Out of Moravia

Janácek's "Jenufa" at Deutsche Oper Berlin

A room, a clinically white box, so brightly lit that it makes your eyes hurt; empty save for a table and chair. A door opens and a woman in grey carrying a bag is ushered in. The door is closed behind her. The woman looks around as if for orientation, then comes to the front gazing abstractedly. The music then sets in, triggering a train of thoughts and emotions in the woman: one moment she is frowning, the next the trace of a smile crosses her face. It is the Kostelnicka in jail reflecting upon how things went so terribly wrong that she finds herself imprisoned. This is the stark beginning of Christof Loy’s interpretation of Janacek’s “Jenufa”. This claustrophobic stage set will be the same for the following 3 acts, the personages locked in as it were in a kind of terrarium where there is no escape from the strict code of morals of a tightly knit village community in which everyone knows and watches everyone and all are somehow related. The rear wall opens from time to time to show telegraph poles in a withered cornfield in Act I, and the same scenery, snow-covered and desolate, in Act II. In this abstract set the characters of the opera are moving like in a test arrangement, totally exposed to the gaze of the spectators.

Loy’s psychologically precise and subtle direction leaves no room for grand opera gestures and poses, but like in an Indian temple dance every single movement of a hand or even the blink of an eye has its proper meaning in a given context. Nothing in this no-nonsense, no gimmicks approach diverts the attention from a story that unravels inexorably as in a Greek tragedy.

The original title of the opera (as of the play by Gabriela Preissova) is “Her Stepdaughter”, indicating two female leads. Loy makes the Kostelnicka the pivot around which the action revolves. In conventional productions we have her portrayed as a prim moralizer, inevitably clad in black governess dress, terrorizing the whole village with her harangues. Old photographs by contrast show her surprisingly youthful and almost gaudily dressed in a kind of “dirndl”. Some time in the opera’s performance history veteran Wagnerian sopranos on the look-out for a farewell role that still offers ample opportunities for stentorian hectoring with which to cover up age-related loss of vocal focus pounced on this part.So, as a stone gathers dross, the originally quite harmless and respected member of the congregation, village agony-aunt and healer was turned into a veritable stepmother from hell and sister to the witch in “Hansel & Gretel”, feared and loathed by all, including her own terror-stricken step-child Jenufa.

How old is the Kostelnicka? Certainly not as old as the ex-Wagnerians on the threshold to the retirement home! If Grandma Buryjovka is, say, 65-70 years old and Jenufa 20, Steva and Laca in their early twenties, then this would make Kostelnicka a woman of between 45 and 50 years of age, a middle-aged matron but certainly not the customary old harridan!

Let’s get the complicated family relations of the Buryja clan clear: there is Grandma Buryjovka, who had two sons (both deceased); one was the father of Steva, the handsome, easy-going heartthrob. Steva’s mother had a son from a first marriage, Laca, introvert and overlooked, passed over despite being the elder as owner of the Buryja mill that went to Steva. Jenufa is the daughter of Old Buryjovka’s second son by his first wife who died in childbirth. He then married Petrona Slomkova who had been secretly in love with him for some time, and despite warnings from her mother about his bad character was only too happy to become his wife and stepmother to his little daughter. The marriage turned into a nightmare for Petrona, as her husband proved a brutal drunkard who would beat her up regularly and squander all their money until his timely death presumably from alcoholic cirrhosis. This traumatic marriage left Petrona scarred and determined to spare her stepdaughter a similar misfortune. But in real life as on the stage things do not always develop according to plan and sometimes even the most careful vigilance of the mother cannot prevent the daughter from going astray.

The casting of Jennifer Larmore in the role of Kostelnicka is a welcome divergence from the misuse made of this role mentioned above and consistent with Loy’s concept of showing her as an erring human being, not a monster. She may appear severe in the first Act when she imposes a probationary year on Steva in which he must abstain from drink before she will even consider a marriage between him and Jenufa. But she seems to be the only one in the village who appraises Steva’s character (or rather lack thereof) correctly. The Varnay/Mödl/Schlemm/Behrens/Silja fraction may have had their reservations about this role debut but in the event they (or most of them anyway) came away won over by a totally successful and convincing portrayal of a woman struggling to keep up appearances and trying to do the right thing within the prison walls of a rigid code of moral conduct. Larmore with her solid belcanto schooling proved that you can actually sing this part and need not howl the notes like an air-raid siren.

