Alexandra Coghlan

I doubt Goethe intended Werther’s sorrows to be as unremitting as this

But English Touring Opera offers relief with their transgressive romp through Tales of Hoffmann

There are some things the French do better than everyone else. Cheese, military defeats and extra-marital affairs are a given, but what about opera? English Touring Opera’s autumn tour sets out a tasting plate of the nation’s Romantic finest, hoping to persuade audiences that there’s more to France than just Carmen. Debussy’s delicate tragedy Pelléas et Mélisande sits between the fragrant melodies of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann and the Armagnac-soaked passions of Massenet’s Werther. It’s a typically wide-ranging programme from this small company, but one whose compromises inevitably equal its ambitions.

While the ambition is spread pretty evenly across the three works, the lion’s share of the compromise falls to Werther — Massenet’s heady adaptation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. It’s a work that suffers from the classic epistolary-novel syndrome of too much emotion hanging off too little plot.

Werther

Werther

With a full orchestra to support its dramatic fragility, the opera musters a sub-Wagnerian impetus, music emerging freely from feeling without the artifice of set-piece arias and ensembles. By stripping it of its harmonic soft furnishings and cramming it into the musical bedsit of just a quartet of instruments (violin, cello, clarinet and piano), ETO and director Oliver Platt have reduced a domestic tragedy to a kitchen-sink squabble.

But John Osborne this is not, and neither Matthias Klaes’s programme note nor Oliver Townsend’s relentlessly realist 1950s set can make it so. Retired magistrate Le Bailli (Michael Druiett) and his family live in implausible poverty in an unchanging domestic interior that must, at whim, also serve for street scenes (it’s all to do with where characters enter from). It’s about as clear in performance as it is in explanation, and is further complicated by the band performing on stage (somewhere between the sink and the Christmas tree), obscuring the English text the lack of surtitles makes so essential.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in