I don’t know about you but in Germany we all had to read Goethe’s „The Sorrows of Young Werther“ in school. It’s like „The Catcher in the Rye“
but for Germans.
Jules Massenet wrote his beautiful opera after Goethe’s novel. And although he made some smaller changes and simplified some of the internal conflicts Werther is dealing with he kept the spirit of the original pretty much alive.
Anyway - you might have read in the news or experienced it in your personal life that the rate of anxiety and depression amongst young people has risen dramatically in the last years. Werther is an opera about that. Of course the main story line is a love story going horribly wrong but the reason for this mainly is the mental condition Werther is in.
Goethe’s „The Sorrows of Young Werther“ is not so much a tale of love and romance as it is a chronicle of mental health; specifically, it seems, Goethe is tackling the idea of depression and even (though the term would not have existed then) bi-polar depression.
00:00 Intro
03:35 Roberto Alagna
09:18 Marcelo Alvarez, Elina Garanca
13:02 Neil Shicoff
17:33 Marcelo Alvarez, Adrian Eröd, Ileana Tonca
27:29 Jonas Kaufmann, Sophie Koch
38:32 Sophie Rennert
42:30 Juan Diego Florez, Isabel Leonard
50:20 Marcelo Alvarez, Elina Garanca
55:25 Extro
Original videos:
Roberto Alagna Bilbao 2015 [ Ссылка ]
Elina Garanca, Marcelo Alvarez Vienna 2005 [ Ссылка ]
Neil Shicoff Aix en Provence 1979 [ Ссылка ]
Sophie Koch, Jonas Kaufmann Paris [ Ссылка ]
Sophie Rennert 2023 [ Ссылка ]
Isabel Leonard, Juan Diego Florez Bologna 2020 [ Ссылка ]
