Okay, I am indebted to mildred mentioning this because I should have realized that I could just ask you about Werther and you would tell me in a way that would explain to me why I should read it, but it... never occurred to me! (Though I am interested in reading it, because it's one of those things I haven't got around to reading yet, I guess it's no surprise that I am interested partially because of the Massenet opera, which I have never seen, and, er, because there's an extant production with a young Thomas Hampson, which is the one I'd see if I watched it :D )
I know in the English speaking world, that entire period of German literature is swept up under the label "Romantic", but that drives every German literature teacher crazy.
This is good to know, because yeah, this is what I have heard. But now I know :)
Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" and "Pamela" are probably the most famous letter-novels in English of the era; Jean-Jaques Rousseau wrote "Julie, or the New Heloise" as his entry to the genre
Oh! I haven't read these but I know them from Pushkin mentioning them in Eugene Onegin :D (Also I believe they showed up in Orieux?) Everything is starting to make sense :P
(He kept in letter writing contact with Charlotte and her husband for some more years, though.)
Until he WROTE THEIR PRIVATE LIVES INTO A BOOK, huh.
not least because it's a court and Werther is a non-noble and gets snubbed by the nobility.
I suppose this isn't fair to Jerusalem, but I find this hilarious given what you've told us about Goethe and Carl August.
(this is also where Kestner wrote an "WTF, Goethe?!?" letter when reading that part of the novel in protest)
Aw, man. I can see why Kestner was not amused.
"Kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet." (This in is contemporary context is a wham last line managing to depict the treatment of suicides by the clergy of both main faiths as heartless without ever saying so.)
Ohhhhh, I see. (And this is the kind of thing I am really glad you are telling me!)
The preamble of the novel, addressing the reader and saying that if for some reason life hadn't granted them a friend, they should regard this book as that friend, even heightened the identification.
Even though the Kestner thing still annoys me, this is actually rather touching to me.
However, Plenzdorf got around censorship in style
Wow, yeah, I like that.
Thank you for this! I shall put it on my (sadly extremely large) stack of things to read :D Though I am thinking that I should read a biography of Goethe first (not that you haven't been awfully helpful with that too), as knowing a bit about Voltaire beforehand certainly helped a lot with Candide :)
The Massenet opera: is a very French and 19th century take. The novel leaves it ambiguous how much Lotte requites Werther's feelings - she likes him, she loves geeking out with him, and she might even be attracted to him, but she does love her fiance/husband, and whether she ever loves Werther is up to debate. And like I said, Albert is NOT the villain of the tale, and even in the second half of the novel when Werther is very Albert-critical, he doesn't find worse things to say than smug, self satisfied, takes Lotte for granted, boring. The opera, otoh, changes this so that Lotte is unquestioningly in love with Werther, is only with Albert because her mother wished that with her dying breath and her father wants it as well, and Albert turns into a domestic tyrant who forbids Lotte Werther's company once they're married. (The novel's Albert never does, he trusts her completely.) This said, the music is beautiful, but much like Gounoud's Faust is not Goethe's Faust, Massenet's Werther is not Goethe's Werther, either. Have an aria anyway. (That's Jonas Kaufmann singing "Pourquoi me reveiller".)
While I'm providing links: Lego Werther, a hilarious summary of the novel in English.
Another trailer, quoting directly from the letter Werther writers after his first encounter with Lotte and showing the locations in Wetzlar (there was A LOT of Werther tourism in the late 18th and then in the 19th century because Goethe had described the locations for the various scenes very recognizably, which was another thing that the Kestners weren't thrilled about)
Also I believe they showed up in Orieux?
They do!
Until he WROTE THEIR PRIVATE LIVES INTO A BOOK, huh.
