Macpherson, Goethe, Werther and the rise of Romanticism
"Pourquoi me réveiller, ô souffle de printemps", sung with such passion by Kaufmann in the role of Werther reading from the manuscript, seems pivotal to the entire opera of Werther. Why is this fragment from Ossian here, why not a first-person aria instead, and why did Massenet (and I believe Goethe) make it so central to the story?
I had only a vague idea about Ossian and its great historical significance until I read the excellent and revealing Wikipedia article about the poems, their perpetrator, and their enormous influence on the rise of Romanticism in Europe and beyond - and then I read on.
In the mid-1700s the Scottish poet James Macpherson (ever heard of him? I hadn't) published a series of epic poems translated by him (he said) from the Gaelic of a third-century poet Oisean, a legendary Irish figure, and set in Scotland's Western Isles. There was always doubt if such ancient manuscripts existed (Samuel Johnson was scathing) and modern analysis methods appear to have largely discredited it as "the world's greatest literary hoax" (Independent).
But fiction if believed can perpetrate wars and religions, force huge social movements, and create genius-level outpourings of great art and literature. So it was with Ossian. Indeed Wordsworth wrote of the bard in Glen-Almain, the Narrow Glen
Does then the bard sleep here indeed? Or is it but a groundless creed? What matters it? – I blame them not Whose fancy in this lonely spot Was moved; and in such way express'd Their notion of its perfect rest. A convent, even a hermit's cell, Would break the silence of this Dell: It is not quiet, is not ease; But something deeper far than these: The separation that is here Is of the grave; and of austere Yet happy feelings of the dead: And therefore, was it rightly said That Ossian, last of all his race! Lies buried in this lonely place.
Europe in the late 18th Century was ready for, and needing, a trigger to sweep away the Age of Enlightenment with its aristocratic sensibilities, its subservience of the personal to society, its formalism, the political-commercial supremacy of born-to-rule educated aristocracy, and above all the self-justifying belief in Reason as the guide to everything (and the province of the few). "Quis custodiet?" Plato might have asked of the Book of Reason. In 1739 my favourite philosopher David Hume (also Scottish) wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions" - thus discarding the Enlightenment philosophies as hollow scholasticism and crafting a new understanding of our belief systems, our understanding of the world, as arising from within us. We create the world, and we create it the way we want to.
And into such a desiccated climate stepped the old and blind bard Ossian and lit a wildfire. Here were tales from a mythic past to rival Homer, stories of war and violence, of murder of loved ones, of people and their fears and dreams. Not for the first time have such topics figured in literature; but maybe it was partly the yearning of the times, partly the misty grey gothic nature of these tales, that sparked the tinder. History, not philosophy, is our guide to understanding.
The lays were rapidly translated throughout Europe, inspiring a new breed of philosophers (in Germany Fichte and Schelling, Hegel -and thus Marx later - and Schlegel, in France Rousseau -and so to the ideals of the French Revolution, in America Jefferson and the writers of the Constitution). The literary revolution was overwhelming - Wordsworth, Keats, Bronte and a host of others in Britain; Dumas, Victor Hugo, Merimée (Carmen). The Hungarian poet Petöfi equated Ossian to Homer as the greatest of the ancients.
But arguably it began in Germany with Goethe who - you guessed it - read Ossian and started writing The Sorrows of Young Werther which created a revolution and itself was rapidly translated. Did all the tales of penniless poets destroyed by an unfeeling society stem from this? In theology dogma and authority was replaced by the spiritual and the individual's direct relationship to The Divine. In visual arts we need only mention Turner and Constable, Delacroix and the later influence on Impressionism.
What of our operas? Andrea Chenier was an appeal to the individualistic ideals of Romanticism - the poet Chenier's primacy of conscience, his appeal to individual liberty, his defence of the downtrodden. But that was pitched in the first act against the ossified Enlightenment values of the aristocracy and in at the end against the brutal authoritarianism of the late Revolution. Individual liberty, the message was, is a delicate flower than can be crushed in many powerful ways. And was. And is.
As to Werther, the man himself is not entirely psychologically realistic. But in common with much of Romantic (and Classical) literature he was more a personification (think Dickens); in this case of Romantic passion and individual creativity, of fighting a battle against Social Norms (Albert personifying them in the Sanctity of Marriage) and of course losing. How much of Romantic literature has this theme? Romanticism made the individual central (so like pre-Enlightenment Humanism) and the central notion of creativity was seen as something unmeasurable, something lying outside science and rationality, and best expressed in art literature music and the spiritual. Its personification was no longer the scientist or philosopher but the poet.
So we see Werther as the Romantic trying in the first act to break passionately into a Sacred Bond - but to him one imposed from the outside not within. Exiled from the world that matters to him by those very norms, his letters as read by Charlotte try to infiltrate it but lead to his undoing. His arrival is to read Ossian. Springtime is dead. Here, I think, Massenet at the end of the Romantic era is making central the Romantic plea for the irrational and creative individual found in Ossian and Goethe. He is asking us to remember the ideals of the Romantic as we move into the Realist Movement and in opera, Verismo.