The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (75 page)

Rusalka
is all the more remarkable if one considers that at the time of its composition it was the gritty realism and lurid melodrama of verismo that was operatically fashionable.
In his celebrated production for ENO, however, David Pountney noted its relation to another contemporary classic – J.
M.
Barrie’s
Peter
Pan.
He took the opera away from the usual medieval fairy-tale landscape and interpreted it as a parable of adolescence, setting it in an Edwardian nursery, over which Ježibaba presided as a grim governess or housekeeper in black bombazine and the Spirit of the Lake was a kindly old man in a wheelchair.
The imagery was Freudian and surrealist, with mechanical toys suddenly coming to life and Rusalka sealed off from the real world inside a translucent perspex box.

Recordings

CD: Renée Fleming (Rusalka); Charles Mackerras (cond.).
Decca 460 568 2

Video: Eilene Hannan (Rusalka); Mark Elder (cond.).
ENO production.
Universal 079 2823

Leoš Janáček

(1854–1928)

Jenůfa

Three acts. First performed Brno, 1904.

Libretto by the composer

Janáček based this opera on Gabriela Preissová’s
Her
Foster-daughter,
a naturalistic drama itself based on a true story.
It used to be performed in a version which smoothed down the brazen orchestration and made several small cuts, but since the pioneering work of the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, Janáček’s stunningly powerful original has now been firmly re-established.

Plot

Jenůfa is pregnant by her feckless cousin Števa and worries that if he is conscripted into the army, she will not be able to marry in time to save herself from disgrace.
In the event, Števa is not called up, but celebrations are interrupted when Jenůfa’s fearsomely respectable and widowed foster-mother, the Kostelnička (translated as ‘the wife of the Sexton’) insists that Števa must stay sober for a year before she will allow the marriage.
Števa’s half-brother Laca is in love with Jenůfa and mightily jealous of Števa.
In a spasm of rage, Laca slashes Jenůfa’s face with his knife.

The Kostelnička discovers Jenůfa’s pregnancy and hides her away to save her reputation, telling villagers that she has gone to Vienna.
A sickly baby son is born: the Kostelnička hopes that it will die.
She sends Jenůfa to bed with a strong sleeping draught.
Števa appears, and the Kostelnička now begs him to marry Jenůfa as soon as possible.
But since she has been scarred by Laca’s attack, he has lost interest in her and instead plans to marry the mayor’s daughter.
Laca arrives next, asking permission to marry Jenůfa.
The Kostelnička tells him about the baby, at which he is so appalled that she goes on to tell him that the baby has already died.
Alone, the Kostelnička wrestles with her conscience and finally decides
that the only way to ensure her beloved Jenůfa has the chance of a decent life will be to kill the baby.
She takes it away and drowns it in the river.
Jenůfa awakes from her sleep and wonders where the baby has gone: when the Kostelnička returns from her terrible mission, she tells Jenůfa that she has been lying delirious for two days, during which time the baby died naturally.
The Kostelnička also tells her about Števa’s forthcoming marriage and advises her to look kindly on Laca.
When he arrives, Jenůfa meekly consents to marriage and the Kostelnička, already haunted by guilt, gives them her blessing.

Some months later, preparations for the wedding are under way, though Jenůfa’s mood is sombre and villagers remark how haggard the Kostelnička looks.
Števa and his new wife arrive to pay their respects, and he and Laca are reconciled.
A wedding song is sung, when news comes that a dead baby has been found under the ice: when pieces of its clothing are brought in, Jenůfa cries out that the child was hers.
The villagers are appalled – doubly so, as they assume that Jenůfa is the murderer – and call for her to be punished.
Then the Kostelnička confesses all.
Jenůfa is stunned, but realizes that the deed was done out of love for her and forgives her foster-mother.
The Kostelnička is taken off to face trial.
The devastated Jenůfa tells Laca that he must abandon her – how can he possibly marry anyone associated with such disgrace?
But Laca insists that he will stand by her, and together they resolve to face whatever the future holds.

What to listen for

Janáček was fascinated by the ‘naturalistic’ school of Italian verismo (Mascagni’s
Cavalleria
rusticana,
for example), but
Jenůfa,
in a sense his own ‘Verismo’ opera, has a power and depth that takes it way beyond the Italians’ lurid sensationalism. At the heart of the opera is the intense intimacy of Act II, set inside the Kostelnička’s cottage.
The good-night which Jenůfa bids to the Kostelnička is set to music of profound tenderness, orchestrated with violas and clarinets, and illustrative
of the depth of the love between the two women; in stark contrast is the Kostelnička’s histrionic monologue in which she decides to kill Jenůfa’s sickly baby, and Jenůfa’s long lyrical reverie and prayer to the virgin after she has woken to find her baby missing.
The final episode of the opera, as the Kostelnička makes her terrible confession and Jenůfa forgives her before bravely setting out with the loyal Laca to make of life what she can, is both desperately tragic and triumphantly uplifting.
If it doesn’t move you, then nothing in opera ever will.

The grimness of the story is lightened by the enchantingly graceful choric folk-songs in the first and third acts.
Note also how alert Janáček’s orchestra is to the drama: obvious examples being the recurrent use of a xylophone (often played invisibly on stage) in Act I to indicate both the inexorable rolling of the mill and the fateful nature of the unfolding action; the chaotic chord which is blurted out by the brass after the Kostelnička lies to Laca about the death of Jenůfa’s baby; or the braying horns which herald the blasphemy of the Kostelnička’s self-justifying idea that by killing the baby she will be returning it to God.

Janáček is not particularly comfortable to sing: he scores heavily, and Czech is dense with consonants.
A lot of the musical success of a performance will therefore depend on a conductor who can allow the singers room to enunciate and project.

In performance

So concentrated and harrowing is the central emotional situation of
Jenůfa
that some directors feel they can ignore its setting in nineteenth-century rural Moravia and present the drama as universal.
But a naturalistic production like Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s at Glyndebourne shows how specifying a social milieu can enhance an audience’s sense of the reverence in which the Kostelnička is held in the tightly knit, inward-looking community and the narrowness of the moral values which govern it.
Act II also needs to convey the claustrophobic nature of Jenůfa’s confinement and the freezing
winter weather into which the Kostelnička takes the baby.
For an audience to feel that, the set must show doors and windows which open to let in the icy blast.

The Kostelnička is a great role for an ageing dramatic soprano with presence, though the temptation to sing it approximately and overact in compensation must be avoided; in the original play, one hears much more about why she is so severe and her maltreatment at the hands of her late husband.
Jenůfa, written for a younger lyric soprano, also presents great dramatic opportunities to a singer who can convey the character’s burgeoning moral strength and compassion.
Although the Kostelnička domineers, it is Jenůfa who gives her name to the opera and it is her inner journey that is central.

Both Laca and Števa are sung by tenors – tough roles both, hard to make sympathetic.
But there are some good cameo roles: Števa’s grandmother, his fiancée Karolka, and the pompous Mayor and his wife among them.

Recordings

CD: Elisabeth Söderström (Jenůfa); Charles Mackerras (cond.).
Decca 414 483 2

DVD: Anja Silja (Kostelnička); Andrew Davis (cond.).
Glyndebourne production.
Arthaus 208

Kát’a
Kabanová

Three acts. First performed Brno, 1921.

Libretto by the composer

Based on Ostrovsky’s play
The
Storm,
but inspired by Janáček’s great (though unconsummated) love for Kamila Stösslová, to whom the opera is dedicated.
Perhaps the simplest and most unmitigatedly tragic of all Janáček’s operas, with a uniquely rich, poignant and tender portrait of the eponymous heroine.

Plot