Massenet, Jules

Massenet, Jules – Werther. Drame lyrique en quatre actes (full opera score with French libretto)

(b. Montand, May 12, 1842 — d. Paris, August 13, 1912)

Based on: “Die Leiden des jungen Werther”. (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
Novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
Libretto: Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann
Composed in 1886/87, premiered at the Vienna Court Opera in 1892 in a German translation by Max Kalbeck

Preface
The accusation of so-called “cultural appropriation” is frequently raised today and dominates aesthetic and political discussions in a sometimes highly polarizing manner. However, earlier forms of “cultural appropriation,” with widely differing aspects but ultimately comparable, also existed in earlier times. In the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, it was not universally welcomed in Germany when French or Italian composers turned to their own domestic literary production; Alleged piety, or from today’s perspective nationalistic sensitivity, was the main reason why Gounod’s opera “Faust” was performed in German-speaking countries for a long time as “Margarethe,” as if it were not worthy of its original title.

When Eduard Hanslick, then Vienna’s leading music critic, famous for his disputes with Wagnerians and author of the still influential music aesthetic treatise “Vom Musikalisch-Schönen” (On the Beautiful in Music, 1854), mentions such narrow-mindedness, he does so descriptively and thus without judgment; when he shows sympathy, it is not on the side of the nationalists. Hanslick begins his review of the premiere of Jules Massenet’s “Werther” by regretting that Robert Schumann never took up the subject, and then states the surprising fact that so far “not a single German composer […] despite the tempting popularity of the material” dared to set the 1774 epistolary novel to music.1 Hanslick finds it significant that Rodolphe Kreutzer – the composer and violinist to whom Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op. 47, the so-called “Kreutzer Sonata,” is dedicated – was a Frenchman who presented the first “Werther” opera in 1792, a work that, like later attempts by some “second- and third-rate Italians” (Benvenuti, Pucitta, Coccia, Gentili, and Aspa) in the course of the 19th century, has “long since faded and been lost.” According to Hanslick, there were two reasons why no German “Werther” had been written until then: …

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