Des cris joyeux (Werther)

Massenet drafted Werther between 1885 and 1887, after visiting Wetzlar, where Goethe had set his epistolary novel. Léon Carvalho of the Opéra-Comique turned it down as too gloomy for his audience, and the score waited. The Vienna Hofoper, wanting a successor to Manon, took it instead, and the premiere was given in German translation on 16 February 1892; Paris heard it the following year. The opera renounces spectacle almost entirely: four acts of interior weather, in which the orchestra carries what the characters cannot say aloud, and the December setting of the last act does the rest.