This piece has everything.
The passion and the disaster.
It has heart-stoppingly beautiful music.
The magic of the Opera.
It's very direct, very simple. Everything seems very clear but it's to reach a kind of darkness.
It happens to be one of my all time favourites, I jealously guard it.
It's a tragedy, a grand tragedy and we love that in the opera.
Charlotte is the oldest sister of a big family, she has seven siblings actually.
Her mother has died within the last year.
She made a promise to her mother on her mother's death bed.
That she would marry Albert, a very upright and proper gentleman.
He's a very nice, normal guy. He's not a romantic type.
He wishes he was more romantic, but he's just not that guy.
She's very practical and she's not bitter about anything, it's a normal existence and it's fine.
Then this hurricane of Werther arrives in this small town, and I think he unlocks
this world to her that sincerely, she didn't even know existed.
It was love at first sight. Charlotte knows that feeling, that grasp, that energy that
that always happens when Werther is near, she senses him.
So she really knows that this guy is bringing some of a difference in her life.
He's a very young man.
He's a Poet.
He's always dreaming.
Dreaming the world, dreaming Charlotte.
He's in a dream becoming a nightmare.
He prays upon her, and it's a cruel, narcissistic tactic on his part.
She almost falls.
For me, it's more Charlotte than Werther.
It's a portrait of a woman who is conflicting herself between her life and her feelings and desire.
How Massenet depicts that struggle is so strong, so unusually strong.
Massenet has tried to capture a dark pallet for this music
certainly orchestrally speaking,
but it has also limped and lovely, lyric moments.
The way they did it could only be written by a French Composer, no question.
The wonderful thing about the marriage with Antonio and Vittorio and I think myself,
is, what I think this music needs is absolutely a strict adherence to the French Style,
but it needs to have the soul of Italians.
I always say Werther is not a beginners role.
It's like when you walk on eggs, you know?
Now, I feel like those eggs are boiled and a little bit more secure.
It needs this passion, and the top coming off a volcano.
It could be an overwhelmingly emotional experience.
It feels like life and death on the stage.