Well, quite. Thomas Mann wrote a novel called "Lotte in Weimar" about Charlotte Kestner, nee Buff, visiting Weimar 44 years later and basically closing that chapter of her life with one last meeting. By then, she's on the one hand treated by all the Weimar society as a walking, talking bit of literature which both flatters and irritates her, but on the other avoided by Goethe; their one meeting in public is inconclusive and she's dissappointed that he's now so formal and a walking, talking institution, but then they meet again in a carriage and have a real conversation, allowing her to make peace with the past. It's a famous novel (also filmed) but has one problem, and that's Thomas Mann basically writing Goethe as himself. (He very much saw himself as the new Goethe in his life time.) And they were different people with different tempers, to put it simply. (His version is why avid Thomas-Mann-reader Susan Sontag, in her novel about Sir William Hamilton in which Goethe has a cameo showing up in Italy where he meets Sir William and Emma, writes Goethe as Thomas Mann, too,)
Biography of Goethe: postpone that, not just because there is so much else to read, but also because he lived a very long and rich life, and also I don't know which English language biography is good. Otoh, there is a short text available in English which I just ordered for you (also just in case my calendar doesn't arrive), which is one of the "incensed monologues for incensed women" written by Christine Brückner and translated by Eleanor Bron. It's a collection of imaginary speeches by a variety of women, both mythological, historical and from literature, so you get, among others, Desdemona (if she'd actually talked with Othello and he'd heared her out, uninterrupted), Luther's wife Katharina, and Christiane the long time mistress and eventual wife of Goethe. It's a funny and poignant text, no longer than a short story, and the other speeches are great as well.
The opera, otoh, changes this so that Lotte is unquestioningly in love with Werther, is only with Albert because her mother wished that with her dying breath and her father wants it as well, and Albert turns into a domestic tyrant who forbids Lotte Werther's company once they're married.
Aw, man, of course it does, it's a 19th C opera. Grrrr. Okay... maybe I should check out the opera before reading it, I'm less likely to be really irritated :) (Argh, and this reminds me I actually picked up the Faust translation you recommended and it's been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, just waiting to be read! I have a lot on my list, okay.) On the other hand... that clip reminds me I would probably just go anywhere for Jonas Kaufmann, aaaaaah.
On the other hand, Lego Werther was hilarious! And the trailers are very pretty :)
I empathize re: Jonas Kaufmann, whom I saw live on the stage three times.
The guy who did the Lego Werther by now did over 300 lego summaries of works of literature in German, and has started doing English versions as well, like this one, so I can link you to Lego Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, the Schiller play I told you about which is also a lesser known Verdi opera named Luisa Miller and features Lady Milford and the scene that more than any other got Schiller the undying enmity of his Duke, Carl Eugen (married to Wilhelmine's daughter), the one about forcible recruitment to the US, here.
He also did Schiller's Don Carlos, but not yet in English. If you want to tackle the German version: Lego Don Carlos.
Ahhhh I'm not going to be able to follow it in German at all (I could get the refrains in the musical if they were short and they repeated them slowly, but only because I had the translation right there :P ), but if he ever does Don Carlos in English let me know, because these are hilarious :D
(Oh! And mildred pointed out to me that I might be able to watch German DVDs in one way or another, so I have German DVDs of this production now, which looks like it could be interestingly regie. But I have been too busy to actually try to figure out how to watch it *facepalm*
And hey, one of the two Amazon reviews says this production mostly kept the original text (not always the case in Regietheater) and made the viewer empathize with Philip instead of just Posa and Carlos, and that Elisabeth comes across as whip smart, so it should be up your alley...
That review, uh, may have been the thing that made me pull the trigger on it :D One day I'll have the time to try to figure out how to play it *rolls eyes at self*
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timeasmymeasure
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-01-30 06:06 am (UTC)I know in the English speaking world, that entire period of German literature is swept up under the label "Romantic", but that drives every German literature teacher crazy.
This is good to know, because yeah, this is what I have heard. But now I know :)
Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" and "Pamela" are probably the most famous letter-novels in English of the era; Jean-Jaques Rousseau wrote "Julie, or the New Heloise" as his entry to the genre
Oh! I haven't read these but I know them from Pushkin mentioning them in Eugene Onegin :D (Also I believe they showed up in Orieux?) Everything is starting to make sense :P
(He kept in letter writing contact with Charlotte and her husband for some more years, though.)
Until he WROTE THEIR PRIVATE LIVES INTO A BOOK, huh.
not least because it's a court and Werther is a non-noble and gets snubbed by the nobility.
I suppose this isn't fair to Jerusalem, but I find this hilarious given what you've told us about Goethe and Carl August.
(this is also where Kestner wrote an "WTF, Goethe?!?" letter when reading that part of the novel in protest)
Aw, man. I can see why Kestner was not amused.
"Kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet." (This in is contemporary context is a wham last line managing to depict the treatment of suicides by the clergy of both main faiths as heartless without ever saying so.)
Ohhhhh, I see. (And this is the kind of thing I am really glad you are telling me!)
The preamble of the novel, addressing the reader and saying that if for some reason life hadn't granted them a friend, they should regard this book as that friend, even heightened the identification.
Even though the Kestner thing still annoys me, this is actually rather touching to me.
