Jules Massenet's lyrical drama Werther last Sunday was given at least a concert performance in the Deutsches Nationaltheater by the Staatskapelle Weimar. The music, focusing on the spiritual relation of Werther and Charlotte, passes through the few moments of happiness as well as the looming disaster in their relationship, finding an expression, touching and loaded with emotions, of inspired intimacy and violent eruptions of existential loss.

And when guest conductor Patrik Ringborg animates the Staatskapelle to create a truly significant, differentiated performance, when he sketches pastel coloured pictures with a subtle sense for sound, when he with incomparable tenderness intensely spins melodies to himself or creates sound fields filled with passion, then the listener penetrates the most secret angles of our actors' frames of mind. Then the ambient story, anyway only a depiction of the milieu, becomes fully marginalised.

Splendid soloists and the highly motivated children's chorus of the Goethe-Gymnasium took part in the search for human truth.