Die Leiden des jungen Werthers

Werther has abandoned Leonore and retreated to a small town where he falls in love with Lotte, the bailiff’s daughter who is however engaged to Albert. Werther makes friends with Albert, but after an argument on the subject of suicide, this friendship breaks up. Werther flees to the confinement and seclusion of a provincial court in which he does not however feel at home. He returns to the town against his better judgement to be close to Lotte. The fate of a young peasant who kills his rival and his own undisguised rejection by Lotte show him the futility of his desires. He resolves to kill himself.
Hans-Jürgen von Bose had been toying with the idea of using Goethe’s epistolary novel as the basis for an opera since the beginning of the 1980s. He was particularly attracted by the sensational-pictorial and dream-like character of the original work and the simultaneity of the narrative strands which permitted him to create music with a multi-layered form and kaleidoscopic structure in correspondence to the assembled nature of the plot. Sections with contrasting instrumentation are provided by groups, scenes and ensembles; the musical material of these small episodes is repeated on a higher and larger-scale plane. The Goethe texts included in the libretto are augmented by poetry by Goethe, Lenz, der Günderode, Hölderlin and Hans Assmann von Abschatz.