’Life and death on the stage’: What makes Werther a masterpiece (The Royal Opera)

Joyce DiDonato, Vittorio Grigòlo, Antonio Pappano and other members of the cast and creative team reveal why they think Massenet’s Werther is an operatic masterpiece. Find out more at Jules Massenet began thinking about making an opera from Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther) as early as 1880, before he started work on Manon – though in his memoirs he claimed inspiration came in 1886 during a visit to Bayreuth to see Wagner’s Parsifal.