Werther at Hungarian State Opera, Opera House

Goethe dashed out The Sorrows of Young Werther in all of six weeks. The novel, which relates, through a series of letters, the hopeless love of a young poet who chooses death to escape his torments, became an immediate best seller, at a stroke both catapulting its author to fame and launching the Werther cult: women perfumed themselves with Eau de Werther, Werther attire was hawked to men, while a noticeable spike in suicides ensued across Germany.
With exquisite sensitivity, Jules Massenet found the musical and dramatic language to transform the German epistolary novel into one of the most heart-wrenching love stories in the operatic literature.