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Press Releases
The Sorrows of Young Werther Featuring Bobby Steggert at Symphony Space 6/3-4
What: The Sorrows of Young Werther by the Ensemble for the Romantic Century
When: Wednesday, June 3 & Thursday, June 4 at 8:00 p.m.
(pre-concert lecture at 7:00 p.m.)
Where: Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th Street, NYC, Train: 1/2/3 to West 96th Street
Tickets: $49. Students $19. To purchase, contact Symphony Space at 212.864.5400 or visit symphonyspace.org.
New York City, NY (FOR RELEASE 5.19.15) --- The Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC) returns to Symphony Space for two performances of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Written by James Melo based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s groundbreaking novella Sorrows of Young Werther, ERC’s production is an original, fully-staged theatrical concert blending drama based on Goethe's tale, and music of the German Lied repertoire. This haunting evening features Tony Award-nominated Bobby Steggert (Mothers and Sons, Big Fish) playing Goethe’s quintessential Romantic hero Werther, mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham making her ERC debut, baritone Sidney Outlaw, as well as pianists Max Barros and Eve Wolf.
‘This production presents a relentless psychological voyage that is timeless, passionate and emblematic of our most fundamental emotions,” explains James Melo of ERC. In ERC’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the plight of Goethe’s hero intermingles with that of the equally doomed, equally sensitive lover depicted in Schumann’s supreme song cycle Dichterliebe, one of the most compelling musical depictions of unrequited love. Like Werther, the unnamed young man in Schuman’s cycle travels a downward spiral that leads to utmost despair. Works by Schubert, Brahms, Liszt, Wolf, Mahler, and Pfitzner for female voice create a powerful dialogue with the two heroes, intermingling with their dreams, passions, and aspirations, and responding to the tormenting intensity of their love.
Considered as one of the first examples of Romanticism, Goethe’s masterpiece The Sorrows of Young Werther is one of the most famous—and infamous—works in the history of literature. Published in 1774, the novel unleashed an instant cult following (and even a rash of imitative suicides) throughout Europe. Readers were captivated by the rapturous ruminations of Werther, Goethe's typically Romantic protagonist whose extreme passion leads to self-destruction.
Known for connecting great music to the cultural events, politics and literature of earlier eras, ERC brings to life artistic luminaries from Van Gogh, Satie, Tolstoy and Dickinson to Sigmund Freud, Beethoven, Oscar Wilde and Fanny Mendelssohn. This production of The Sorrows of Young Werther follows on the heels of ERC’s dazzling performance of Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon at BAM Fisher in spring 2015. Critics described it as “a heady evening of fascinating treasures (Theater Scene),” “thoroughly entertaining (The Artists Forum),” and “a dazzling musical and multimedia paean to human aspiration (The New York Times).”
About Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC)
Celebrating its 14th season, the Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC) transforms the classical music concert experience by fusing fully staged dramas with live chamber and vocal music. The combination of scripts – all drawn from historical materials such as memoirs, letters, diaries and literature – with chamber music, brings the past to life with an immediacy that has transported and captivated audiences worldwide.
ERC’S 2014-15 New York Season presented Tchaikovsky: None But the Lonely Heart and Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon at BAM Fisher, The Trial of Oscar Wilde at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, and Beethoven Love Elegies in the Berkshires, MA, at The Stables Theatre at Edith Wharton’s The Mount. The productions received rave reviews and played to sold-out audiences. To date, ERC has created more than 40 original theatrical concerts including Seduction, Smoke and Music: The Love Story of Chopin and George Sand, featuring actors Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack and American Ballet Theater dancers Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky; Toscanini: In My Heart too Much of the Absolute coupled with a CUNY seminar featuring author and Toscanini biographer Harvey Sachs; and four writer- centric productions: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe); Tolstoy’s Last Days; Herself to Her a Music (Emily Dickinson); and Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon. Other productions have centered on subjects such as Marcel Proust, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Dreyfus Affair, Arthur Rubinstein, Erik Satie, Peggy Guggenheim, Anna Akhmatova, Van Gogh, Debussy, Fanny Mendelssohn, Robert and Clara Schumann, Schubert, and Beethoven.
