The Lied d’Ossian in Massenet’s Werther: Intertextuality and Vocality in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

ABSTRACTResearch in intermediality and media archeology can be used to examine the intertextuality of vocality in Jules Massenet’s opera, Werther (1887). The historicization of the Lied d’Ossian and the particular definition of voice that James Macpherson’s poems convey offer tools to tease out an aesthetic tension between this song within an opera and the realism sought after by the drame lyrique. The vocality of Werther can be approached in three ways: by examining the sung poetic voices of Ossian, by exploring the musical “source” of Werther, and by looking at the opera’s unsung voices of Ossian. Werther’s intertextual and intermedial code demonstrates how the painstaking allusion to different vocal sonorities through rhetoric and discursive metaphors were nonetheless subsumed by the conflation of sound and meaning.