The second Act must surely be the most harrowing opera act ever written, with the possible exception of Act IV of “Otello”! Here the singer of the Kostelnicka must really “deliver”, and Larmore truly surpassed herself in portraying a woman in a terrible, almost unsolvable moral dilemma. As in Shakespearean or Greek tragedy the spectators know that calamity is impending, they long to interfere but are, of course, as powerless as the characters onstage to ward off the inevitable. Not that Preissova is in any way on a par with Shakespeare or Sophocles, but Janácek’s dramatic musical genius lifts maudlin melodrama to tragic heights. Often the antics of many a Kostelnicka in the moments leading up to the murder of the baby and her subsequent bouts of madness have turned the whole character into an unintentional parody. We witness operatic wringing of hands, flailing of arms and hysterical laughter. Nothing of this, thanks to Loy & Larmore, in this production. We see a loving mother-daughter relationship, Jenufa trusting and confident, the Kostelnicka already having misgivings about the irresponsible lover’s constancy When she, after pleading in vain with an evasive Steva to acknowledge his child and do the “decent thing”, takes the terrible decision to murder the baby she appears to crawl behind the door of Jenufa’s room, like one frightened by her own murderous impulses, as if to hide from the horrible deed she is going to commit, or from some powers above she imagines “peep[ing] through the blanket of the dark to cry: ‘hold, hold!’ ”
When she returns she is not the same person but a woman shaken to the very core by the unspeakable she has done. She is frantic with fear, her movements become erratic, and in Act 3 she can only sit crouched on a chair, scared and hollow-eyed, holding on to the bag in which she carried the baby to its icy death. In the end the finding of the baby’s body and her confession come as a relief to her and she walks out upright again, almost jauntily, saying to the dumbfounded mayor en passant: “Now lead me away!” She knows her botched life is over but that her daughter will have a happier future. – Or will she? Jenufa must be deeply traumatized by the fact that she had a baby she loved despite its being “illegitimate” and that was cruelly murdered by the woman she trusted. And now she will become the wife of the man who cut up her face. Laca may have reached the goal of his wishes in marrying the woman he loves, but will suffer lifelong remorse of his one jealous outburst in which he scarred her forever. They are both clad in sober black and walk towards a black horizon, or rather are swallowed up by a black hole, an unsettling picture which counteracts the optimistically surging music, but is consistent with the director’s analytic approach: there can be no simple “happy ending”. An uncertain future awaits the newly-weds, and it will take some time for them to sort out their lives.

Michaela Kaune as Jenufa makes plausible the development from ardently loving girl to grown-up woman who confidently takes her destiny in her own hands at the end, singing with luminous voice throughout, never once faltering in a vocally and physically challenging role. Maybe she is a tad too resigned, too meekly accepting her fate and too easily forgiving, but these are more or less the dictates of the role, and we 21st century audiences have to accept this.

The two half-brothers are also ideally typecast: Joseph Kaiser as Steva, tall and handsome, but also slinking and slouching, shirking responsibility wherever possible, sings with a soft, mellifluous tenor that insinuates itself in every woman’s heart. Will Hartmann as Laca, is shorter and stockier. He doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve and has difficulties articulating his feelings, so shows the world an indifferent, even morose exterior, his firm voice and ringing high notes betraying his passionate nature that sometimes flares up in violent outbursts. Hanna Schwarz as Old Buryjovka looks an unlikely village grandma when she comes in with a tin bucket and potato bowl wearing high heels and a red wig. Her singing is now of the caterwauling kind, and while I overheard someone, apparently belonging to the Silja fraction, say he would have wanted her to do the Kostelnicka, I for one was grateful that my eardrums and nerves were spared this ordeal.

The smaller roles are all excellently cast from the Deutsche Oper ensemble, with a cameo appearance of Nadine Secunde as the mayor’s wife. She provides a moment of comic relief before the final “showdown”, when she stuffs herself with doughnuts at the wedding breakfast, carping with a full mouth that she would never have her daughter marry in such a miserable way, “ill-clad and without a bridal wreath!” Her and her Karolka’s (Martina Welschenbach, peroxide blonde and fresh and proper as Doris Day) triumph in having captured the coveted Steva as a bridegroom is short-lived, however. When it is revealed that he is the father of Jenufa’s child found dead under the thawing ice of the millstream, they, like everyone else, shrink from him in horror.

Everyone agrees that with this production which has all the ingredients to become a “classic” the Deutsche Oper has been set on the right track again after years of artistic stagnation in a quagmire. And with the new Music Director Donald Runnicles at the helm the orchestra has at last found back to old form. From the first note Janácek’s music exerts its almost hypnotic pull. The mill-wheel’s mechanical rotation, churning the waters as well as the human passions in an eternal cycle, the strange, archaic rapping of the xylophone, hammering away on your nerves, set the mood for the next 2 hours of a relentlessly unfurling drama of crime and punishment.