Massenet's Werther: You've Got Mail!
Aria Code
WQXR & The Metropolitan Opera
4.8 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2019
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A picture may paint a thousand words, but nothing compares to the intimacy and immediacy of a handwritten letter. Hearing the "Letter Aria" from Jules Massenet's Werther will prove it. From an opera based on the Goethe novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, this scene finds the tortured heroine Charlotte re-reading the letters of the doomed poet.
In this episode, host Rhiannon Giddens welcomes soprano Isabel Leonard, pianist Mary Dibbern and author Peter Bognanni to explore why the words we write to each other have so much power – sometimes even more than the ones we say aloud. They'll reflect on Massenet's talent for showing Charlotte's deep connection to Werther and you'll even get a real-life story about how email brought two people together. Then you'll hear Isabel Leonard sing the complete scene onstage at the Metropolitan Opera.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | He's a poet. He speaks in terms of moonlight and love. Maybe sort of the naughty boy. |
| 0:12.5 | She realizes that she wants to run away with this man and have a wild passionate love |
| 0:16.6 | affair. From WQXR in the Metropolitan Opera, this is Ariacode. I'm Rianne Goodins. |
| 0:24.7 | I would have expected that maybe we would get some bold proclamation of love here, but |
| 0:29.6 | instead what we're getting is the most dire and morose kind of situation that someone |
| 0:35.4 | could possibly be in. Every episode, we pull apart one Arya to see how it works and |
| 0:40.5 | then we bring it back together so you can hear it in a whole new way. Today, we go through |
| 0:45.0 | the pages of the letter Arya from Massena's Verter. His words and her feelings, they all |
| 0:50.4 | just sort of come together. A floodgates open and it's chilling. It's so chilling. |
| 1:01.6 | So I admit it, I once fell in love over text. I didn't see it coming. All I knew was that |
| 1:08.1 | day after day, I was texting this guy for hours, morning, noon and night. It was a really |
| 1:15.9 | intense experience and I was just really struck with how amazing a way to get to know somebody |
| 1:24.5 | it is because you're not looking at them, you're not distracted by always my hair right. |
| 1:29.8 | You're not thinking about any of that stuff because all they can see are your words. It makes |
| 1:34.1 | me think about how we communicate and how things have changed over the years, but then how |
| 1:39.4 | things haven't changed. When we think about when people wrote letters and we tend to think |
| 1:44.1 | of letter writing like paper, pen, you sort of put your thoughts in order and then you write |
| 1:49.1 | an essay and you send it off to somebody. Back in the day, people were writing what they were |
| 1:52.8 | feeling at the moment. It was a much more urgent form of communication than we think of it. |
| 1:56.9 | And I think letters fascinate us so much because they're so intimate and personal, they're pure |
| 2:02.7 | communication. Maybe that's why writers and composers turn to them to show us who their characters |
| 2:08.8 | really are. That's exactly what's happening in the letter Arya from Massinese Verter. |
... |
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