Making Massenet’s Werther really relevant to a 21st-century audience would take a director of real genius with some surprising insight into this problematic work. The problem is that it’s so deeply rooted in 19th-century sensibilities that cause the characters to live lives of quiet desperation rooted in convention, familial duty and formal piety. It’s like an André Gide novel with less elegant prose. Alain Gauthier’s new production for the Canadian Opera Company (a co-pro with Montreal and Vancouver) which opened last night at the Four Seasons Centre is workmanlike and pleasing on the eye, but it doesn’t have that spark of insight.
Gauthier’s staging is set round about the time of either the novel or the opera. It’s hard to be precise since ‘everyday country folk’ likely don’t represent the height of fashion!. The painted backdrop is impressionistic and wouldn’t have been out of place in Paris mid-19th century. Olivier Landreville’s set design is quite clever, allowing a variety of indoor and outdoor settings to be created by rapidly rearranging elements involving walls and doors, which avoids annoying pauses and it is enhanced by Mikael Kangas’ lighting plot which is consistently atmospheric and occasionally spectacular.
So, a great deal rides on the musical performances. At its best, Act 3 for example, the music is almost enough to make one forget the tedium of the plot. In the big confrontation–love scene, Russian mezzo-soprano Victoria Karkacheva (Charlotte) sang with great beauty and just the right amount of vulnerability while American tenor Russell Thomas’ Werther was ardent, his high notes on occasion thrilling. It’s the one point in the opera where Werther emerges as a character who is not just a sappy dope. Sadly, although both Karkacheva and Thomas also sang well in the other three acts, there was only so much they could do with the libretto.
The rest of the (large) cast was made up of past and present members of the COC Ensemble Studio. These range from veterans like Michael Colvin and Alain Coulombe, who had fun with the bibulous old guys Schmidt and Johann, to Emma Pennell and Ben Wallace who formed the drippy, poetry loving pair Brühlmann and Kätchen. Bass Robert Pomakov made a welcome return to the COC with a powerfully sung Bailli, charmingly supported by an excellent group of young singers from the Canadian Children’s Opera Company. The cast was completed by Simone Osborne and Gordon Bintner, she an effervescent Sophie who made an excellent foil to Karkacheva’s introspective Charlotte. Stiff and slightly sinister as Albert, Bintner seemed to encapsulate the the unyieldingly bleak tenor of the opera.
Johannes Debus conducted and, as ever, drew excellent playing from his orchestra. The dramatic parts of the score were genuinely thrilling and it’s hard not to opine that Massenet’s orchestral writing is considerably better than his vocal writing. It’s worth the price of a ticket to hear Karkacheva and Thomas in Act 3 and the singing and acting is generally of a very high standard but ultimately, one is left with the feeling that, in 2026, Werther needs more than this production to create a truly memorable evening.
