Wanting to Slap a Fool - A Look at Two Werthers

In March Opera Orlando put on the 1892 Jules Massenet opera Werther, an adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I enjoyed the production and, because I'm me, I decided to read the book.

A haiku summary:

Unrequited love

Book is great, opera too.

But Werther's a prick

Background

The Novel

The Sorrows of Young Werther is a tragic tale of unrequited love.  Goethe's novel was an immediate hit and it was quickly translated from German into basically every European language.  "Werther Fever" had begun.  People dressed in Werther's blue and yellow outfit.  It was one of three books Frankenstein's monster finds and treasures in Chapter 14 of Frankenstein.

(This isn't related, but Frankenstein's monster also quotes a poem called "Mutability" which was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the husband of Frankenstein's author Mary Shelley.  A neat meta reference.)

Werther Fever was so intense that the book was banned in places to prevent copycat suicides.  (It's a little unclear how many suicides there actually were but it obviously doesn't take too many young men in blue and yellow clothes killing themselves with a copy of the novel in their pockets to set off hysteria.)

Goethe himself seems to have had reservations about the novel and it's effect.  He apparently revised it significantly in 1787 and allegedly added a poem from Werther's ghost to the beginning:

Dearest reader, cry for him, love him,

Save his reputation before he is destroyed;

Look! The eyes of his escaped soul are speaking to you:

"Be a dignified man and do not follow my footsteps."

The text above is from a Jim Murdoch blog post from 2010.  I said "allegedly" earlier because I can't actually find the text of the 1787 version, so for now I'll have to take Murdoch at his word.  The blog post is an interesting read, worth checking out.

So is the novel worth the hype?  I mean, it's not worth killing yourself over, but it is in fact excellent.

The Opera

French composer Jules Massenet adapted the novel into the opera Werther with librettists Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann.  It premiered in 1892.   I can't find too much on how it was received but there are a lot of recordings of it and it seems to be, if not a major part of the repertoire, a not uncommon one.

A Summary of the Novel

The Sorrows of Young Werther is (mostly) an epistolary novel comprised of the letters Werther wrote to his friend William over about a year and a half starting in 1771.  In the German town of Wahlheim, Werther, while escorting a woman to a dance, meets Charlotte (aka "Lotte") and falls in love with her, despite her being engaged to a man named Albert who is away on business.  For months, Werther hangs about and becomes close with Lotte, her family, and Albert.

His love for Lotte becomes unbearable and he leaves to take a court position elsewhere, in Weimar.  After months away and one embarrassing (if bewildering to a 21st Century American) social incident with the aristocracy, he returns to Wahlheim.  He becomes increasingly obsessed with Lotte and around Christmas Eve, after she tells him to leave for the last time, he goes home and shoots himself in the head with Albert's pistols, which he had borrowed.  The end.

Werther's voice absolutely dominates the novel and I would probably argue he's the only actual character in it.  There is an editor "character" who makes some footnotes throughout and has ostensibly collected the accounts of what happened during Werther's final exchange with Lotte and the aftermath of the shooting, which Werther obviously did not write letters about, but other than the little bit of Lotte we get at the very end, everything is completely filtered through Werther's perceptions.  (I wonder if that's going to come up again later....)

A Summary of the Opera

The opera's plot, though distilled, is largely the same but it has some small yet important differences. The timeline and a few of the details are fuzzier but the biggest difference is in how the drama is framed.

After a prologue of sorts where the Bailiff, Lotte's father, sings Christmas songs with his younger children while Lotte gets ready for a ball, Werther shows up explicitly to escort Lotte to the dance.  After the dance, which happens offstage, they return to her home at the end of the night with him hopelessly in love with her.  She then gets word that her fiancé Albert has returned, and she sadly sings:

Yes, the one my mother made me swear to accept for husband.

God is my witness for a moment near you

I had forgotten the oath that reminds me!

