Jenůfa, Deutsche Oper, 17 January 2020

Jenůfa (Rachel Harnisch), Grandmother Burya (Renate Behle); Images © Bettina Stöß

Grandmother Buryja – Renate Behle

Kostelnička Buryja – Evelyn Herlitzius

Jenůfa – Rachel Harnisch

Laca Klemeň – Robert Watson

Števa Buryja – Ladislav Elgr

Foreman – Philipp Jekal

Mayor – Stephan Bronk

Jano – Meechet Marrero

Barena – Karis Tucker

Mayor’s Wife – Nadine Secunde

Karolka – Jacquelyn Stucker

Shepherdess – Fionnuala McCarthy

Christof Loy (director)

Dirk Becker (set designs)

Judith Weihrauch (costumes)
Bernd Purkrabek (lighting)

Eva-Maria Abelein (Spiellleitung)

Thomas Wilhelm (choreographic assistance)

Christian Arseni (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: Jeremy Bines) 

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Donald Runnicles (conductor)

If Jenůfa fails to move, something will have gone terribly wrong. That is not, however, to say that one should take for granted a performance as moving as this. It takes a good deal of musical work to present an opera with this degree of excellence. This, in short, was an evening that heard the Deutsche Oper at something close to its very best.

Grandmother Burya, Laca (Robert Watson), Jenůfa

Guiding that excellent work throughout, whether on stage or in the pit, was the hand – perhaps better, were the hands – of Donald Runnicles. I have heard some distinguished conducting of this opera, from Bernard Haitink at Covent Garden (my first Jenůfa and, indeed, my first Janáček opera) to Jiří Bělohlávek in concert and, most recently, on the fateful night of 23 June 2016, Mark Wigglesworth for ENO. Each of those conductors brought something distinctive and valuable to the opera. Runnicles and his outstanding orchestra had nothing whatsoever to fear from comparisons. If I applaud his gifts of synthesis, that is not to say that the parts coming together to make their sum were insignificant: quite the contrary. An ear for detail, be it for specificity of timbre or rhythm, combination of instrumental and vocal line, the composer’s singular method of motivic writing, and much else besides, was crucial here in capturing and holding not only the musical but also the dramatic attention. That coming together, however, was equally crucial. Not unlike Mozart – or Shakespeare, for that matter – Janáček does not judge. To be sure, we make our own judgements, yet the humanity informing the composer’s mission involves understanding of why people do wrong, why they did not act otherwise. The conductor’s task in communicating that is to balance detail and broader sweep, not unlike the composer himself does in his astonishing art. There was human wisdom here on both counts: aware, perhaps, of something beyond, something divine, yet knowing that the truths in which this drama would partake must also keep their distance. They have their roots in something specific, even folk-like, without ever being reducible to that. Once again, this seemed to be communicated instinctively, however great the preparation and skill in maintaining that fond, even dangerous illusion of the immediate.

Kostelnička Buryja (Evelyn Herlitzius), Jenůfa

In an instructive programme note, Runnicles spoke of Janáček following an aesthetic of Kargheit (which connotes both frugality and bleakness) when it comes to sonority, an aesthetic opposed by well-meaning, Straussian smoothing of the edges and rounding out by the conductor Karel Kovařovic for the first Prague performance. A comparison with Rimskified Mussorgsky is not, as Runnicles, suggests, so far from the mark (though I still think that deserves something, somewhere of a place). We no longer hear either as eccentric, let alone incompetent, and we are surely right to do so. But again, to hear the craft, the meaning, the art in such writing requires work: no music worthy of the name really plays or sings itself; nor, one might add, does it listen to itself. Orchestral musicians as much as the conductor, as much as the listener, need to respond to finely judged balances between fragment and melody, speech rhythm and musical rhythm, individual timbre and blend. They must also do so with a knife-edge appreciation of dramatic timing. That unforgettable xylophone solo there, a solo violin intervention there, the crucial difference between trombone (Janáček) and horn (Kovařovic) sonority, and so on: these were not only presented, but felt, believed in. There is no need to damn Kovařovic any more than there is Rimsky-Korsakov. They did what they did; it spoke to many. One could truly feel, however, that Janáček spoke on this occasion – and that one thereby felt the cruelty, the bleakness, and yet ultimately the humanity and redemption too that this opera requires us to feel.

