Werther trailer (The Royal Opera)

Joyce DiDonato and Vittorio Grigolo lead the cast with Antonio Pappano in the pit in Benoît Jacquot’s sumptuous production of Massenet’s operatic tragedy of duty and desire. Find out more at Jules Massenet began thinking about making an opera from Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther) as early as 1880, before he started work on Manon – though in his memoirs he claimed inspiration came in 1886 during a visit to Bayreuth to see Wagner’s Par