Werther hangs about after Lotte and Albert are married and both Lotte's sister and Albert try to cheer him up.   Charlotte later asks him to go, but says he should return on Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve he returns, they sing for a while and then she tells him to leave for the last time.  Werther takes Albert's pistol, leaves, and then shoots himself.   Lotte finds him and they sing a duet.  Lotte sings about how she loves him.  He dies.  The end.

The Opera Orlando Production

The Opera Orlando production I saw was part of their "Opera on the Town" series, where at least once a year they do a production in a real location rather than on a stage.  Werther was set at Sydonie Mansion in Mount Dora, FL.  The 42 room mansion was built by Pittsburgh steel magnate James Laughlin (of Jones and Laughlin Steel) in the 1880s.   It's been renovated a few times and was opened as a public historical site in 2014.

Each of the opera's four acts were in a different part of the mansion grounds and used only the existing environment for sets.  It was sung in English, as there's no way to do supertitles given the setup, and the music was a solo piano reduction of the orchestral score played by Nathan Cicero.

The On the Town performances are smaller scale, so in contrast to a show in a big space, it's a pretty intimate experience.  You can actually see the actors faces and the details of their acting choices.  Overall the performances were well calibrated to the smaller setting.  A standout example for me was Thandolwethu Mamba's Albert at the end of act 2, where Albert really realizes the depths of Werther's fixation on Lotte and the weird love triangle he's now in.  A lot went across his face and I really liked how he mostly composed himself when Lotte's father came in to the scene; to the audience it's clear that he isn't quite at "socialize with father-in-law" mode yet, but to Lotte's father who didn't hear what we just did, it would have been convincing.  There was also some ambiguity about whether he did manage to put it all out of his mind or if he was just fronting.

I had never heard any of the music from Werther before, and much of it was very impressive and, perhaps unsurprisingly, really well sung.  Lotte's Act 3 aria (sung by Chelsea Laggan) "va! laissez couler mes larmes" ("Let my tears flow") and the final duet between Lotte and Gabriel Preisser's Werther were both incredibly affecting and very beautiful.

The crowd for these events is always game and it was a fun environment, even for a melodramatic downer like Werther.  I appreciate that while Opera Orlando clearly takes the craft and performances seriously, they also strive for accessibility and always seem like they're enjoying putting on these shows and the enthusiasm carries over into the audience, which is generally having a merry time.  To quote the wife of Gary Simpson, who played Lotte's father, "There's some great baritone hair going on today."

The mansion itself, serving as Lotte's house, was a beautiful and interesting setting (though it was a hot day and 3 of the 4 acts were outdoors).  Having Weather's suicide happen right on Lotte's doorstep rather than back at his apartment as in the novel and libretto does make him more explicitly a dick than he is in the source material, but if you told me that was a deliberate choice by stage director Grant Preisser and not an unavoidable consequence of the location, I would believe you.  (More on "I Think Werther Is a Giant Dick," later.)

I don't know the opera well enough to pick up on how much this production may have tweaked the show, but the cast was smaller on than in the libretto.  The changes resulting from this are on the order of "I think the characters Schmidt and Johann were conflated together" and resulted in no ill effect. (In that example, both characters are purely expositional, only present in the first act, and essentially interchangeable.  I don't think they are even in the novel; if they are they didn't make much of an impression.)

Overall, I really enjoyed this performance and would love to see this opera again.

(Also, after Werther shoots himself, there was so much blood that Gabe Preisser looked like he got lit up by RoboCop.  It wasn't distracting at the time, but it made me chuckle later.)

Novel vs Opera

Note:  There seems to be a lot of varying opinions on whether Lotte reciprocates Werther's affections in the novel, so do take my perspective with a grain of salt.  I think it's a sign of a great work that people can engage with it in good faith and come away with different takes.

Note 2: Any quote from the opera libretto is from the Opera Arias Database version. From memory, there are some small differences between it and what the Opera Orlando performers were singing, but the gist is the same.

