MARCUS
MERKEL

Drame lyrique by Jules Massenet - Poetry by Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - In French with German surtitles

The young Werther falls in love with Charlotte, who promised her mother on her deathbed that she would marry Albert. Now Charlotte is torn between this promise and the feelings she develops for Werther. When Charlotte finally rejects him again 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 to Werther's flat in horror and finds him badly injured. Werther dies in her arms.

"These stirring scenes, these captivating images", Jules Massenet is said to have exclaimed when he came across "The Sorrows of Young Werther" in 1885. In Massenet's opera, Goethe's epistolary novel from 1774 is a "drama of pure humanity", as librettist Paul Milliet put it, in which Werther ends up desperately reciting Ossian's lyrics in Charlotte's arms, while she also confesses her love for him in the face of death and children sing Christmas carols in the distance. Through subtle orchestration on the one hand and far-reaching dramatic gestures on the other, Massenet manages to realise the basic idea of unanswered passionate love on the operatic stage.

The management team of the Koblenz production has already impressed several times in recent seasons in opera and drama productions with the sophisticated interweaving of the aesthetic levels of acting performance, elements of puppet theatre and the mirroring or magnification of the action by means of the live camera. The meticulous work at the interfaces of the various art forms is tailor-made for Jules Massenet's "Werther" and becomes an intense experience of sound, space and images for the audience.