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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 June 2020
The climactic scene in Massenet's opera Werther – as in Goethe's novella – occurs when Werther reads a poem by Ossian. The air resembles a German lied, with a rippling harp accompaniment that may be a reference to other Ossianic settings. Steven Huebner has suggested that the lied reference is meant to create a sense of German local colour in the opera. However, little work has been done to explain why Massenet would have chosen to set an Ossianic text in the style of a German lied.
The current article addresses this question by considering the references to specific German lieder by Schumann and Schubert heard by early critics in the Ossian reading. The subsequent discussion explores the French reception of German lieder and Massenet's personal knowledge of Schubert and Schumann's music. These references to Schumann, Schubert and Ossian expose a complex set of intertextual relationships between Massenet's opera and other Ossianic music, the characters in Massenet's opera and their milieu, and Massenet's depiction of German music and culture.
Despite Huebner's well-chosen criticisms of Massenet's depiction of the German setting, I argue that the lied and its harp accompaniment are dramatically meaningful gestures that highlight Werther's Ossianic character arc throughout the opera, hinting at his sentimentality, weakness, and non-normative masculinity in relation to nineteenth-century gender stereotypes. This interpretation, following Massenet's own account of the opera's genesis, prioritizes the Ossian reading as the crux of the drama. The resulting analysis demonstrates the audible influence of Schumann and Schubert on Werther, and Massenet's musical approach to the Ossianic tropes of nature, decay and fate.
I am grateful to Sarah Clemmens Waltz, Annelies Andres, Joshua Neumann, Oren Vinogradov and Michele Arace, who provided comments on an earlier version of this manuscript; any errors that remain are my own. The anonymous reviewers provided insightful commentary. This research could not have been conducted without the support of the staff at Founders Library, Howard University; the Performing Arts Reading Room, Library of Congress; and Fintel Library, Roanoke College.
1 Macpherson published English versions of the chief Ossianic texts – Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Fingal, Temora and the Works of Ossian – by 1765; he produced a major revision in 1773. A final volume, in Gaelic, was published in 1807 after Macpherson's death. Gaskill, Howard, ‘Ossian in Europe’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 21/4 (1994): 643–78, at 644–5, 648Google Scholar.
2 See Gaskill, ‘Ossian in Europe’, 672–5; Laughlin, Corinna, ‘The Lawless Language of Macpherson's “Ossian”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 40/3 (2000): 511–37: 512–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stafford, Fiona, Sublime Savage (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1988): 4, 177–8Google Scholar.
3 Moore, Dafydd, ‘Heroic Incoherence in James Macpherson's “The Poems of Ossian”’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 34/1 (2000): 43–59 at 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, James, ‘“Bring Me the Head of James Macpherson”: The Execution of Ossian and the Wellsprings of Folkloristic Discourse’, Journal of American Folklore 114, no. 454 (2001): 396–435, at 407Google Scholar; Stafford, Sublime Savage, 89–93, 102–3.
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5 Stafford, Sublime Savage, 3. Of the poems’ authenticity, Stafford writes that ‘Macpherson drew on traditional sources to produce imaginative texts not modelled closely on any single identifiable original’; see Stafford, , “Introduction: The Ossianic Poems of James Macpherson”, in Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Gaskill, Howard (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1996): viiGoogle Scholar.
6 Gaskill, ‘Ossian in Europe’, 645.
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10 See Gaskill, ‘Ossian in Europe’, 662–67; and the essays in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, ed. Gaskill.
11 Huebner, Steven, French Opera at the fin-de-siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 121–2Google Scholar; D'Aoust, Jason R., ‘The Lied d'Ossian in Massenet's Werther: Intertextuality and Vocality in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Musicological Research 36/1 (2017): 29–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christopher Smith, ‘Ossian in Music’, in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, ed. Gaskill, 375–92 at 386.
12 Goethe's novel exists in two versions, from 1774 and 1787; the revised edition generally provides more insight into Charlotte's perspectives on the story and makes Albert a more sympathetic character. There is some ambiguity about which version of the novel Massenet and his librettists used: the opera's detailed portrait of Charlotte seems to reflect the 1787 version, but it could also derive from a creative reading of the 1774 version. In his memoirs, Massenet quotes Philippe-François Aubry's translation of the 1774 version, but the opera itself, according to the prefatory notes, is set ‘aux environs de Francfort, de julliet à decembre 178 … ’. Massenet was apparently adamant about setting the opera in the 1780s rather than the 1770s, although this seems to have had more to do with costume choices than with acknowledging a specific version of Goethe's novel. Massenet, , Mes souvenirs et autres écrits, ed. Branger, Jean-Christophe (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2017): 142Google Scholar; Huebner, French Opera, 125.
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16 The essential features of Goethe's plot remain intact in the opera: Werther is an idealistic young man who falls in love with Charlotte, who is engaged to Albert. In both the written and staged versions, Werther reads Ossian's poetry to Charlotte as an attempt to win her over, but she rebuffs him. He then returns to his lodgings and mortally wounds himself with a pistol. The opera compresses the timeline of the plot, adds a final duet between Charlotte and Werther as he lies dying, and greatly increases the role of Sophie, Charlotte's sister, who is a potential love interest for Werther.
17 Macpherson, James, The Poems of Ossian: A New Edition Complete in One Volume (Leipsic: Fleischer, 1834), 192Google Scholar. First published in Fingal, 1762. The ‘voice of Cona’ refers to Ossian himself.
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24 Goethe's remark appears in The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, abridged and ed. Derek Hudson (London, 1967): 101, cited in Lamport, ‘Goethe, Ossian, and Werther’, 97. See also, Goethe, trans. Hulse, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 143n65; Swales, Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther, 40.
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26 Swales, Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther, 41.
27 Huebner, French Opera, 119–20.
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39 Throughout this essay, ‘r.h’. indicates a rehearsal number in the full score published by Kalmus, c. 1970 (A 4478), although they do not appear in the vocal score used as the basis for the examples in this article; ‘r.h. +1’ indicates one bar after the indicated rehearsal number. These rehearsal numbers derive from those in Massenet's autograph, now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, dèpartement Bibliothèque-musée de l'opéra, and accessible online at http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb13916062b.
40 Translation by Lionel Salter, from CD booklet for Massenet: Werther. José Carreras, Frederica von Stade et. al., Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Sir Colin Davis directing. DECCA B007FEF2KM, 1981, rereleased 2012.
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59 Huebner, French Opera, 124. For example, the minor characters Johann and Schmidt sing ‘Vivat Bachus’: a pun on J.S. Bach's name.
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