However, Plenzdorf got around censorship in style
Wow, yeah, I like that.
Thank you for this! I shall put it on my (sadly extremely large) stack of things to read :D Though I am thinking that I should read a biography of Goethe first (not that you haven't been awfully helpful with that too), as knowing a bit about Voltaire beforehand certainly helped a lot with Candide :)
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-01-30 10:50 am (UTC)While I'm providing links: Lego Werther, a hilarious summary of the novel in English.
A beautiful trailer advertising a theatre production (all the spoken text is directly from the novel)
Another trailer, quoting directly from the letter Werther writers after his first encounter with Lotte and showing the locations in Wetzlar (there was A LOT of Werther tourism in the late 18th and then in the 19th century because Goethe had described the locations for the various scenes very recognizably, which was another thing that the Kestners weren't thrilled about)
Also I believe they showed up in Orieux?
They do!
Until he WROTE THEIR PRIVATE LIVES INTO A BOOK, huh.
Well, quite. Thomas Mann wrote a novel called "Lotte in Weimar" about Charlotte Kestner, nee Buff, visiting Weimar 44 years later and basically closing that chapter of her life with one last meeting. By then, she's on the one hand treated by all the Weimar society as a walking, talking bit of literature which both flatters and irritates her, but on the other avoided by Goethe; their one meeting in public is inconclusive and she's dissappointed that he's now so formal and a walking, talking institution, but then they meet again in a carriage and have a real conversation, allowing her to make peace with the past. It's a famous novel (also filmed) but has one problem, and that's Thomas Mann basically writing Goethe as himself. (He very much saw himself as the new Goethe in his life time.) And they were different people with different tempers, to put it simply. (His version is why avid Thomas-Mann-reader Susan Sontag, in her novel about Sir William Hamilton in which Goethe has a cameo showing up in Italy where he meets Sir William and Emma, writes Goethe as Thomas Mann, too,)
Biography of Goethe: postpone that, not just because there is so much else to read, but also because he lived a very long and rich life, and also I don't know which English language biography is good. Otoh, there is a short text available in English which I just ordered for you (also just in case my calendar doesn't arrive), which is one of the "incensed monologues for incensed women" written by Christine Brückner and translated by Eleanor Bron. It's a collection of imaginary speeches by a variety of women, both mythological, historical and from literature, so you get, among others, Desdemona (if she'd actually talked with Othello and he'd heared her out, uninterrupted), Luther's wife Katharina, and Christiane the long time mistress and eventual wife of Goethe. It's a funny and poignant text, no longer than a short story, and the other speeches are great as well.
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-02-10 06:19 am (UTC)Aw, man, of course it does, it's a 19th C opera. Grrrr. Okay... maybe I should check out the opera before reading it, I'm less likely to be really irritated :) (Argh, and this reminds me I actually picked up the Faust translation you recommended and it's been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, just waiting to be read! I have a lot on my list, okay.) On the other hand... that clip reminds me I would probably just go anywhere for Jonas Kaufmann, aaaaaah.
On the other hand, Lego Werther was hilarious! And the trailers are very pretty :)
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-02-10 12:05 pm (UTC)The guy who did the Lego Werther by now did over 300 lego summaries of works of literature in German, and has started doing English versions as well, like this one, so I can link you to Lego Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, the Schiller play I told you about which is also a lesser known Verdi opera named Luisa Miller and features Lady Milford and the scene that more than any other got Schiller the undying enmity of his Duke, Carl Eugen (married to Wilhelmine's daughter), the one about forcible recruitment to the US, here.
He also did Schiller's Don Carlos, but not yet in English. If you want to tackle the German version: Lego Don Carlos.
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-02-12 05:28 am (UTC)Ahhhh I'm not going to be able to follow it in German at all (I could get the refrains in the musical if they were short and they repeated them slowly, but only because I had the translation right there :P ), but if he ever does Don Carlos in English let me know, because these are hilarious :D
(Oh! And mildred pointed out to me that I might be able to watch German DVDs in one way or another, so I have German DVDs of this production now, which looks like it could be interestingly regie. But I have been too busy to actually try to figure out how to watch it *facepalm*
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-02-12 06:10 am (UTC)And hey, one of the two Amazon reviews says this production mostly kept the original text (not always the case in Regietheater) and made the viewer empathize with Philip instead of just Posa and Carlos, and that Elisabeth comes across as whip smart, so it should be up your alley...
Re: All About Werther
Date: 2021-02-13 05:58 pm (UTC)