Werther: “Toute mon âme…Pourquoi me réveiller?”

Manon: “Je suis seul… Ah, fuyez, douce image”

Between Berlioz and Debussy, whose Pelléas et Mélisande made the decisive break from 19th-century tradition, the most successful French opera composer was Jules Massenet. Of his thirty or so operas, the ones we are most likely to see in this country are Manon and Werther, both of them based on 18th-century novels. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is a frankly sentimental story about a young poet who is in love with a married woman and who, to make an honourable escape from an impossible situation, shoots himself with a pistol lent him by her husband. The initial inspiration for Massenet’s opera was the scene in the novel where Werther meets his beloved Charlotte for the last time and engages in nostalgic recollection of their happier moments together. At the climax of the scene he recalls his translation of a passage of romantic pathos from the (allegedly) Gaelic poet Ossian, “Pourquoi me réveiller, ô souffle du printemps?” - an aria so melodically inspired that Charlotte, who until now has concealed her love from him, finds herself revealing her true feelings at last.

Werther was initially considered “too gloomy” for Paris and was first performed in Vienna. Eight years earlier, in 1884, Manon had appealed immediately to French taste - partly because it is based on a French rather than a German novel, the Abbé Prévost’s Story of Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut, and is set in France (unlike Puccini’s later treatment of the same theme, Manon Lescaut, it ends with Manon’s death on the road to Le Havre rather than in the Louisiana desert). Des Grieux is a serious young man destined for holy orders but easily seduced; Manon is an incurably frivolous young woman who duly seduces him. In the aria “Ah, fuyez, douce image” des Grieux, who is about to preach his first sermon at St Sulpice, attempts to put temptation out of his mind - the moral conflict ingeniously reflected in an orchestral accompaniment echoing with memories of Manon and ecclesiastical imagery at the same time.