As I said earlier, the plots of the novel and the opera are pretty close in the broad strokes, but the effects diverge a lot due to the differences in interiority and framing, two ideas that are deeply interconnected in novel.

Werther is a very educated and articulate narrator and he's dramatic to the point where I honestly didn't trust that the events he was describing went down the way he said they did.  Several times Werther would describe an interaction with Lotte in breathless terms and I'd think to myself "Dude, I don't think her reaction means what you think it does."  His propensity for navel gazing and rumination, while making his character more richly defined, accessible, and explicable than he is in the opera, also means his head is so far up his own ass that he's not a reliable narrator.  He's, in a sense, too interior to have objective reliability.

I definitely think this unreliability was Goethe's intent and it affects how the events of the plot are framed.

The opera is not told from Werther's perspective and the shorthand of the medium plus the rather beautiful music means the ambiguity of the novel's central relationship is basically nonexistent, which pushes the work firmly into romantic tragedy rather than a tale of the growing obsession of Goethe's "unstable young man."  (Which is how the novel's diegetic editor refers to him.)  That's not a criticism of the opera, it's just something that was altered in adaptation.

Opera Lotte obviously loves Werther more than platonically all the way back in Act 1 and her final duet with him puts a romantic exclamation mark on the relationship.  The novel has none of this final summation or catharsis, ending about 7 paragraphs after Werther shoots himself.  The editor relates nothing that Lotte said in the aftermath, only noting that she was miserable.  I wouldn't quite go so far as to say it's what June and i call a "non-ending" but it's certainly anticlimactic compared to the emotional bombast of the opera.  Werther's death in the novel is also decidedly unromantic; he takes hours to die and is paralyzed and non-responsive the entire time.

In essence the opera glorifies the romantic interpretation of Werther that Goethe seemed concerned about, almost like it were a version of Fight Club where the original satirical point is lost and the faux alpha shenanigans become aspirational rather than cautionary.  (So basically how a lot of chuds actually interpret Fight Club.)

A few things I thought were a little odd in the opera made more sense after reading the novel, or at the very least I understood how it came out of the adaptation process.  In the opera it's fuzzy how much time has passed and how much time Werther and Lotte have spent together.  Albert arrives the same night that they meet.

The book plays out differently.  Werther is escorting someone else to the dance and meets Lotte in the carriage.  He visits her for months before Albert returns.

The end of Act II thing where Lotte tells Werther to come back on Christmas Eve (a few  months away) was really bewildering at the time and is a shuffle and condensation of what happens in the novel.  In the book after his long absence in Weimar, Werther is getting intense around Christmas time and Lotte tells him to come back on Christmas Eve so it's more "You're being weird come back in a few days when everyone else is here too" and less "come see me in 9 months for some reason."

None of this is a big deal in the opera as the emotionality and not the lore schedule is the focus and the important part.

Characters

Werther

The framing and depth differences between Novel Werther and Opera Werther don't shift the character as dramatically as, say, the adaptation of Edgar into Edgardo from Bride of Lammermoor to Lucia di Lammermoor.  Opera Werther is still recognizably Novel Werther, there's just has less of a window into his mind.

Maybe I'm just getting old but I very much don't like Werther, the character.  In the opera I disliked him by the end of act 1; in the novel I felt more empathy for him, at least in the first half, but his devolution and obsession goes so much harder in the novel that by the end I think that, though he was easier to pity, I disliked him even more.  The book is really well written and Werther is very well realized, for better and for worse.  His unraveling feels very realistic and plausible.

Both versions of Werther are self-centered and tend to breeze past other people's thoughts and emotions.  The moment in the opera where I first thought 'Man, screw this guy" was in Act 1 when Lotte mournfully sings this about her mother's death:

If you had known her!

Ah! the cruel thing to see and leave what we have most dear!What tender memories and what bitter regret!Why is everything perishable?The children felt this very strongly;They often ask in an inconsolable tone:Why black men took away mom?

