At our remove, Goethe’s runaway Sturm und Drang best-seller of 1774 looks like it was always an opera waiting to happen. Werther, you’ll recall, is your classic manic-depressive Romantic, gloomily chanting Ossian as his inamorata drifts into the arms of a stick named Albert, whom her dying mother made her promise to marry. In the end, Werther shoots himself, as did a shocking number of Goethe’s early readers. But when Jules Massenet finally gave Werther a singing voice, the Opéra Comique in Paris rejected his adaptation as “too dismal.” Happily, the tastemakers in Vienna thought otherwise, launching Massenet’s melodious Werther in 1892 to great applause. Since then, its fortunes have fluctuated, partly, no doubt, in reaction to the tenors who have attempted the title role. The heart-broken rhapsody “Pourquoi me réveiller” can hardly fail. But without a singing actor of the utmost artistry, his wrenching death scene can try the public’s patience sorely. In Barcelona this season, there’s little chance of that as the skyrocketing superstar Xabier Anduaga alternates with Matthew Polenzani, a seasoned master in the glow of his prime. Brace for dueling ovations. —Matthew Gurewitsch