Victoria Karkacheva and Russell Thomas in the Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Werther.Michael Cooper/Supplied
Title: Werther
Written by: Jules Massenet
Conductor: Johannes Debus
Company: Canadian Opera Company
Venue: Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
City: Toronto
Year: Runs until May 23
Sometimes you flock to the opera to watch people be crushed by life.
Early on in Massenet’s four-act Werther, the Canadian Opera Company’s new co-production with Opéra de Montréal and Vancouver Opera, it is quickly evident that its titular protagonist – gloriously brought to despair by American tenor Russell Thomas – will die from the heartbreak of an unreciprocated desire.
Based on Goethe’s 1774 epistolary novel, the French-language libretto follows Werther, a melancholic and melodramatic poet, falling in love at first sight with the innocent, dutiful and maternal Charlotte (mezzo-soprano Victoria Karkacheva), the eldest daughter of a widowed bailiff (bass Robert Pomakov) who belatedly reveals to him that she’d promised her late mother to marry Albert (bass-baritone Gordon Binter).
Robert Pomakov, Emma Pennell, and Ben Wallace in Werther.Michael Cooper/Supplied
The tragedy of the libretto is that there will never be a place for him in her life even if she possesses a genuine love for him, her devotion to filial piety overriding her carnal desires.
In the first half, which takes place outdoors, set designer Olivier Landreville envisions the stage as a pop-up storybook with a stone bench, a 15-metre-long linden tree branch looming above and bushy hills leading into the distance. With scenes of children practising Christmas carols, neighbours gossiping away and a maiden spreading joy, the score evokes a saccharine tone which depicts an artificial-seeming world that is swiftly, intensely affected by Werther’s appearances, and his ever-fluctuating moods.
As Werther sings of nature’s beauty or his immediate infatuation with Charlotte, Massenet’s sumptuous music – interpreted by Johannes Debus’s effortless command of the COC orchestra – reaches for the borders of an uncontainable, swooning, ecstatic bliss. But, when it comes to facing her rejection of his hot, intense feelings, it turns sombre, unsettling, and, as when he repeatedly bemoans his fate with an exaggerated frown, almost comic.
Thomas and Gordon Bintner in Werther.Michael Cooper/Supplied
Lëilah Dufour Forget’s divine costume design tracks Charlotte’s narrative progression through her starkly coloured dresses, transitioning from dusty pink to fuchsia to a maroonish-magenta finally resembling Werther’s notable tailcoat, and often acting as a counterpoint to her cheery sister Sophie (soprano Simone Osborne) or Albert’s yellow waistcoat and blue jacket that directly references Goethe’s anti-hero.
In the director’s note, Alain Gauthier, who remains faithful to the work’s late-19th-century time period, views Werther’s final action as the consequence of the “growing isolation in the face of a world from which he feels disconnected.” Since the first two acts are concerned with surfacing context, it is only in the second, action-packed half that this concept can stunningly manifest: Landreville uses almost-four-metre nesting walls to create a replica of Charlotte’s room that, between acts and utilizing the smaller panels within, transforms into Werther’s tinier, claustrophobic room his imprisonment within the confines of his disoriented mind suddenly becomes palpable.
The isolation appears in Thomas’s performance too, which juggles vulnerability before adding in lust, torment and hopeless despair. With a smooth passaggio, his resounding pleas demanded total attention, especially in the well-known aria Pourqoui me réveiller, where he anchored the emotional resonance of the lines rather than the mere grandeur of projection. In the second half, the versatile Karkacheva, accessing her darker timbres to imitate Werther as she sings his letters aloud, is a perfect match in dramatic brilliance, as when she falls to her knees and keels over after praying for divine intervention.
Alain Coulombe and Michael Colvin in Werther.Michael Cooper/Supplied
Though lacking in chemistry, the duo’s respective performances were so compelling that the drawn-out unfolding of the anticipated events still possessed genuine suspense. Together, they explored the complicated limits of this impossible affair, which assumes an added layer of complexity when Thomas’s unmentioned racial difference – the only racialized member of the singing cast – is factored in as an additional societal factor possibly keeping them forever apart. This historically unconventional yet suitable casting unquestionably deepens Gauthier’s desired emphasis on Werther’s disconnect from the world around him: enigma he is not.
Even in small gestures, as when he throws his head back in ecstasy, abruptly makes his return on Christmas Eve, or clutches Charlotte’s pink ribbon to his chest before trading it for a pistol, one experiences the force of Werther’s crippling passion, whose final act the opera shrewdly refrains from glorifying or condemning.
Save for several instances of dead time between scenes where Mikael Kangas’s lighting design requires more application and intensity, the COC’s Werther is a lavish, explosively dramatic and richly satisfying production with outstanding lead performances delivering the pathos operas often lose sight of when given modern reinventions.
“Do not accuse me,” Werther tells Charlotte for when he dies: “But weep for me!”
I cannot deny heeding his request.