Passionate Portrait of a Monster

In a foreword to a modern translation of Goethe’s 18th century bestseller “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” W.H. Auden described Werther from the 20th century perspective as a “complete egoist, a spoiled brat, incapable of love because he cares for nobody and nothing but himself and having his way at whatever cost to others.” In other words, “a horrid little monster.”

Yet no character in a novel had, up to that time, quite so captured the popular imagination. To the young women in Goethe’s Germany, dreamy, moon-besotted, suicidally lovesick Werther became the quintessential romantic figure, and oceans of tears were spilled over him. And he does seem an awfully familiar character even now. My generation, in the ‘60s, found the type magnetic--the self-destructive existentialist, self-absorbed dabbler in this and that, passionate though never quite of the world. So had the Beats before us, so does Generation X today.

Jules Massenet clearly encountered the type in Paris late last century as well. His opera “Werther,” which L.A. Opera presented in a new production Wednesday night, is as French as “Carmen.” Bizet’s opera, in fact, was written only a decade earlier than “Werther,” and the two operas--”Carmen” opened the company’s 13th season Tuesday--make an interesting, complementary pair. Each plays off our boundless fascination with unfettered sexual distraction and its wakes of devastation. The transition from the final curtain of “Werther” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the day’s news from Washington on the car radio wasn’t jolting.

L.A. Opera, however, has done its best to keep Massenet’s opera very much in its place and not ours. The production, which comes from Toulouse, offers historical glimpses of Goethe’s Frankfurt, and the period sets and costumes by Hubert Monloup could probably be adapted for 100 other operas or plays. (It will be instructive to compare them with the watercolors from the age of Goethe that opens at the J. Paul Getty Museum in two weeks.)

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Nicolas Joel, artistic director of the Thea^tre du Capitole de Toulouse, oversees a naturalistic production, but one that has an elegant, understated, humanizing flow. That quality also characterizes his brother’s conducting: Emmanuel Joel is just what the cool, colorless sets need to come to life.

Still, the focus remains properly on Werther himself. Ramon Vargas tells us little about Werther, about who he was for Goethe, for Massenet or for the late 20th century. The Mexican tenor seems more hale and hearty than we might imagine someone so easily drawn to distraction and suicide. His gestures are as stock as the sets and costumes. At his worst, he can seem faintly ridiculous in the role, and he even generated a few laughs at inappropriate moments (the English titles weren’t on his side, though).

At his best, however, he sings radiantly. If Vargas--no rarefied aesthete, he--overly thickens the cream of Massenet’s delicately spun melodies or emotes with verismo display, the vocal authority is nonetheless undeniable. He displays an utter sureness of tone that makes one instantly comfortable hearing him. More importantly, his voice produces the special kind of tenorial ring that makes each climax memorable, and the performance as a whole an occasion.

If Vargas is an unusually hotheaded Werther, Paula Rasmussen is an unusually cool Charlotte, although she fits the Goethe model well. (Massenet makes Charlotte a more romantic figure than Goethe did of his Lotte, who does little to encourage Werther’s mad obsessions.) The mezzo-soprano is one of L.A. Opera’s success stories: A former member of the company’s resident artist program, she has matured into a singer who can hold her own against quite a bit of mezzo competition these days. She sang beautifully Wednesday, self-possessed and with a cultivated reserve.

Nicolas Joel and Emmanuel Joel were at their most impressive in balancing the passions of Werther and Charlotte against a more quotidian background. The performance moved with an almost uncanny smoothness. Unerring small portraits of normalcy were offered of Charlotte’s chirpy young sister, Sophie (Jami Rogers); her stoical husband, Albert (Malcolm MacKenzie); her benign father (Dale Travis); and the comic drunks Johann (Roberto Gomez) and Schmidt (Jonathan Mack). The children who sing the Christmas carols that open and close the opera were a delight. Concertmaster Sidney Weiss played the violin solos sweetly and the L.A. Opera Orchestra was as sweetly luminous as I have ever heard it; sweet enough to hold Auden’s “horrid monster” very much at Gallic bay.

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* “Werther” continues Saturday at 2 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 18, 23 and 26 at 7:30 p.m. and Sept. 19 at 2 p.m., $25-$137, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 365-3500, https://www.laopera.org.