I was mired in the 19th century for my musical weekend. On Saturday afternoon, I attended a performance of Jules Massenet’s opera, “Werther,” at the Metropolitan Opera, and on Sunday afternoon, the first Isaac Stern Memorial Concert at Carnegie Hall, a recital of music for cello and piano by Johannes Brahms, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax.

Massenet’s opera, inspired by Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, is not a first-rate piece in … <Read More>