Massenet's Werther: You've Got Mail!
Aria Code
WQXR & The Metropolitan Opera
4.8 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2019
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | He's a poet. He speaks in terms of moonlight and love. Maybe sort of the naughty boy. |
| 0:12.5 | She realizes that she wants to run away with this man and have a wild passionate love |
| 0:16.6 | affair. From WQXR in the Metropolitan Opera, this is Ariacode. I'm Rianne Goodins. |
| 0:24.7 | I would have expected that maybe we would get some bold proclamation of love here, but |
| 0:29.6 | instead what we're getting is the most dire and morose kind of situation that someone |
| 0:35.4 | could possibly be in. Every episode, we pull apart one Arya to see how it works and |
| 0:40.5 | then we bring it back together so you can hear it in a whole new way. Today, we go through |
| 0:45.0 | the pages of the letter Arya from Massena's Verter. His words and her feelings, they all |
| 0:50.4 | just sort of come together. A floodgates open and it's chilling. It's so chilling. |
| 1:01.6 | So I admit it, I once fell in love over text. I didn't see it coming. All I knew was that |
| 1:08.1 | day after day, I was texting this guy for hours, morning, noon and night. It was a really |
| 1:15.9 | intense experience and I was just really struck with how amazing a way to get to know somebody |
| 1:24.5 | it is because you're not looking at them, you're not distracted by always my hair right. |
| 1:29.8 | You're not thinking about any of that stuff because all they can see are your words. It makes |
| 1:34.1 | me think about how we communicate and how things have changed over the years, but then how |
| 1:39.4 | things haven't changed. When we think about when people wrote letters and we tend to think |
| 1:44.1 | of letter writing like paper, pen, you sort of put your thoughts in order and then you write |
| 1:49.1 | an essay and you send it off to somebody. Back in the day, people were writing what they were |
| 1:52.8 | feeling at the moment. It was a much more urgent form of communication than we think of it. |
| 1:56.9 | And I think letters fascinate us so much because they're so intimate and personal, they're pure |
| 2:02.7 | communication. Maybe that's why writers and composers turn to them to show us who their characters |
| 2:08.8 | really are. That's exactly what's happening in the letter Arya from Massinese Verter. |
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