Jenůfa, Kostelnička

That also requires the small matter of excellent singing and acting – and of excellent collaboration. Here again, I had no reservations. Rachel Harnisch led us surely down a tragic yet sorrowfully redemptive path with a Jenůfa whose initial youthful spirits rendered the inhumanity of her subsequent, consequent tribulations all the more harrowing. I cannot imagine any human being having failed to root for her. Robert Watson and Ladislav Elgr faced off splendidly as Laca and Števa, the former wounded and wounding, increasingly noble of spirit, the latter’s cocky allure – seemingly the whole village, not only its girls, under its spell – undermined by a weakness of spirit that is always difficult to convey through song. (In a sense, it is the Don Ottavio problem, here skilfully surmounted.) Not the whole village, of course, for that would be to reckon without the Kostelnička – and without Evelyn Herlitzius’s Kostelnička. If I say it was a typically astonishing performance, I do not mean to undermine its specificity. Herlitzius is one of those singing actors who somehow both remains quite herself and assumes, even transforms the character of the role she is playing. Initially hard, increasingly wild, always with good in her heart: one could hardly bear to look her in the face, or the aural equivalent, yet equally knew that one must. This was spellbinding artistry, in the truest sense. Yet wherever one looked and listened, there was necessary artistry, as much a crucial part of the musicodramatic synthesis: Renate Behle’s Grandmother, wiser than her carefully prepared surface let on, in knowing that principle may also lie in surviving, in not succumbing to tragedy; Nadine Secunde’s properly ghastly Mayor’s Wife; Philipp Jekal’s Foreman, wanting initially to be Števa, yet perhaps suggesting that all was not quite as it should be: these characters and more made Janáček’s community and thus drama what they were. So too, of course, did the excellent Deutsche Oper Chorus.

Jenůfa, Števa (Ladislav Elgr), Laca

I have left Christof Loy’s production until last because it seemed – and this is not always a claim I should make for that director’s work – more a framework in which the work and its performance could unfold than an interpretation. Aside from the conceit of having the imprisoned Kostelnička look back at the story that had led her to where she now found herself, there was not so much to report. Occasional dramatic pauses made their point too, having us collect our thoughts – and our emotions. I have seen more interventionist and, perhaps, more telling stagings; it is fair to say, for instance, that I learned and was challenged more from David Alden at the Coliseum. But that did not seem to be the point on this occasion. If a staging permitted, even gently led me to be moved by the drama that unfolded, then it may also be accounted successful.

Reimann, L'Invisible (world premiere), Deutsche Oper, 8 October 2017

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Images: Bernd Uhlig

Ursula, Marie, Ygraine – Rachel Harnisch

Marthe, Bellangère – Annika Schlicht

Handmaiden – Ronnita Miller

Father – Seth Carico

Grandfather, Old Man, Agiovale – Stephen Bronk

Uncle, Stranger – Thomas Blondellle

Child, Tintagiles – Salvador Macedo

Queen’s Servants – Tim Severloh, Matthew Shaw, Martin Wölfel

Vasily Barkhatov (director)

Zinovy Margolin (set designs)

Olga Shaishmelasvili (costumes)

Robert Pflanz (video)

Ulrich Niepel (lighting)

Sebastian Haunsa, Jörg Königsdorf (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Donald Runnicles (conductor)

Aribert Reimann has recently seemed fated to be remembered, if not quite only, then principally for his Lear. Its fortunes certainly seem to have picked up recently: I saw it in Paris last year; Salzburg staged it this summer too. (Alas, it simply did not fit into my schedule.) I can hardly talk of the need to look beyond a single work, for it is the only of his operas I can really lay claim to knowing – until now, perhaps. It was no one else’s fault, moreover, that I missed the Berlin premiere at the Komische Oper of his Medea earlier this year on account of illness. Reimann’s work as a pianist will surely survive too, the recordings of Second Viennese School repertoire with Fischer-Dieskau (the creator of Lear) invaluable; I have found myself choosing them several times for the discography to my forthcoming Schoenberg biography. So perhaps I am over-dramatising. At any rate, there was a keen sense of anticipation at the Deutsche Oper, a sense of the some time répétiteur returning home. And what we saw and heard seemed to me not only a convincing ninth opera, but a highly accomplished piece of musical theatre from all concerned: a model of advocacy for a new work.

For those who know a little more – if only, as for yours truly, through reading, rather than through real acquaintance with the works – Reimann has been especially associated with what the Germans call Literaturoper: that is, an opera based upon an already existing literary text. Indeed, he contributed a piece, ‘Wie arbeite ich an einer Oper?’ (‘How do I work on an opera?’) to a 1982 collection on works derived from literature, Für und wider die Literaturoper, ed. Sigrid Wiesmann (Laaber). It seems especially fitting with respect to the history of the genre, then, that here Reimann should have turned to Maurice Maeterlinck, whose play Pelléas et Mélisande offered Debussy the opportunity to compose one of the defining, as well as foundational, works in the genre. (Another instance, which ought to be far better known, is Maeterlinck’s Ariane et Barbe-Bleu, set by Paul Dukas.) Here Reimann, drawing on a lifetime’s experience, has put together with commendable economy a short – under ninety minutes? – work founded on three of Maeterlinck’s relatively – surrounding Pelléas – early one-act plays, skilfully combined so as to prove considerably more, as the cliché has it, than the sum of their parts.