And Werther responds with:

Dream! Ecstasy! Happiness!I would give my life to keep those eyes forever,this charming forehead, this adorable mouth, astonished and delighted,Without being looked down on for a moment!The heavenly smile! Oh! Charlotte!

I like you, I love you, and I admire you!

My dude, are you even listening to what this woman you claim to love is saying?

This moment doesn't really happen in the book but I think it really captures something that is very present in Novel Werther.   He frequently goes into transmit mode and doesn't bother trying to read the room, like in the carriage ride to the ball when Lotte mentions how much she likes reading:

I did my best to hide the emotions her words aroused in me. I didn't succeed very well because, when I heard her speak casually and very candidly about The Vicar of Wakefield [...] I was quite beside myself and told her all I knew of them and only after quite some time had passed, and Lotte turned suddenly to address the other, did I notice that they had been sitting there goggle-eyed, & if they weren't sitting there at all! The cousin looked down her nose at me several times, but I didn't care. (p37)

(Side note: Is this an analog to the 500 Days of Summer elevator scene where Tom is blown away by Summer also liking the Smiths?)

Novel Werther doesn't find out about Lotte's mother dying and how Lotte had to take on the maternal responsibility for her siblings until August 10th, after he's been supposedly hanging on her every word for two months.  And he hears it from Albert, not Lotte.  So...what have they actually been talking about?  In general, Werther relates a stunningly small amount of Lotte's actual words in his letters.  It feels like he relays more direct more quotes from Albert.

Werther also says shit like this in reference to Albert and Lotte:

[Albert] might be the best, the most noble man in the world, and I would be glad to subordinate myself to him in any capacity whatsoever, but I would find it insufferable to see him take possession of so much perfection. To take possession... (p55) [emphasis mine]

Fuck you, Werther.

Maybe that kind of thing wouldn't have stood out in the 18th Century, but to a reader in 2025 it's really crappy.  Lotte is a thing to be possessed and is characterized not as a real person, but an idol Werther can worship.

An Outside View - The "Lovestruck" Peasant

In the novel, Werther benefits greatly from first impression and protagonist bias as he is the first character we encounter and we spend almost all of our time hearing his version of events. This means the reader is likely to stay sympathetic and give him the benefit of the doubt far longer than they would if he was not the point of view character.  If you Rashomon this story and look at it from Lotte's perspective, it's potentially horrifying.

Again, I think that's intentional and is really emphasized by the story's inclusion of the "lovestruck" peasant.  At the beginning of his stay in Wahlheim, Werther meets a man who is  in the service of a widow he is desperately in love with and wants to marry.  Much later, after Werther returns to Wahlheim he encounters the man again who recounts how he was fired.  As Werther relates the story:

It was as if he were pursued by demons until, one day, when be knew that she was in one of the upstairs rooms, he went to her there-more than that, he was drawn to her.  She wouldn't give in to him, so he tried to take her by force. He didn't know what came over him. As God was his witness, his intentions had always been honorable, and he had never longed for anything so much in his life as that she should marry him. After he had spoken on and on like this for a while, he became hesitant, like someone who has more on his mind but is afraid to speak out. At last he shyly confessed to the small intimacies she had allowed him and how close she had let him draw. (p88)

Werther doesn't react at all to the, you know, "tried to take her by force" thing and only focuses on the tragedy of the widow's subsequent rejection of the man.  I find the line about "how close she had let him draw" really troubling.  Both the man and Werther accept the "she secretly really likes me" as the only explanation for why she let him draw so close and don't entertain any other explanations like, I dunno, maybe she was afraid of the obsessed man who just assaulted her and didn't want him to escalate?

Later, the man is arrested for murdering his replacement, whom he was convinced was going to marry the widow. He says "No one shall have her, and she shall have no one." (p105)

Neither the servant's story about his dismissal nor his conviction for murder is a wake-up call for Werther.  Werther calls him "unfortunate" and in fact goes to court to try to get him set free.  (It does not work.)

