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Rhiannon Giddens: He's a poet. He speaks in terms of moonlight and love. Maybe sort of the naughty boy. She realizes that she wants to run away with this man and have a wild, passionate love affair. From WQXR in the Metropolitan Opera, this is Aria Code. I'm Rhiannon Giddens.

Peter Bognanni: I would have expected that maybe we would get some bold proclamation of love here. But instead, what we're getting is the most dire and morose kind of situation that someone could possibly be in.

Rhiannon Giddens: Every episode, we pull apart one aria to see how it works, and then we bring it back together so you can hear it in a whole new way. Today we go through the pages of the letter aria from Massenet's Werther.

Isabel Leonard: His words and her feelings, they all just sort of come together. The floodgates open, and it's chilling. It's so chilling.

Rhiannon Giddens: So I admit it. I once fell in love over text. I didn't see it coming. All I knew was that day after day, I was texting this guy for hours, morning, noon and night. It was a really intense experience. I was just really struck with how amazing a way to get to know somebody it is because you're not looking at them, you're not distracted by, you know, "Oh, is my hair right?" You're not thinking about any of that stuff because all they can see are your words.

It makes me think about how we communicate and how things have changed over the years, but then how things haven't changed, because when we think about when people wrote letters, and we tend to think of letter writing, like paper, pen, you sort of put your thoughts in order, and then you write an essay and you send it off to somebody.

Back in the day, people were writing what they were feeling at the moment. It was a much more urgent form of communication than we think of it. I think letters fascinate us so much because they're so intimate and personal. They're pure communication. Maybe that's why writers and composers turn to them, to show us who their characters really are. That's exactly what's happening in the letter aria from Massenet's Werther.

Now, this opera is based on an 18th century novel by Goethe called The Sorrows of Young Werther. It's about a young poet named Werther who falls in love with a woman he can't have and commits suicide. Her name is Charlotte. She's engaged to Albert, who's stable but boring, which often go hand in hand, I'm Afraid. She meets Werther and he immediately steals her heart. But she's taken and it's the 1700s, so it's kind of a non-starter. She sends Werther away and she tells him not to come back till Christmas.

Cut to Christmas Eve. Charlotte's home alone and she pulls out a stack of letters from Werther and begins to reread them. Now remember, Werther is a poet, so he can lay it on pretty thick. Charlotte takes it all to heart. This letter aria is the moment in the opera when the music really shows us the depth of her love and anguish. Now, everybody's had their fair share of love and anguish, am I right? But our three decoders think about it for a living.

Isabel Leonard: Je vous écris de ma petite chambre, right? Just so pretty.

Rhiannon Giddens: First up is mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, who sings the role of Charlotte.

Isabel Leonard: She is one of the characters who I love dearly and feel for dearly.

Rhiannon Giddens: Next is pianist Mary Dibbern.

Mary Dibbern: Hi.

Rhiannon Giddens: She's the music director of education and family programs for Dallas Opera and a Massenet enthusiast.

Mary Dibbern: Probably because I lived for 31 years in Paris and I worked with a lot of the great opera singers and the great opera texts.

Rhiannon Giddens: We also have Peter Bognanni.

Peter Bognanni: Well, you can just call me Peter.

Rhiannon Giddens: Cool. A writer and creative writing professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Peter Bognanni: I read The Sorrows of Young Werther in college, and I could totally identify with this frenzied emotional state. On the other hand, too, I thought maybe he was a little bit moody and emo.

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Rhiannon Giddens: Dear listener, the weather's fine, thinking of you, and hope you're ready for the letter aria from Massenet's Werther.

Mary Dibbern: Charlotte is a young woman. She's the oldest of a lot of children, and before her mother dies, she promises her mother to take care of all of these children, which is one of the reasons she gets hooked into a marriage with a man in town named Albert.

Isabel Leonard: Charlotte has a heartbreakingly tragic sense of duty to her family, to her mother, and she takes all of these things upon her without question.

Mary Dibbern: Meanwhile, a man named Werther comes to town and bowls her over. He's a poet. He speaks in terms of moonlight and love, maybe sort of the naughty boy. He falls in love with her at first sight. And suddenly she realizes that she wants to run away with this man and have a wild, passionate love affair. But she knows that she can't because she's engaged to Albert.

Peter Bognanni: Albert is kind of the steady, boring guy who's devoted and has some money, but he can't dazzle like Werther. This is a time where your husband and your husband's wealth determines the entirety of your future. She has to consider those things.

Mary Dibbern: So she makes a hard decision. She sends him away.

Isabel Leonard: It is just so tragic. It's so sad.

Mary Dibbern: But then he writes her a series of letters.

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Peter Bognanni: There's an incredible opportunity for intimacy in any kind of written communication. I had a relationship that was based a lot on email. Basically, the way it happened was that we met in college and we dated for, I think, maybe two months. Then she was supposed to leave for Spain to do a study abroad program. We didn't really make any promises to one another because it felt pretty early in our relationship, even any promises about how much we would be in communication. Then slowly we started emailing each other almost every day, and I was really looking forward to those messages in a way that I didn't know that I would.

