Love Writes an Opera
SIMON, JOHN
On Music LOVE WRITES AN OPERA By John Simon Pierre Boulez once remarked in conversation that the only 20th-century composers of consequence were Bartok, Stravinsky, Schönberg, Berg, and...
...Her discreet spouse soon cleared out, and there may have been some romancing between the by now dumpling-shaped Kamila and her white-haired but ever-youthful swain...
...He cut the text by half, and made further changes as he composed, only very reluctantly adding lines of his own...
...Then three more masterpieces: The Cunning Little Vixen (1922-23), The Makropoulos Case (1923-25), and From the House of the Dead, just about completed at his death...
...And the new set has nothing like the notes by John Tyrell for London...
...Some changes are a bit procrustean...
...A beautiful young mother 38 years his junior, who was married to an antiques dealer, she never reciprocated Janacek's grand passion (expressed mostly in letters, since they lived far apart...
...Also choral, a specialty of this Moravian composer (18541928...
...When her elder boy wandered off into the cold neighboring woods, the 74-year-old composer gallantly led the search for him...
...Janácek was more interested in the personal tragedy of the eponymous heroine, whom he identified with Kamila...
...The opera is based on the play The Storm by Aleksandr Ostrovsky, Russia's leading dramatist between Pushkin and Chekhov...
...Benackovâ, though no longer quite in her prime, sounds more errantly youthful, more torn between extremes of feeling— more heartbreaking...
...He presumably thought of Debussy as 19th-century and I forgot to bring up Leos Janácek, but Boulez would doubtless have shrugged him off as well...
...Janacek was an absolute original...
...Tichon's return leaves Katya distraught both by the impending loss of Boris and by her sense of guilt...
...Since the earlier CD set—with Elisabeth Söderström as Katya and the great Vienna Philharmonic—was superb, what more did he hope to achieve...
...And he turned Katya into a meeker, more passive victim, her suicide motivated by unhappy love rather than rebellion against a stifling society...
...The French and German translators make the same error, whether out of piety or incompetence, I cannot say...
...Later, he taught it at the Czech Teachers' Institute in Brno, and singing at the Old Brno Gymnasium, finally becoming director of the Brno Organ School he himself founded...
...Since the mid-'60s, however, Janacek's reputation has been steadily growing...
...He lived his creative life in reverse, becoming younger, more adventurous, more radical in his old age...
...Desmond Shawe-Taylor writes: "The amazingly pregnant melodic germs are frequently built into ample, flowing phrases, and some of the leading themes are instrumental in origin...
...others, inspired...
...Now his mother is sending him on a long business trip...
...Ostrovsky's five acts became three, each in two scenes...
...He tells her that Uncle Dikoj, who controls his purse strings, is banishing him to Siberia...
...Then she jumps into the river...
...In a beautifully contrasted scene, Varvara and Kudrjas indulge themselves lightheartedly, while Katya and Boris pair off spiritually as well as carnally...
...His still underrated fifth, The Excursions of Mr...
...Yet when he wants it, a finely flowing melody arches toward a climax of intense feeling, ending with a passionate outburst or gently dying fall...
...A thunderstorm breaks out while she and Varvara are out walking, and they seek refuge in a ruined pavilion on whose walls there are frescoes of Judgment Day and the punishments awaiting sinners...
...He listened to the talk of a villager, the cry of a hedgehog, the creaking of a wooden fence as no one before or since...
...Kabanicha has Tichon kneel and forces him to make humiliating demands of obedience from his cringing wife before he leaves...
...For one thing, sound is now better than 20 years ago...
...With some straining one can demonstrate in him influences of Italian verismo, French impressionism, and Mussorgskian speech melodies...
...With a couple of exceptions, all of his masterpieces were composed in the last 10 or 12 years of his life, a time when others usually have written themselves out...
...Ostrovsky intended it partly as a screed against the brutish lives of Russia's merchant classes...
...thereafter he wrote all his librettos...
...He also omitted some minor characters and fused others, thereby highlighting Katya's tragedy...
...His marriage to Zdenka Schulzová quickly turned sour, and completely cooled with the deaths of their children: Vladimir's in infancy, Olga's in girlhood...
...Janacek displays his peculiar structural power of allowing these brief germs to grow and spread like a thought in the mind, with all sorts of new and expressive harmonic subtleties, but without contrapuntal elaboration or thickening of the texture...
...Now Katya wanders on, singing of her longing for Boris, whom she hopes to see once more...
...In the opera, we all hear that stern or seductive wordless chorus at crucial moments...
...God led us astray...
...as "God led us...
...The great Swede mastered the difficult Czech remarkably, but Benackovâ, the finest Czech singer of our time (only Lucia Popp and Edita Gruberova can, perhaps, compete) has the edge of the native...
...Ffrequently JanaCek breaks the melody down into units of a few bars that vary considerably in rhythm, melody and harmony, as the changing emotional situation demands...
...He sees Katya in church and falls in love...
...So she merely asks that he give alms in her memory to all the beggars he meets on his journey, and he leaves, complaining that no one understands his sorrow...
...Although Janácek's first two operas were negligible, the third, on which he toiled from 1894 to 1903, was ultimately to make him famous...
...Also in the language of animals and the sounds of beloved things—say, a windmill or a river...
