A fairy godmother, a glass slipper, an opulent ball, an enchanted forest, and a Prince Charming who loves her – did all that really happen, or was it just a dream? Long-suffering Cendrillon lives a life of drudgery with her good-natured father and his imperious wife, until fate, romance, and a touch of fairy magic…
Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther pitted religion against Romanticism in a battle royal for the soul of young Germany, which Romanticism won: Werther became a cult hero, even a fashion icon, to generations of Europeans. Oliver Platt’s reduction of Goethe’s aesthetic manifesto to a kitchen sink drama (played throughout in the same shabby kitchen) gives us a…
Massenet’s Werther is a tragic tale of unrealised and forbidden passion between a dutiful wife (Charlotte) and her husband Albert’s best friend, Werther, whose final, violent resolution comes at that most emotionally loaded of times – Christmas. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is the original inspiration for Massenet, whose opera (like Goethe’s work) is itself…