Mary Dibbern: So it's Christmas Eve, Charlotte is sitting at a table in a small room in her very modest house, and she's thinking about Werther.

Isabel Leonard: She's been receiving letters from Werther for quite some time. She probably has a very large stack of them that she has been hiding, and she goes back to this stack of letters pretty frequently.

Mary Dibbern: She's wondering about who he is with, what he's doing, and she's obsessively rereading these letters.

Peter Bognanni: She starts off by saying his name twice.

Mary Dibbern: First very softly, and Massenet writes dreaming. Then she says it louder, mezzo forte, as if she's calling out to him.

Peter Bognanni: And doing it in a way that is both, maybe a realization, but also very pained.

Isabel Leonard: It's one of those moments, just even the way she says it, the weight, the depth of it all, it's everything. It's the entire aria in his name in the beginning. So very simply, she could have for the entire seven minutes just said his name and you still would have understood, I think, everything. She goes on to say, "How is it that this person holds my heart so deeply?"

Mary Dibbern: Qui m'aurait dit la place. Who would have told me what place he would have had in my heart? As if she doesn't understand herself what this emotion is.

Isabel Leonard: I think she's trying to understand because there is this otherworldly hold that they have on each other. Because she's alone, you see how she feels. You see really who she is and her inner thoughts about the whole thing.

Peter Bognanni: Well, I think part of the reason why Charlotte is reading the Letters is because she wants to feel the presence of Werther even though he's absent. I think that there's perhaps a little bit of a connection there where I certainly reread emails thinking, "This person's not here, this person's not going to be here for a long time. I can kind of evoke her presence a little bit just by rereading these messages." But there also is something painful about reading a message from a person who it's impossible to see in front of you.

Mary Dibbern: In the first letter that Charlotte reads, the music is very slow and it's descending, but it's quite mysterious. The strings in the bass are also in open chords with not a lot of harmony, but parallel motion coming up and down the scale. It creates a very beautiful mood.

Peter Bognanni: Charlotte starts to read from the first snippet of a letter that she has in front of her. Werther says, "I'm writing you from my little room. A gray and heavy sky of December weighs on me like a shroud, and I am alone, always alone."

Isabel Leonard: It starts in this sort of a hanging sound, like this sound where the air is very still and very cold. That first chord and these little plunk, plunk, plunk sounds that come out in the orchestra. It's just eerily hanging in the air.

Mary Dibbern: The mood of the gray sky is really beautifully depicted by these chords, very, very quiet that descend and come up and down as if they're clouds or smoke. She reads just a fragment of this first letter and suddenly she interrupts herself and she almost screams out.

Peter Bognanni: Ah, there's nobody with him. Not a single bit of evidence of tenderness or even of pity.

Mary Dibbern: Then she screams out to God and she says, "How did I have the courage to make him go away and be so lonely?" In this moment of regret, the vocal line is very passionate and very beautifully written, and it's higher. Then suddenly the orchestra swoops up under her and lifts up to where she screams out the name of God. Then the orchestra leaves again and she's by herself.

Isabel Leonard: She just feels so guilty, and she takes his depression as her responsibility as well. The things that she would have to go to therapy for, right? It's not all your responsibility, Charlotte.

Mary Dibbern: So you can see already that he's starting to manipulate her by only telling her sad things. He's really doing a number on her.

Peter Bognanni: So slowly, this person I'd only been dating for a couple of months, and I started to exchange emails almost every day. Her from Spain and me from a warehouse in downtown Minneapolis. I think that we hadn't really gotten a chance to get to know each other that well over a couple of months. There were a lot of things that we hadn't talked about yet because we hadn't sort of reached that level of intimacy yet.

What started to happen when we were emailing was that those things started to come out. We started really talking about our lives and what was important in them. In a way, I think some of the things that we talked about in our emails were actually more intimate, more vulnerable than some of the conversations that we'd had in person. Maybe some of this was because of the distance and the fact that I wasn't going to see her tomorrow.

Mary Dibbern: The second letter that she reads starts with an introduction that always sounds to me like birds chirping. So it's quite unexpected. You get the woodwinds and you get this little bird figure. Suddenly it's very happy music.

Isabel Leonard: It's more upbeat. It has a lighter, happier energy to it, and I think it's important, especially in playing this scene, to have all the different ups and downs. You know, it can't all be sad. It can't all be down and depressing.

Peter Bognanni: She says, "Joyful cries of children rise, and I think of the time, so sweet, when all your dear little ones were playing around us."

Mary Dibbern: You think that the mood is lifting, and then gradually you realize that, no, he's manipulating her again. But that's okay, because the music is so beautiful, and maybe it gives the singer a little bit of relief to sing this melody that's not quite as heavy and sad. So he gives her a little break there vocally, and he gives the audience a break, too.

