Xabier Anduaga, who in the coming years will almost certainly emerge as a major interpreter of Werther, is not quite there yet. The young tenor from San Sebastián’s debut in the title role was the principal draw of the current run of Werther at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, where the work had not been staged for nearly a decade. The result was an undeniable success, though there remains ground to cover. Anduaga possesses what matters most for a role that ranks among the most...

Looked down on by the official cultural savants (including psychoanalysts) for embodying the trivialisation and heavy-handed simplification of one of the most powerful love stories of the western culture, almost like a creation myth; and despised as well by the scholarly musicology of the 20th century that considered Massenet to colour everything with an unbearable bourgeois temperateness and a sticky and decorative sweetness, Werther is one of those “Cinderella” titles that...