Tag: opera

Boy Meets Girl – Watch "Werther" in Theatres

Boy meets girl, passionate feelings, unrequited love, societal restraints of duty, hopeless love, tragic ending, all are plot elements in the lyric drama Werther by French composer Jules Massenet (1842-1912).

Transmitted live in high definition and surround sound into selected movie theaters around the world as part of The Met: Live in HD series, Werther will be seen this Saturday, March 15, at 12:55 pm.  Opera Lovers in West Virginia can see this new production at the Cinemark Theater at the Huntington Mall in Barboursville; Regal Nitro Stadium 12; and Hollywood Stadium 12 in Granville/Morgantown, as well as at the Cinemark Theater in Ashland, Kentucky.  With an approximate running time of three hours and fifteen minutes, Werther will be sung in French with English subtitles. Get tickets here.

The young German writer Goethe wrote a semi-biographical novel The Sorrows of Young Werther , in the form of a collection of letters from Werther to an unseen friend.  Werther, his protagonist, tells of his love for Charlotte, a young woman who is betrothed to another man.  This impossible , ever-intensifying love leads the self-absorbed Werther to suicide.  The focus of Goethe’s novel was on Werther’s feverish mind but Massenet and his librettists Edouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann, expanded the focus to include rich, full characterizations of Charlotte, her husband Albert and the society in which the protagonists’ passions collide with convention and honor.

Jules Massenet was the dominant French opera composer of the late nineteenth century.  He completed some 30 operas but Manon (1884) and Werther (1892) are his most performed works.  Massenet had a great gift for rich melodies and heart-wrenching stories.  With continuous music of bittersweet quality throughout the opera, Massenet portrays Werther’s desperate love and Charlotte’s emotional disarray through the poetry of recitatives and the lyricism of intense arias.

“German Jonas Kaufmann, currently the most in-demand, versatile and exciting tenor in opera, sings the title role of Werther.  To be a great Werther, a tenor must somehow be charismatic, yet detached, vocally impassioned, yet ethereal.  Kaufmann sings with dark colorings, melting warmth, virile intensity and powerful top notes.” (Anthony Tommasini, New York Times review).

French mezzo- soprano Sophie Koch in her Met debut role, “brings a plush strong voice and aching vulnerability” to the role of the 20-year-old Charlotte.  Koch’s command of the role’s singular dramatic and musical challenges is impressive.”

If you are unable to see the simulcast this Saturday, there will be an encore showing on Wednesday, March 19, at 6:30 pm.

I will have an open discussion of Werther this Thursday, March 17, at 7 pm in Smith Music Hall 123 on the Huntington campus of Marshall University.  Come and join us.

Larry Stickler is a Professor of Music at Marshall University

Experience an operatic retelling of the World War I Christmas Eve truce

Watch Silent Night on Friday, Dec. 20 at 9 p.m. on WV PBS and Saturday, Dec. 21 at 7 p.m. on WV PBS.2

This opera recounts the true story of the World War I Christmas Eve truce. For one magical evening on December 24, 1914, French, German and Scottish soldiers laid down their arms and joined in a spontaneous celebration reflecting the peace, fellowship and humanity of the season. Based on the Academy Award-nominated film Joyeux Noel, this two-act production was commissioned by the Minnesota Opera and premiered in November 2012 to national acclaim, including a Pulitzer Prize for Music for composer Kevin Puts. With a libretto by Mark Campbell, Silent Night is sung in French, English, German, Italian and Latin with English subtitles.

Scared to Write a Note

Thumbing through a copy of Opera News, an article on opera composer Ricky Ian Gordon revealed some very provocative words:

“The twentieth century is littered with a lot of composers who were terrorized out of writing what they heard-out of writing in …their authentic voice. There was such a critical backlash against…tonal music. I mean you could write…you were just laughed off the map.”

What is music? Such a simple question. Such complication behind the answers.

The early 2oth century composers were in a real bind. Were they going to be followers of Serialism, Indeterminacy or Neoclassicism? Tonality, for all intents and purposes, was an anachronism-something so quaint that only the inferior or less serious composers would chose as a musical language.

(Think this attitude is gone? A few years ago, one of my colleagues made an off-hand remark about the 12 Tone System and a listener wrote that anyone with any knowledge knew that the last serious (read important) works were written in this style. So, we must remain in a prison based on a system that began in the 1920’s?)

Or worst choice of all: write the music they heard in their own minds?

We all talk about the arts in terms of freedom, but there’s always a quid pro quo. The questions become: why are we writing? Who are we writing for?

If there’s a shadow hanging over your shoulder of what you “should” be writing or a host of critical voices in your mind, you’re never going to write the music that is your true voice.

Mr. Gordon is writing no less than three operas. 

I doubt he has much time to listen to the voice of doubt or to the ghosts of musical eras past.

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