ERC has partnered with and/or performed at The Jewish Museum of New York; the Archivio Fano and the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, Italy; the Festival de Musique de Chambre Montréal; Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts; the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts (MIFA); the French Institute- Alliance Française (FIAF); the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University; the Italian Cultural Institute of New York; the City University of New York (CUNY); the Tuscan Sun Festival in Cortona, Italy; the Festival del Sole in Napa Valley; and New York’s Florence Gould Hall and the Eleazar de Carvalho Festival in São Paulo, Brazil.
Since 2007, ERC has been a musicological affiliate of the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center, where ERC has also established an annual series of seminars – one for each of the Ensemble’s programs. ERC also served as music consultant for the Jewish Museum’s 2005 exhibition, “The Power of Conversation,” and was in residence in 2004 at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Founded in 2001 by pianist Eve Wolf, who also serves as Executive Artistic Director, ERC’s artistic collaborators include fellow pianist and Co-Artistic Director Max Barros, Musicologist James Melo, Director of Theatrical Production Donald T. Sanders, Production Designer Vanessa James and Lighting Designer Beverly Emmons. They are complemented by an ongoing roster of musicians and actors who have become major interpreters of the ERC vision.
About James Melo (Playwright/Musicologist)
James Melo has written extensively for scholarly journals and music magazines in Brazil, Uruguay, United States, and Austria, and has been invited to participate as a panel discussant in conferences in Indiana, New York, and Canada. He has written program notes for several concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and for over 70 recordings on the Chesky, Naxos, Paulus, and Musikus labels, among others.
He is the New York correspondent for the magazine Sinfónica in Uruguay, reviewer of music iconography for the journal Music in Art, and senior editor at RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) at CUNY. In March 2005, he chaired a session in the conference Music and Intellectual History, organized by the Barry Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation (CUNY), and presented a paper on the history of musicological research in Brazil. He received a grant from the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, where he conducted research on the manuscripts of Anton Webern. Mr. Melo is the program annotator for the recording on Villa-Lobos' complete piano music and Camargo Guarnieri's complete piano concertos on Naxos. In 2006, he began collaborating with the Montréal Chamber Music Festival as musicologist and program notes writer.
In March 2008 he chaired a session on music iconography in Brazil and Portugal in the conference Music, Body, and Stage: The Iconography of Music Theater and Opera at CUNY Graduate Center. As the musicologist for the Ensemble for the Romantic Century in New York, Mr. Melo provides historical and musicological support for ERC’s productions in addition to organizing and chairing a series of multidisciplinary seminars at CUNY Graduate Center in partnership with the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation. Mr. Melo’s musicological background has enriched the many historically informed scripts he has written for ERC, including Sublime Sorcery: Music and the Supernatural (2002), A Singing Flame: The Soul of Spanish Music (2002), The Sorrows of Young Werther: A Romantic Liederabend (2003), Schubert’s Dream (2003), Emily Dickinson: Herself to Her a Music (2004), My Heart, My Serpent: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2005), Satie, Bohemian from Montmartre: A Cabaret (2006), Chopin: Letters from Majorca (2008), De Profundis: The Trials of Oscar Wilde (2010), and Proust’s Court of Love (2011), among others.
About Donald T. Sanders (Director)
Donald T. Sanders has been Director of Theatrical Production for ERC since 2005. He directed Tchaikovsky: None But the Lonely Heart at Shakespeare & Co in the summer of 2013. In 2011 he directed Seduction, Smoke and Music starring Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack at the Tuscan Sun Festival and its reprise at the Napa Valley Festival del Sole in 2012. Other notable ERC productions include: Fanny Mendelssohn: Out of Her Brother’s Shadow at New York’s Jewish Museum; Toscanini: Nel Mio Cuore Troppo di Assoluto at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice Sale Apolline; and Van Gogh’s Ear at New York’s Florence Gould Hall and the Festival de Musique de Chambre Montréal. He has directed productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater (The American Pig: an Anti-Imperialist Vaudeville, Naked Lunch, 33 Scenes on the Possibility of Human Happiness, Thomas Cole, A Waking Dream, Edith Wharton’s Old New York) as well as off-Broadway the plays of Arnold Weinstein, Eric Bentley, Kenneth Koch and the music works of William Russo. He is a founder of New York Art Theatre Institute (NYATI).
He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Bristol, England and the Yale School of Drama. Since 1993 he has been Executive Artistic Director of The Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts (MIFA) where he presents such artists as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Vanessa Redgrave, England’s Out of Joint, Complicite and Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, and France’s Comédie Française. In 2002, Sanders was made a Chevalier dans L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the Republic of France.
