In his old age, Goethe wished that “Mozart should have composed Faust”. This wish was not granted. But one of his contemporaries - equal to Gluck, Mozart or Haydn - composed the Werther : Gaetano Pugnani. He was a typical representative of the transition period to the Viennese Classic and was highly valued especially by violin virtuosos up into the 20th century. Of course, Pugnani was only able to bring about a quarter of Goethe's epistolary novel onto the stage, and that was done in Italian.
Pugnani wrote his two-part “Melologue” around the time Goethe was in Italy. However, the two never met. And Goethe evidently did not learn anything about this composition in later years either.
In a dialogue between music and actor, so to speak, Pugnani skilfully absorbs the increasing drama of the plot on the one hand, and on the other hand anticipates Beethoven's pastoral . The melodrama genre opens up a tremendous wealth of possibilities for expression and interpretation. Unfortunately, this interestingly complementary unity of music and literature was forgotten.
Pugnani's legendary work was long lost. In 1996 - almost 200 years after its performance at the Vienna Burgtheater - it was rediscovered and reconstructed in the music collection of the Vienna Philharmonic. The
performance at the Theater an der Wien now couples Pugnani's music with Werther's original German text. Music and literature combine to form a wonderful cosmos of sensitivity, love and despair.
