First premiered in German at the Kaiserlich-Königliche Hofoper in Vienna on February 16, 1892, and then triumphantly received in its French version a few months later in Geneva, Werther by Massenet has stood the test of time. But what did the world look like when this operatic masterpiece first came to life?
The late 19th century now seems like a world of its own, caught between age-old traditions and the first stirrings of modernity. In Paris, the first electric trams had just started to weave through the streets, yet most were still horse-drawn. The Eiffel Tower, inaugurated three years earlier for the 1889 World’s Fair, was still considered by many as a temporary curiosity rather than a permanent fixture of the skyline.
Electricity—this invisible revolution—was only beginning to light up the major boulevards and the homes of the privileged few in Europe’s great cities. Early automobiles, both fascinating and terrifying, remained rare, noisy, and unreliable. Most city dwellers, and even more so those in rural areas, still lived by rhythms and customs that belonged more to the past century than to the era of technological breakthroughs that would explode after the Great War.
Imagine the soundscape of these cities: no constant hum of engines, but instead the rhythmic clatter of hooves on cobblestones, the creaking of wooden wheels, the calls of street vendors, and the murmur of conversations. The very music of daily life was profoundly different from our modern, noise-saturated world.
For the first time, sounds could be recorded. Edison’s phonograph, invented fifteen years earlier, was still a technical marvel in 1892, reserved for the salons of the wealthy or rare public demonstrations. In Paris, a few avant-garde venues offered these “phonographic auditions” as attractions, but in cities like Brussels or Liège, who had yet heard these recorded sounds that now surround us endlessly? Music—including Werther—remained a fleeting, precious experience, one that could only be lived in the presence of its performers.
The year 1892 was a remarkable one for the arts, witnessing the birth of Sherlock Holmes and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. The world of opera was no exception, with the premiere of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in Milan that same year. Among Massenet’s contemporaries, Gustav Mahler was deep in the composition of his Second Symphony, while serving as director of the Hamburg State Opera.
This is the world—both distant and still tangible in the old stones of our cities—into which Werther was born. If Massenet’s masterpiece continues to resonate so deeply in modern theaters, it may be precisely because it transcends the constraints of its time. Beyond period costumes and long-forgotten social conventions, the tormented passions of Goethe’s drama strike at something timeless.