Isabel Leonard: I remember doing this aria that every time a new little section would come in, I would go, "Oh." That feeling of little waves. Right? Here's the next wave, and here's the next wave. There was something incredibly rejuvenating every time a new section would come on, even if the larger mood of the piece got heavier and heavier.

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Peter Bognanni: I think the email that I sent that caused me the most anxiety was when I sort of made a leap from just kind of casually letting her know that I was still interested in her, to really laying that on the line. After I hit send on that email, I felt like maybe I had just blown it, that there was going to be a response that was like, "You're coming on too strong. Remember, I'm in Spain, you're in Minnesota. We're not actually dating."

Mary Dibbern: He ends this little outburst about the children with the question, "Will they forget me?" Charlotte answers-

Isabel Leonard: "No, no, no, no." We all remember you, essentially.

Mary Dibbern: And she says, "But will he come back?"

Peter Bognanni: This seems to me like the moment where she sort of fully realizes that he may not. This could potentially be the end of him.

Mary Dibbern: She says, "Oh, this last letter terrifies me," and there's this huge outburst in the orchestra. Then what you call tremolo, which is when the strings are doing a non-rhythmic sound. It's a frightening sound. It's a sound like you hear in horror movies. So she pulls out the last letter. He has this very dramatic idea in his head that he will kill himself on Christmas Eve and she will get the letter and it will be too late, and he is punishing her for sending him away.

Isabel Leonard: The floodgates open in those last couple pages. It's also vocally very dramatic. The vocal writing is relentless, actually. It's one of those places where you know you have to get there when you start the aria. Again, all those ups and downs, you play them as best as you can because you still need almost everything you have at the end of that aria.

Peter Bognanni: She reads, "If I should reappear, do not accuse me, weep for me."

Isabel Leonard: His words and her feelings, they all just sort of come together. It's chilling. It's so chilling. But I believe that Massenet, through his writing and the music, you can tell that he empathizes with the complexity of the love and the pain that she is going back and forth with all the time in the piece.

Peter Bognanni: But there is something a little malicious about the end of that letter. He's essentially saying, "When you find out what happens, you're going to cry so much that you dampen this letter with your tears. This is going to completely unmoor you and you will tremble. You will tremble, you will tremble."

Mary Dibbern: Werther is a psycho. Let's face it.

Isabel Leonard: It leaves her nowhere, right? Which is, in a sense, where she began. She has no way of fixing this in the sense of responsibility that she has. She can't fix it.

Mary Dibbern: The orchestra comes down, down, down, down into the depths of her despair. You might wonder why I'm so interested in Massenet. Oh, I just think it sounds beautiful. But more than that, I think, is because the singers love to sing Massenet's music, and they find that the psychology of the character is really beautifully portrayed in his music. It allows them to each create an individual interpretation of each opera. That's one of the reasons Massenet has performed so much. You never get tired of it because there's always something new you can find within the music, within the orchestra that each singer uses to bring out his or her character.

Isabel Leonard: I'm such an empath that it's hard for me sometimes not to feel so much for these characters. I think it's a good thing, but it can also take its toll on you at the end of the night. However, I think when you really delve into these characters and you allow yourself to empathize with the characters and their struggles, you learn so much about human nature. You learn why the brain goes there, why the mind makes these choices, and you become naturally more understanding of others, but as well, I think, of yourself.

Peter Bognanni: So we continued to write to one another, and it was all leading up to this moment where we would actually see each other in person again. I couldn't help wondering, "Well, what's it going to be like when we see each other in person again? Is this something that is only going to work as a communication online, or are we going to be able to build on this and have a real relationship?" That woman is now my wife. We've been married for 10 years and we have two kids. Ever since that time, I have written her an actual physical letter every year on her birthday. [laughs]

Rhiannon Giddens: That was mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, pianist Mary Dibbern, and writer Peter Bognanni decoding the letter aria from Massenet's Werther. Now here's Isabel to sing it for us live on stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

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Rhiannon Giddens: I got to say, Charlotte's not the only one trembling at the end of that aria. Especially after Isabel Leonard's performance. Well, that's it for this episode of Aria Code. If you've been listening and enjoying the show, maybe take some inspiration from Werther and write us a note. Just head over to iTunes and leave us a review. We promise your love will be requited. Also, it really helps us out.

Aria Code is a co-production of WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera. Our producer is Merrin Lazyan, Brendan Francis Newnam is our editor and Matt Abramovitz is our executive producer. Sound design and mixing by Matt Boynton and original music by Hannis Brown. Our team also includes Khrista Rypl and Justin Hicks. Special thanks, of course, to Isabel Leonard, Mary Dibbern and Peter Bognanni for their insights. I can't believe it, but our next episode is the last for this season and it's going to be a good one. We're closing out with-- Yes, finally, we get to Carmen.

Speaker 5: When you think about operatic cliché, number one is probably the fat lady in the Viking helmet, as it were. But number two is probably the seductive gypsy of Carmen complete with lace fan and voluptuous curves and come-hither eyes batting at you.

Rhiannon Giddens: Signing off with fond regards, yours truly, Rhiannon Giddens.

 

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