# # #
For more info, visit RomanticCentury.org
When: Wednesday, June 3 & Thursday, June 4 at 8:00 p.m.
(pre-concert lecture at 7:00 p.m.)
Where: Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th Street, NYC, Train: 1/2/3 to West 96th Street
Tickets: $49. Students $19. To purchase, contact Symphony Space at 212.864.5400 or visit symphonyspace.org.
New York City, NY (FOR RELEASE 5.19.15) --- The Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC) returns to Symphony Space for two performances of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Written by James Melo based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s groundbreaking novella Sorrows of Young Werther, ERC’s production is an original, fully-staged theatrical concert blending drama based on Goethe's tale, and music of the German Lied repertoire. This haunting evening features Tony Award-nominated Bobby Steggert (Mothers and Sons, Big Fish) playing Goethe’s quintessential Romantic hero Werther, mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham making her ERC debut, baritone Sidney Outlaw, as well as pianists Max Barros and Eve Wolf.
‘This production presents a relentless psychological voyage that is timeless, passionate and emblematic of our most fundamental emotions,” explains James Melo of ERC. In ERC’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the plight of Goethe’s hero intermingles with that of the equally doomed, equally sensitive lover depicted in Schumann’s supreme song cycle Dichterliebe, one of the most compelling musical depictions of unrequited love. Like Werther, the unnamed young man in Schuman’s cycle travels a downward spiral that leads to utmost despair. Works by Schubert, Brahms, Liszt, Wolf, Mahler, and Pfitzner for female voice create a powerful dialogue with the two heroes, intermingling with their dreams, passions, and aspirations, and responding to the tormenting intensity of their love.
Considered as one of the first examples of Romanticism, Goethe’s masterpiece The Sorrows of Young Werther is one of the most famous—and infamous—works in the history of literature. Published in 1774, the novel unleashed an instant cult following (and even a rash of imitative suicides) throughout Europe. Readers were captivated by the rapturous ruminations of Werther, Goethe's typically Romantic protagonist whose extreme passion leads to self-destruction.
Known for connecting great music to the cultural events, politics and literature of earlier eras, ERC brings to life artistic luminaries from Van Gogh, Satie, Tolstoy and Dickinson to Sigmund Freud, Beethoven, Oscar Wilde and Fanny Mendelssohn. This production of The Sorrows of Young Werther follows on the heels of ERC’s dazzling performance of Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon at BAM Fisher in spring 2015. Critics described it as “a heady evening of fascinating treasures (Theater Scene),” “thoroughly entertaining (The Artists Forum),” and “a dazzling musical and multimedia paean to human aspiration (The New York Times).”
About Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC)
Celebrating its 14th season, the Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC) transforms the classical music concert experience by fusing fully staged dramas with live chamber and vocal music. The combination of scripts – all drawn from historical materials such as memoirs, letters, diaries and literature – with chamber music, brings the past to life with an immediacy that has transported and captivated audiences worldwide.
ERC’S 2014-15 New York Season presented Tchaikovsky: None But the Lonely Heart and Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon at BAM Fisher, The Trial of Oscar Wilde at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, and Beethoven Love Elegies in the Berkshires, MA, at The Stables Theatre at Edith Wharton’s The Mount. The productions received rave reviews and played to sold-out audiences. To date, ERC has created more than 40 original theatrical concerts including Seduction, Smoke and Music: The Love Story of Chopin and George Sand, featuring actors Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack and American Ballet Theater dancers Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky; Toscanini: In My Heart too Much of the Absolute coupled with a CUNY seminar featuring author and Toscanini biographer Harvey Sachs; and four writer- centric productions: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe); Tolstoy’s Last Days; Herself to Her a Music (Emily Dickinson); and Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon. Other productions have centered on subjects such as Marcel Proust, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Dreyfus Affair, Arthur Rubinstein, Erik Satie, Peggy Guggenheim, Anna Akhmatova, Van Gogh, Debussy, Fanny Mendelssohn, Robert and Clara Schumann, Schubert, and Beethoven.
ERC has partnered with and/or performed at The Jewish Museum of New York; the Archivio Fano and the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, Italy; the Festival de Musique de Chambre Montréal; Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts; the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts (MIFA); the French Institute- Alliance Française (FIAF); the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University; the Italian Cultural Institute of New York; the City University of New York (CUNY); the Tuscan Sun Festival in Cortona, Italy; the Festival del Sole in Napa Valley; and New York’s Florence Gould Hall and the Eleazar de Carvalho Festival in São Paulo, Brazil.
