Audiobook · read by volunteers
Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)
Read by Rob De Lorenzo, Barry Eads · 13 chapters · 4 h 43
About the book
Young Werther is a sensitive, passionate and artistic man who leaves the city for the countryside, where he finds beauty, nature and a new friend in a charming young woman named Charlotte. But Charlotte is already promised to another, and Werther's feelings have nowhere to go. The novel unfolds in letters to a friend, and through them we watch the inner life of a man who feels everything too deeply. Goethe's novel brought him fame throughout Europe when it appeared in 1774. It captured the spirit of a restless generation, and it is still a powerful picture of youthful longing and the pain of love that cannot be returned. This recording uses the translation by R. Dillon Boylan.
Introduction
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was twenty-four when he wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, in German Die Leiden des jungen Werther, and it made him famous almost overnight. It was first published in 1774, in a revised version in 1787, and it is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel, drawing on the author's own experience of an unhappy love.
The book became one of the defining works of the movement known as Sturm und Drang, Storm and Stress, which stressed emotion and individual experience against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Its success was extraordinary. Readers across Europe took Werther as a model of the sensitive soul, and the novel influenced fashion, literature and the way people talked about feeling. It was also, in some quarters, the subject of anxious debate, since contemporaries worried about the effect of its closing events on impressionable readers.
Goethe himself later spoke of the book with some distance, as a work of his youth. For modern readers, it remains a remarkable portrait of a mind in the grip of passion, written with both intensity and irony.
The translation heard here is by R. Dillon Boylan. The recording has thirteen chapters and lasts about four hours and three quarters. It is read by LibriVox volunteers. Those who know Goethe chiefly through Faust may be surprised by the directness and the emotion of this earlier work. It is short enough to be heard in a single afternoon, and affecting enough to be remembered.
Public domain
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died in 1832: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text