...Varvara, Tichon's foster sister, conducts a carefree affair with Kudrjas, a young teacher, and Kabanicha has a grotesque relationship with Dikoj, a brutish merchant and neighbor...
...the undiluted strength of its human feeling...
...and here and there Mackerras invests the music with still greater intensity...
...Finally, the new, unsigned English translation, aside from skipping a few lines altogether, mistranslates Boris' disturbing comment (not in Ostrovsky): "Svedl nás Buh...
...Dikoj's nephew, the civilized Boris, is unwillingly living with him...
...This and the thunder, perceived as the wrath of heaven, induce a hysterical confession from Katya in the presence of Kabanicha, Tichon, Boris, and various other promenaders sheltering from the storm...
...Thus did the Muse become the Angel of Death...
...Yet the recording repeatedly allows the orchestra to overwhelm the singers, good as they all are, barring the Kabanicha of Eva Randová, whose weak characterization is most clearly revealed in her flat rendering of those final thanks, where Nadezda Kniplova, on London, is chillingly proper and dissembling...
...The boy sauntered back unharmed, but Leos caught the chill that eventually carried him off...
...They met infrequently, the last time in 1928, when Kamila, her husband and boys came to visit the Janaceks in Hukvaldy, the village where they lived...
...Here Janacek pulls a masterstroke all his own...
...Varvara, plotting a night in the Kabanov garden with Kudrjas, also talks Katya into meeting Boris there...
...Yet such is the power of the music that this is not felt in performance...
...The composer's impecunious youth was spent studying music in Brno, Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna...
...Next was Katya Kabanova (1920-21), perhaps his most popular work, dedicated to Kamila...
...Katya begs to accompany him, but no: She will be left at the mercy of her hateful mother-in-law...
...Life will go on as before, with Katya's sacrifice duly forgotten...
...But most of his major compositions were inspired by, and often dedicated to, her...
...Varvara and Kudrjas, meeting at a secluded spot on the Volga banks, decide to flee provincial oppression for the freedom of Moscow...
...On Music LOVE WRITES AN OPERA By John Simon Pierre Boulez once remarked in conversation that the only 20th-century composers of consequence were Bartok, Stravinsky, Schönberg, Berg, and Webern...
...Broucek, caused any number of famous librettists to stumble, until he himself took over...
...So why...
...A crowd gathers...
...Söderström's quality is different: She gives us a more mature, evenly tender Katya...
...The greatest happiness he knew came from meeting Kamila Stosslova at a spa in 1917...
...Thus in the play only the doomed heroine hears the strange singing of the Volga, into which she ultimately throws herself...
...Newcomers should buy the Supraphon version, but even people who own that fine older one will not find acquiring it redundant: Benackova is the definitive Katya Kabanov...
...Katya (short for Katerina) is married to the young merchant Tichon Kabanov, a weakling tyrannized by his widowed mother, Kabanicha, who is fiercely jealous of her daughter-in-law and wants total fealty from her son...
...Dikoj comes on with her dead body retrieved from the waters...
...His next, semiautobiographical opera, Fate, suffers from a novice librettist's amateurish text...
...Resentful but spineless, he acquiesces...
...Katya bids a moving farewell to life, consoling herself with the birds that will sing and the flowers that will bloom on her grave...
...Today he is recognized as one of the giants of instrumental, chamber, symphonic, and operatic music...
...Tichon feebly accuses his mother of murdering Katya...
...The confession does not ease her conscience and she runs off...
...Yet these are far less important than his immersion in Czechoslovak— or more precisely Moravian—folk songs (which he collected) and in the rhythms and melodies of his native tongue...
...But the main difference is in the protagonist: Söderström on London, Gabriela Benackova on Supraphon...
...And he wrote about it in little journalistic essays just as idiosyncratic and effervescent as his music...
...Katya Kabanová, my subject here, is more correctly spelled Kát'a, but to make the printer's life easier, I'll stick to the earlier transliteration...
...Sir Charles Mackerras, the leading Janacek conductor of our day, has rerecorded Katya Kabanová two decades after his abovementioned version for London, this time on Supraphon (3291-2...
...He arrives, and she begs his forgiveness...
...So too in Vienna in 1918, where the composer's European reputation was made...
...It all works well enough, except near the end, where an overspeedy transition is illogical...
...The result is a kind of intimate eloquence which is the opposite of rhetoric...
...It makes the suicide more persuasive and allows Janácek to deploy his skills in choral writing...
...I have always loved Söderström's singing, but cannot deny that Benackova brings something additional and shattering to Katya...
...The unrepentant and hypocritical Kabanicha, bowing in all directions to the assembled multitude, sings, "Thank you, good people, thank you for your kind services," indicating, in Ian Horsbrugh's words, "that neither assistance nor comment is required...
...A full description of these differences can be found in John Tyrell's booklet notes to the 1979 recording of the opera (London 421 852...
...After Jenufa premiered in Brno in 1904, personal jealousies kept it from being mounted in Prague till 1916, where it was an enormous success...
...Tichon throws himself sobbing upon it...
...The Czech Philharmonic is splendid too, and both versions feature Czech singers at ease with the material...
...Katya begs to be taken along, but the weakling refuses...
Vol. 81 • May 1998 • No. 6
