of Goethe’s novel to its rightful place, Robert Carsen places literature at the centre of his staging by setting the action in a huge library.