Music, no matter how innocent and lovely it might seem, can still convey some truly dire emotions.
You may remember a romantic hit from the 60s, "The End of the World" by Skeeter Davis. It features a gentle melody and softly poetic lyrics, but depending on context, those lyrics could reflect a desperate state of mind: "Why does my heart go on beating? Why do these eyes of mine cry? Don't they know it's the end of the world? It ended when you said goodbye."
Someone thinking that way — someone who has lost their one true love — might decide that if their own romantic world has ended, living with the rest of the world just isn't worth the effort any more.
Massenet's opera Werther is another example of music that, at first, is deceptively innocent. It's opening scene features happy children practicing a joyous Christmas carol on a bright, July afternoon. But before long, we meet a young man so distressed that for him, even Christmas in July is no picnic.
Werther, and the book that inspired it, are among those tragic works of art that may feed the strange yet persistent notion that suicide, especially in the name of love, is somehow a romantic, even noble, thing to do.
It's certainly hard to believe that at the moment someone takes their own life the act could possibly seem romantic — and it's surely nothing but tragic for the people left behind.
Still, the idea of romantic suicide has been around for a long time, and Werther proves that. The opera was completed in 1887, and is based on novel by Goethe that appeared more than a century earlier. The book was inspired by an actual event: the suicide of a young man who was in love with a married woman.
Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, consists mainly of letters from the title character to his beloved. The opera's libretto goes well beyond that, fleshing out the rest of the pivotal characters. Still, it remains Werther's story — and somehow it's plain, right from the falsely cheerful beginning, that things are bound to end badly.
World of Opera host Lisa Simeone brings us a production from the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, starring tenor Giuseppe Filianoti in the title role, and the brilliant mezzo-soprano Sonia Ganassi as Charlotte.
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