WERTHER - Opera Season

On Nov. 19, 20, 21, 22, 24 the Comunale Nouveau Theater in Bologna will host Jules Massenet's play.
Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther - a novel believed to have inspired an increase in suicides still referred to as the “Werther effect” - isolates the protagonist from the rest of the world, and even his beloved Charlotte sees him only as a good friend. The one-way sentiment does not appeal to opera as much as the impossible and thwarted love: for Massenet, the librettists invent a lightning strike between the two young people and for her the vow to her dying mother to marry Albert. This is not the most radical reworking of a subject that is as fascinating as it is hostile for operatic scenes (in 1814 Coccia's Carlotta and Werther even had a happy ending), especially since Massenet's poetic vein has good play in enhancing Charlotte's torment and at the same time the poet's loneliness and sensitivity, ardent with passions and alien in the surrounding bourgeois world, to the point that one remembers as the protagonist's best-known aria, “Pourquoi me réveiller,” what is actually a section of a large and articulate duet.