The three plays, L’Intruse, Intérieur, and La Mort de Tintagiles all concern themselves with death, children, and reactions to the deaths either of children or of those closely connected with them. A great strength of what we saw at the Deutsche Oper in Vasily Barkhatov’s excellent staging was that one could never quite be sure what was ‘work’ and what was ‘interpretation’. One had one’s suspicions, of course, but even when it was clear that a stance was being taken to the drama, it may have been by the librettist-composer, by the director, or even by the performers – or indeed by a combination thereof. In this Kindertotenoper, the first section presents a family anxiously awaiting the deliverance of a mother from childbirth, news of her deliverance eventually more negative than they had hoped; we then move to the tale of an old man and stranger having to tell a family the news of the death of one of its daughters; and finally, to the story of an unseen queen who strives, and succeeds, the efforts of a child’s sisters notwithstanding, to have her servants kill him. Fate looms large, of course, which may have been heightened by the practice – not followed here – of performing the second and third of the plays by marionettes.

What may have heightened the symbolism, and indeed the Symbolism, however, here is responded to by a typical directorial – or is it creator’s – edge. As time progresses through the three works, we first find ourselves in a stifling (high) bourgeois household from what would seem to be roughly the time of (Maeterlinck’s) writing. Intérieur takes a step forward in time, somewhere between a generation or two, prompting us to ask about the identities of characters, both sung (all in French) and acted (the Staatisterie on excellent form too), or at least what connections we might draw between sections of the work. L’Intruse is written for strings only – as well, of course, as voices! Intérieur, by contrast, is set in the world of orchestral woodwind. When we come closer to the present day – although with certain disturbing questioning from the three countertenors who have helped punctuate our way between sections: who are they now as servants, and why are their ‘dresses’ made of rubbish bags? – we hear the full orchestra, brass and percussion included. But there are still many sections solely for strings or for woodwind; when those orchestral choirs come together, and when they are supplemented, we are prompted to ask what that might mean, musically, dramatically, and of course musico-dramatically.

Shadows – implicit puppet-play – play an important role too, almost as if a second orchestra. They seem to offer additional standpoints on the action, to comment on it, and perhaps to offer alternatives. A dream world is never far away; and like the best – or worst – dreams, we are never quite sure what is what. Not that there is anything vague about Reimann’s writing, its precision clear, even as its clusters provoke immediate, dramatic effect. Its roots in serial processes may be felt, fatalistically, just as the hopelessness and fascination of the situations on stage works itself out, whether in a kinship, in parallel, and sometimes perhaps even in opposition. One never feels that the music is merely ‘reflecting’ the words or the characters; sensing its ever-changing dramatic role, like that of the staging, is the business of the drama – and indeed of the listener-spectator. And yet, those alternatives: were they alternatives at all? There was never any way out really, was there? Such seems to be the message of Barkhatov’s multiple visual realisations of the potential demise of Tintagiles: car crash, noose, and so on. We persuade ourselves things might be, might have been, otherwise; often we have to. Sometimes, at least, we should not. (Not entirely incidentally, words of thanks should be offered to the production team for coming on stage to receive applause, wearing T-shirts with images of the imprisoned director, Kirill Serebrennikov. We must not forget, and here at least must not be fatalistic.)

Perhaps even more so than usually, this was very much a company effort. It seems invidious to single out members of an excellent cast, changing roles as they did, no one seeking the limelight. Let us just say that Rachel Harnisch offered a fine performance as first amongst equals – indicated also by the warmth of applause she received. One often came close to losing track of who was a ‘singer’ and who was an ‘actor’; it did not matter. The Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper sounded fully prepared: not only prepared, but committed. Donald Runnicles led what sounded to me an equally prepared and committed account not only of the orchestral score but of the work as a whole. Its changing moods and colours, its ‘internal’ and ‘external’ musico-dramatic process, its moments of eery calm and explosion: all those and much more registered powerfully, if mysteriously, even on a single hearing. I hope very much to have a second chance, to explore this work further, and have little doubt that it deserves such an opportunity, from and for many of us.