I read this parallel situation as Goethe's condemnation of Werther.  A "dear reader, this is what Werther looks like from outside his own head."  Werther, of course, focuses on the cruelty of true love denied, and sees the peasant lad's situation as a template rather than a warning:

One of us three must go and I wish to be the one. Oh, my dearest one, the thought of murdering your husband .. you ... me, has often raged through my torn heart. So be it then.  (p113)

There's a self-aggrandizing element, here, of "Obviously I have to kill one of us but aren't I noble for choosing myself?"  Werther.  Buddy.  You could also just leave.

It's worth repeating that, as much as I disliked the character, Werther's devolution in the novel is compellingly written and verisimilitudinous.  Goethe captures a mind in its own echo chamber, radicalizing by devouring itself:

Everything disagreeable that had ever happened to him in his active life-his grievance against the embassy, every failure that had hurt him-now ran rampant through his tormented mind. He let it justify his idleness, he felt cut off from all hope of ever again being able to regain a firm grip on life. Thus he finally drew closer to his sad end, lost in a fantastic sensitivity and infinite passion, in the eternal monotony of a sad intercourse with the gracious and beloved creature whose inner repose he disturbed, stormy in the powers that were left him, working them off with no goal, no prospects. p107

None of this is in the opera which contributes to its sincere romantic tragedy vibe.  Opera Werther is a more opaque version of the novel character, as if we were just dropping into the  events described in the journal entries, without any of the interstitial musings.  It makes his internal weather harder to track, and you don't see his unraveling as in the novel and I sympathized with him far less.   (Though novel Werther burned through most of that sympathy about the time he was bemoaning the "unfortunate man" who assaulted a woman and then murdered someone.)

Admittedly, an opera-goer less grumpy or more romantically inclined than I am might have more compassion for Werther because of how the opera handles Lotte.

Lotte

Lotte is far more present in the opera than in the novel.  Sure, novel Werther talks about her a lot, but does very little to reveal who she actually is and what she feels about anything, especially given his narrative unreliability.   Most of what Werther relays as direct-ish address are her scolding him for being intense or saying things like:

"For heaven's sake," she told me today, "please, I beg of you, no more scenes like the one in the garden last night." (p56)

Their interactions in the novel, filtered through Werther, have a great deal of ambiguity, and I often found myself feeling like she was distinctly annoyed by him.  Opera Lotte doesn't really have this ambiguity and her feelings for him are pretty apparent even at the end of act 1, where at the first mention of Albert she sings to Wether the line I quoted above:

Yes, the one my mother made me swear to accept for husband ...

Gods is my witness for a moment near you ...I had forgotten the oath that reminds me!

Both parts of this play slightly differently in the novel, where during the dance a woman waggles her finger at Lotte and says "Albert" and Lotte only says to Werther "Why shouldn't you know? Albert is a good man and you might say I am engaged to him." (p40)  It's ambiguous as to whether the waggling warning was because Lotte seemed like she was having too much fun or because Werther was.  (Lot of Ws in that sentence.)

Also, it's pretty clear in the novel that Albert is a long time time friend of the family and he was in the room when Lotte's mother died.  Lotte's mother only said that he and Lotte looked happy and would be happy together.   He and Lotte already knew each other and were presumably close; it's not "I'm dying, promise to marry this dude you've never met."

In Act 3 Opera Lotte sings this:

Werther, Werther.

Who would have told me the place that in my heart he occupies today?Since he left, in spite of me, everything tires me!And my soul is full of him!

In contrast, novel Lotte in the equivalent section thinks (as related by the editor): "If only she could have turned him into a brother at this point, how happy that would have made her!" (p114)

And then when Werther arrives unexpectedly:

Without knowing what she was saying or doing, she proceeded to send messages to two of her friends to come at once - anything so as not to be alone with Werther. (p115)

And finally, in a scene with no book equivalent, the opera versions have their lovely and impassioned duet as Werther is dying.

