From The Top: Chasing impossibilities yields heartbreak

Instead of going to class last Friday, I stayed in bed for the entire morning and afternoon. In my defense, it was the first day of fall and there was a nip in the air. With the temperature at around 65 degrees, how could I be expected to go outside in such frigid conditions? The need to stay in bed was just too tempting.

With hot coffee in one hand, I flipped between the pages of Peter Stoneley’s A Queer History of Ballet while listening to Massenet’s Werther. Met Opera on Demand just uploaded a brand new 2017 recording, with tenor Vittorio Grigolo in the title role and mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard as Charlotte. Werther is tragic — a love story that never really gives audiences closure. Based on the novel by Goethe, the story follows the poet Werther, who is in love with Charlotte. However, she is already betrothed to Albert, and has agreed to marry him to fulfil the wish of her deceased mother. It’s clear Charlotte does love Werther, but she also loves Albert. Eventually she marries Albert, though later we find she regrets her decision. What do you do when you’re in love with someone, but already committed to someone else? Do we always just want what we can’t have?

Though there are a great deal of stories in which happy endings do take place, how realistic is it in the long run? We’re all just waiting for the next best thing, right? In Rossini’s Il Barbiere Di Siviglia, Rosina and Count Almaviva spend the entire opera trying to get married, even though Rosina is already (begrudgingly) engaged to the decrepit Bartolo. In the end, Rosina and Almaviva are eventually married, and all ends well. However, in its “sequel,” Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro, Almaviva spends the entire show trying to bang the housemaid. The passion and love between Rosina and Almaviva is gone, and Rosina spends her time moping and lamenting about the former days of her now-loveless marriage. Obviously, Almaviva is one of the many operatic examples of an antiquated f-ckboy, but shouldn’t Rosina have seen it coming? She did marry Almaviva only days after they met.

At least Charlotte waited months to once-and-for-all kick Werther to the curb. And even though Charlotte did love him, she probably knew there’d be no point in entertaining Werther’s imaginations. In a few years, he’d probably leave her anyway for the next piece of ass that trots by. I would suggest Charlotte do the same, but in a patriarchal society that rebuffs promiscuous women, her opportunities thereafter would be incredibly limited. It’s really just a lose-lose situation for all.

Werther and Le Nozze di Figaro aren’t the only operas that share these themes. Opera is full of tales of wanting what you can’t have. In Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Tatyana falls madly in love with Eugene Onegin, though he explains to her that he isn’t one for marriage (a.k.a. another f-ckboy). However, in the opera’s third act (set five years after their initial courting), Tatyana has moved on to marry Prince Gremin. It is only when Onegin sees Tatyana happily married to another that he decides he is actually in love with her. He confesses his feelings to Tatyana, though she coldly rejects him.
Yes, she still loves him, but he had his chance to marry her, and she won’t leave her current husband. Onegin is left heartbroken, though it’s hard to feel sorry for him. He had his chance and he blew it. And though these stories are fictional, many of them draw inspiration from raw, human emotion. I can’t help but relate the similarities to real life as well. Even if we don’t act on our urges and impulses, we’re always yearning for what we don’t and can’t have.

I find myself avoiding stories that have happy endings. Why entertain a fantasy when you can be realistic? In the aforementioned examples I provided, we have three protagonists who all couldn’t be more different. Werther loved too much, and he ends up killing himself at the end of his story. Onegin loved too little, and he’s left in the cold, alone. And Almaviva literally loved everybody, yet he still ends the show on his knees begging for forgiveness. What both share is heartbreak from the ones they were unable to court. But where is their remorse? It’s really only when they can’t get what they want that they see the folly of their actions.

In the end, nothing works out for these three men. Werther kills himself. Onegin in shunned. Almaviva is humiliated. The only lesson to be learned is that you’re always going to yearn for what you can’t have, so find a way to control your impulses so you don’t end up like these fools.

Arya Roshanian is a “senior” majoring in music. His column, “From the Top,” runs Tuesdays.