✭✭✭✭✩

by Jules Massenet, directed by Willy Decker

De Vlaamse Opera, Het Operagebouw

February 21, 23, 25, 28 & March 2, 2003

Far too often Massenet's Werther is performed as if it were merely a domestic drama about a wife whose pity for a lovesick poet turns to love.  Not so Willy Decker's beautiful, incisive new production for De Vlaamse Opera that reveals the larger issues that make Goethe's original novel a central text of romanticism. 

Decker divides the stage diagonally into two sections.  In the foreground is a blue, patterned interior of the ordered bourgeois world of Charlotte, Albert and their family, a world of society, duty, confinement and comfort.  Through a sliding opening that grows larger depending on its influence is a landscape, Werther's world of nature, individuality, freedom and extreme emotion.  Werther is initially drawn to the safety of Charlotte's world, but gradually her love of both poetry and poet draw her to his world of risk.  When the shower of Werther's letters is mirrored in the snowstorm outside we see that death ultimately rules both worlds.

Charismatic young American tenor Gerard Powers sang the title role communicating both the young man's allure and his instability.   Swedish mezzo Ann Hallenberg gave highly nuanced portrait of Charlotte.  Niagara Falls native Brett Polegato, a frequent performer with De Vlaamse Opera, showed us a far more sympathetic and complex Albert than one usually encounters. Polegato's warm baritone and command of tone brought out Albert's evolving mixture of love, disbelief, anger and fear as Charlotte grows ever more distant.  French conductor Patrick Fourniller gave the score a sinewy beauty that related Massenet forward to Debussy.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera Canada 2003-06-22.

Photo: Brett Polegato, Gerard Powers and Ann Hallenberg. ©2003 Annemie Augustijns.