In his excellent new translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Norton), Stanley Corngold catches your eye first thing by translating the title as The Sufferings of rather than the expected The Sorrows of . Norton's previous translator of Werther, Harry Steinhauer, also used the more accurate "suffering," but this time it heralds a translation of one of the most widely read books of the last quarter-millennium into thoroughly readable modern English with unflagging respect for Goethe's language.
Few novels in history have topped Werther in longtime popularity and sales. Its basic storyline would have flown in any age. The young Werther is consumed by a not-at-all-unrequited love of Charlotte, who at one point chides him (in Corngold's smooth translation) for "my excessive emotional involvement in everything, and how that would lead to my destruction!" As Charlotte is betrothed to another when they meet and honors that commitment in a monogamous marriage, Werther's destruction by suicide (with her husband's pistols) is a given �" literally, a donnee of the plot.
In some striking ways The Catcher in the Rye of its day, Werther also became a cherished text of the Sturm und Drang movement. Its depiction of Werther's empty life as an underappreciated sub-diplomat during his self-imposed exile from Charlotte spoke directly to the emotional poverty non-rich Europeans were heir to.
It was also, the right people knew, the 24-year-old Goethe's own story, and the author's appreciation of the financial security it brought him was tempered by a certain embarrassment caused by its barely fictionalized personal self-revelations, the most conspicuous of which was his own youthful love for the affianced Charlotte Buff. While never disowning Werther, Goethe expressly regretted it many times and in many ways, first by appending a poem to its 1775 second edition that ended, in italics, "Be a man, and do not follow me [to my doom]."
It is precisely with Goethe's preoccupation with "being a man" that an opportunity has been missed by the publication of this slender volume. Queer criticism at the highest levels of academia has now made the case that Goethe was, despite his complicated relationships with women, if not "gay" in the post-Stonewall sense, at least same-sexual in disposition and activity. By now, all but the fiercest defenders of the purity of German culture concede the point.
As this particularly pertains to Werther, it turns out that Goethe �" who not surprisingly wanted to be remembered as the author of the two parts of Faust as well as reams of the finest poetry ever written in German �" returned to rewrite Werther more than once, in writing far harder to find. In his article "In and Against Nature" in Outing Goethe and His Age, one of the brightest of the queer scholars, Robert D. Tobin, cites the author's 1796 "Letter from Switzerland," in which a younger, pre-Sufferings Werther writes of a friend perhaps not so unlike Wilhelm, the "dearest friend" to whom he writes the letters in the largely epistolary novel we already know.
"I arranged for Ferdinand," this younger Werther says, "to bathe in the lake; how splendidly my young friend is built! How proportionate are all his parts! What a fullness of form, what a splendor of youth, what a profit for me to have enriched my imagination with this perfect example of human nature. I see him as Adonis felling the boar, as Narcissus mirroring himself in the spring."
And Goethe mirroring himself? A bundle of Goethe's collected Werther writings, as well translated as Corngold's Sufferings, would be welcome and timely.
Werther, Jules Massenet's mature opera on Goethe's novel (with an unambiguously het libretto), seems to be cropping up everywhere of late. Inexplicably, the same corporate entity is simultaneously re-releasing the old 1981 Philips Werther with Jose Carreras and Frederica von Stade, conducted by Colin Davis (Decca) and releasing a new, live recording of Werther , also by London's Royal Opera, with Antonio Pappano leading a cast headed by Rolando Villazon and Sophie Koch (DG), from exactly a year ago. Clearly the latter's selling point is the much-vaunted return of Villazon after a series of vocal crises.
Although the recorded sound is disappointingly flat and shallow, the gladiatorial atmosphere in Covent Garden is palpable, the auditorium atmosphere crackling with can he or can't he? Well, he can, but with sadly diminished capacity. On the occasions when he gets purchase on a money note, he knows how to manipulate it, but the vocal walking on eggshells throughout is deflating. Villazon's unflagging intensity doesn't make this an uplifting performance.
Why either recording appears hard on the heels of Decca's Werther DVDs with Jonas Kaufmann �" doing precisely what Villazon wants to, but with ringing, unfettered voice �" and Koch as an even more splendid Charlotte is anybody's guess.