The opera, then, affirms Werther's version of events and his hopes about Lotte's feelings for him.  The novel is orders of magnitude more ambivalent; Lotte clearly enjoys his company and does realize she harbors a wish to "keep him for herself" (p115) but this comes right on the heels of her wishing he was a brother, so I read that more as she appreciates his attention, but does not see him romantically.

In the introduction to the Signet Classics edition, Marcelle Clements says of Lotte "It is impossible not to see her as a tease, or more profoundly, someone just as crazy as Werther." I would absolutely dispute this.  Liking the attention of someone whose company you enjoy does not make you a tease, especially for a woman in 18th Century Germany who was forced by circumstance to be a mother to all her siblings at a young age and probably doesn't have much opportunity to have adult conversations about things that interest her.

I also think Clements's statement about Lotte's "subtle sadism" is incredibly not supported in the text.  We do not get enough of her to make a judgement like this.

Lotte and Werther's second to last interaction, when he shows up to find her alone, is instructive, here:

This much is certain: she was determined to do her best to keep Werther at a distance, and any hesitancy on her part must be attributed to a sincere desire to spare him, since she knew what it would mean to him to stay away and realized that it was as good as impossible for him to do so.  Yet she was more inclined, during this time, to go through with her intention. (p110)

After he waxes poetic about Christmas, Lotte tries "to hide her embarrassment behind a sweet smile" and bids him come back on Christmas Eve when, crucially, everyone else will be present, too.

How many times does a woman have to tell a man to "stop being intense" or even "go away" before she gets promoted out of "tease" category?   

And Clements's interpretation has the undertone that Werther's emotional wreckage is her responsibility not his, something opera Werther would agree with:

Goodbye, then! Charlotte dictated my stop!

(He says this after she walks away from him and says "Farewell for the last time."  The translation in the Opera Orlando production was something like "Charlotte has killed me")

I think this is as good a segue as any into...

"Awful Incel Shit, Mason"

I was kind of surprised about how much Novel Werther sounded like what I've seen on the /r/niceguys subreddit.   A Nice Guy is a man who feels entitled to romantic affection from women just because they are nice, often speaking of them in worshipful terms, and then going hostile when they are rebuffed.  There also tends to be a "why did you cruelly lead me on?" phase in the interactions, usually in response to basic human politeness or even barely veiled embarrassment by the woman in question, all of which is present in Werther's words (and Clements's introduction, for that matter.)

The emotional burden and blame is shifted to the woman and there's often this indignation that she could dare not love someone who says such nice things about her.  As Werther himself says in the novel:

Sometimes I simply cannot understand how she can love another, how she dare - since I love her alone, so deeply, so fully, and recognize nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her! (p87)

Fucking yikes.

It doesn't seem to matter much if the woman is with someone else either; "I'd treat you better than him" is a frequent refrain.  Again to quote Werther (who makes a habit of showing up when he knows Albert is gone):

And do I dare say it? Why not, William? She would have been happier with me. He is not the man to fulfill all her desires. A certain lack of sensitivity, a lack ... oh, put it any way you like... his heart does not respond to certain passages in a book over which Lotte's and mine would meet, and on a hundred other occasions... (p86)

Werther's bristling response to being challenged also rings familiar:

His jaw set hard, he looked at her somberly. [Lotte] held fast to his hand. "Think calmly, Werther," she said, "for the evening and for just one moment. Don't you see that you are deceiving and ruining yourself on purpose? Why me, Werther? Why me of all people, who belongs to another? Why? I fear ... l fear that it is just the impossibility of possessing me that makes your desire for me so fascinating."

He drew his hand out of hers, and stared at her with a benumbed, resentful expression.

