Werther
Judith Shatin
About this work:
Werther, scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, was inspired by Goethe’s 1774 novel, Sorrows of Young Werther. Romanticism, with its striving for the unobtainable and its emotional motivations, permeates the book. In a series of letters from to a friend, Werther tells of his yearning for Lotte, who is already betrothed to Albert. Werther, after a deepening friendship with Lotte that can not lead to fulfillment, ultimately commits suicide. Based on a conflation of autobiographical experiences and poetic imagination, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther is a story of inner struggle. I have tried to musically express the psychological anguish, the lyrical encounters, and the resultant sense of frustration.
My Werther is a piece about the struggle to overcome inner demons. It opens with a piercing cry into the void. The cello breaks free with a soliloquy to which the other instruments respond. The shape of the piece weaves around the interaction of the cello and violin, who eventually have their own duet. But it is interrupted with increasing impatience. The piano intones the inevitability of fate, especially in a solo close to the end. Then, in a frenzy one hears the slammed piano lid echo the fatal shot of the shattering conclusion of the novel. Werther was composed for and premiered by the Da Capo Chamber Players, who also recorded it on Dreamtigers, a CD of Shatin’s chamber music. Performances include those by Alternate Currents, the New Performance Group in Seattle, Ruckus and the Twentieth Century Consort.
Werther, scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, was inspired by Goethe’s 1774 novel, Sorrows of Young Werther. Romanticism, with its striving for the unobtainable and its emotional motivations, permeates the book. In a series of letters from to a friend, Werther tells of his yearning for Lotte, who is already betrothed to Albert. Werther, after a deepening friendship with Lotte that can not lead to fulfillment, ultimately commits suicide. Based on a conflation of autobiographical experiences and poetic imagination, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther is a story of inner struggle. I have tried to musically express the psychological anguish, the lyrical encounters, and the resultant sense of frustration.
My Werther is a piece about the struggle to overcome inner demons. It opens with a piercing cry into the void. The cello breaks free with a soliloquy to which the other instruments respond. The shape of the piece weaves around the interaction of the cello and violin, who eventually have their own duet. But it is interrupted with increasing impatience. The piano intones the inevitability of fate, especially in a solo close to the end. Then, in a frenzy one hears the slammed piano lid echo the fatal shot of the shattering conclusion of the novel. Werther was composed for and premiered by the Da Capo Chamber Players, who also recorded it on Dreamtigers, a CD of Shatin’s chamber music. Performances include those by Alternate Currents, the New Performance Group in Seattle, Ruckus and the Twentieth Century Consort.
–JS
Year composed: 1986
Duration: 00:09:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Other Combinations, 2-5 players
Instrumentation: 1 Flute, 1 Clarinet, 1 Piano, 1 Violin, 1 Cello
Instrumentation notes: fl (picc), cl, vln, vc, pno