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• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

In comparison to Manon, Werther is the romantic dreamer, totally lost as he sees his beloved Charlotte marry another man. But his music – a seductive, rocking melody where he and Charlotte at once express the strength of their love and the necessity to deny it in the face of social pressure – etches itself on the audience’s ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

Manon and Werther have become Massenet’s most frequently performed operas, but several others are gaining ground, among them Hérodiade, Thaïs, Sapho, Cendrillon, Grisélidis, Chérubin and Don Quichotte, all recently revived. Both Manon and Werther – and the other operas as well – are about relationships. The tale of Manon explores a theme that ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

elected to the French Academy instead of his rival Saint-Saëns. Massenet’s 28 operas include several enduring masterpieces: Manon (1884) remains one of the most popular French Romantic operas, while Werther (1892), after Goethe, arguably his finest work, is intensely dramatic. Thaïs (1894) displays a post-Wagnerian exoticism, described by D’Indy as ‘semi-religious eroticism’, illustrated in the seductive lyricism ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

the title role in Esclarmonde for her. The early 1890s produced only failures and unfinished works, but his next durable success was to be premiered in Vienna in 1892: Werther, a setting of a libretto based on Goethe. This has become one of his most popular works and was quickly followed by the oriental Thaïs, whose ‘Meditation’ has ...

• Classical
• Early Romantic

Following the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe enjoyed a short period of relative stability with Napoleon’s exile, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France and the establishment of the Vienna Peace Settlement in 1815. However, in the early 1820s a number of minor revolts broke out in Naples and ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Late Romantic

thrive on its audience’s understanding of great literary subjects in terms of heightened lyricism. It was followed by Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868) by Thomas, and later by Massenet’s Werther (1892), based on another Goethe novel. Although it was not an immediate success, the combination of a great literary subject and intense vocal lyricism eventually made Werther one of ...

• Styles & Forms
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

grand old man of Italy. The influence of French opera, and of Jules Massenet (1842–1912) in particular, should not be underestimated. Although the composer of Manon (1884) and Werther (1893) is not today held in such high regard as his contemporaries and immediate successors, Puccini and Debussy, among others, would not have been the same without ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Classical Era

Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’), a name taken from a play of the time, began as a literary movement that flourished in Germany and Austria in the second half of the eighteenth century. Easier to recognize than to define, its manifestations included the ‘horrid’ world of the Gothic novel and, in the visual arts, the paintings ...