"Very clever!" he said. "Very clever. Are these perhaps Albert's words? Very politic, very politic, indeed." (p111)

Werther's angry thoughts of killing, parallel to the actual actions of the "lovestruck" peasant, makes him drift out of Nice Guy adjacent into incel territory:

Oh, my dearest one, the thought of murdering your husband .. you ... me, has often raged through my torn heart. So be it then.  (p113)

It all feels rather... modern?  I guess human behavior hasn't changed very much.

Gallimaufry

• Kristen Marie-Gillis who played Sophie in the Opera Orlando production was a joy and always has such great chemistry with everyone.

• It's really funny seeing Gabe being all maudlin and melancholy.  Except for 1 villainous-ish turn in Lucia di Lammermoor, I've only see him do comic parts.

• Werther likes Homer a lot, and has this quite funny line early on while describing the bucolic appeal of Wahlheim:

...when I then go into the small kitchen and get a pan and melt some butter and put the pan on the fire to cook them and cover them and sit down beside them to toss them a little every now and then - I can feel so vividly how Penelope's high-spirited suitors slaughtered oxen and swine and carved them up and roasted them. Nothing can fill me with such true, serene emotion as any features of ancient primitive life like this.  (p43)

Ah yes, the beacons of idyllic serenity that are Penelope's suitors in the Odyssey, those ill behaved men trying to force marriage on a woman who wants them to piss off.  Werther might want to read that story again...

• When novel Werther leaves Lotte and makes residence in Weimar, he manages to not talk about her in his letters for quite a long time and even strikes up a friendship with a Fraulein von B.  If you didn't know the title of the novel, this respite would almost make it seem like he was getting better and moving on.  But then he tells William how much Fraulein von B loves Lotte and loves hearing him talk about her.  It's honestly a really sad moment.  He was never getting better and was probably talking the Fraulein's ear off about another woman.  I'd hazard a guess that there's no way she enjoyed that.

• In the opera when Weather returns in Act 3 to Lotte's drawing room he gets an almost villainous musical sting for his entrance.  Which I am on board with.

• The part in Act 3 where Werther reads his translation of Ossian's letters to Lotte has great and very powerful music.  (I found the book equivalent to be kind of a drag.  God, does he read for a long time.)

• Novel Lotte might have enjoyed his company but man it sounds like it was exhausting.

• I mentioned how in the novel the only real details about Lotte are given by the editor, who could have only gotten them from Lotte herself.  I suppose one could argue maybe she didn't tell the complete truth and hid that she actually loved Werther but there's nothing from the editor that frames it this way.

• I think it's interesting that in the novel there's not grand declaration to William about his return to Wahlheim.  He just sort of drifts back in to town.  I wasn't sure whether to read this as the unconscious drift of a man who'd lost his way, or if he was perhaps too embarrassed to mention to his friend he was planning on returning.

• In the 2009 film (500) Days of Summer, Summer calls Tom, the lovesick protagonist, "Young Werther."  Check out this interesting essay "The Sorrows of Unrequited Love: A Comparative Study of Tom Hanson and Young Werther" by Denise Velarde

• I found the following passage in the novel really striking:

When I walk out of the gate, the way I drove when 1 went to fetch Lotte for the dance how different things were then! All past, all over and done with! Not a trace left of that bygone world, not a heartbeat of my former emotions. I feel like a ghost who returns to the burnt-out, ruined castle he built when he was a virile prince, and furnished with all the treasure of a glorious life, and left hopefully to his beloved son.  (p86)

Conclusion

Man, screw Werther.  But, yeah, The Sorrows of Young Werther the novel and Werther the opera are both really good and well worth checking out.  Now that I know the story it's condensed from, I really want to see the opera again and see if I react to anything differently.   

The novel is extremely well written, paced briskly, and is relatively short at around 120 pages. I would recommend it with no hesitation and I would definitely be curious to hear how other people interpret the events.

To any interested parties, the novel is certainly easier to experience, but Opera Orlando did  recommend the 1985 Prague Symphony recording starring Peter Dvorsky and Brigitte Fassbender, available on Amazon.

But be a dignified man and do not follow in Werther's footsteps.

-m