Since 2007, ERC has been a musicological affiliate of the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center, where ERC has also established an annual series of seminars – one for each of the Ensemble’s programs. ERC also served as music consultant for the Jewish Museum’s 2005 exhibition, “The Power of Conversation,” and was in residence in 2004 at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Founded in 2001 by pianist Eve Wolf, who also serves as Executive Artistic Director, ERC’s artistic collaborators include fellow pianist and Co-Artistic Director Max Barros, Musicologist James Melo, Director of Theatrical Production Donald T. Sanders, Production Designer Vanessa James and Lighting Designer Beverly Emmons. They are complemented by an ongoing roster of musicians and actors who have become major interpreters of the ERC vision.
About James Melo (Playwright/Musicologist)
James Melo has written extensively for scholarly journals and music magazines in Brazil, Uruguay, United States, and Austria, and has been invited to participate as a panel discussant in conferences in Indiana, New York, and Canada. He has written program notes for several concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and for over 70 recordings on the Chesky, Naxos, Paulus, and Musikus labels, among others.
He is the New York correspondent for the magazine Sinfónica in Uruguay, reviewer of music iconography for the journal Music in Art, and senior editor at RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) at CUNY. In March 2005, he chaired a session in the conference Music and Intellectual History, organized by the Barry Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation (CUNY), and presented a paper on the history of musicological research in Brazil. He received a grant from the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, where he conducted research on the manuscripts of Anton Webern. Mr. Melo is the program annotator for the recording on Villa-Lobos' complete piano music and Camargo Guarnieri's complete piano concertos on Naxos. In 2006, he began collaborating with the Montréal Chamber Music Festival as musicologist and program notes writer.
In March 2008 he chaired a session on music iconography in Brazil and Portugal in the conference Music, Body, and Stage: The Iconography of Music Theater and Opera at CUNY Graduate Center. As the musicologist for the Ensemble for the Romantic Century in New York, Mr. Melo provides historical and musicological support for ERC’s productions in addition to organizing and chairing a series of multidisciplinary seminars at CUNY Graduate Center in partnership with the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation. Mr. Melo’s musicological background has enriched the many historically informed scripts he has written for ERC, including Sublime Sorcery: Music and the Supernatural (2002), A Singing Flame: The Soul of Spanish Music (2002), The Sorrows of Young Werther: A Romantic Liederabend (2003), Schubert’s Dream (2003), Emily Dickinson: Herself to Her a Music (2004), My Heart, My Serpent: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2005), Satie, Bohemian from Montmartre: A Cabaret (2006), Chopin: Letters from Majorca (2008), De Profundis: The Trials of Oscar Wilde (2010), and Proust’s Court of Love (2011), among others.
About Donald T. Sanders (Director)
Donald T. Sanders has been Director of Theatrical Production for ERC since 2005. He directed Tchaikovsky: None But the Lonely Heart at Shakespeare & Co in the summer of 2013. In 2011 he directed Seduction, Smoke and Music starring Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack at the Tuscan Sun Festival and its reprise at the Napa Valley Festival del Sole in 2012. Other notable ERC productions include: Fanny Mendelssohn: Out of Her Brother’s Shadow at New York’s Jewish Museum; Toscanini: Nel Mio Cuore Troppo di Assoluto at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice Sale Apolline; and Van Gogh’s Ear at New York’s Florence Gould Hall and the Festival de Musique de Chambre Montréal. He has directed productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater (The American Pig: an Anti-Imperialist Vaudeville, Naked Lunch, 33 Scenes on the Possibility of Human Happiness, Thomas Cole, A Waking Dream, Edith Wharton’s Old New York) as well as off-Broadway the plays of Arnold Weinstein, Eric Bentley, Kenneth Koch and the music works of William Russo. He is a founder of New York Art Theatre Institute (NYATI).
He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Bristol, England and the Yale School of Drama. Since 1993 he has been Executive Artistic Director of The Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts (MIFA) where he presents such artists as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Vanessa Redgrave, England’s Out of Joint, Complicite and Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, and France’s Comédie Française. In 2002, Sanders was made a Chevalier dans L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the Republic of France.
# # #
For more info, visit RomanticCentury.org
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