A Ruined Life, a Salvaged Dinner

...Now the river takes on a darker fascination for Katya, especially after Boris shows up to say a final goodbye because he is being bundled off by his beastly uncle to a trading post in Siberia...

...When Susan, who dislikes her mirror for showing "the old maid I am about to be" rather than her parents' notion of "the bride to be," figures out what is afoot, she runs out angry, though curious about the cold cherry soup that is in the making...

...But it turns out the misplaced Melba toast is what had burned...

...In brighter bygone days...

...The river plays a key role in the opera from the very beginning, when Kudrjäs addresses it as a marvelous spectacle that has absorbed him for 25 years, declaring that he can never get enough of it...

...Whereupon he sings the Monteblancan folksong about the shepherd and his waiting girl...

...The scene is vaguely reminiscent of Gounod's Faust, Act III, where Faust and Marguerite and Mephistopheles and Martha crisscross the garden in peripatetic courtship...

...The handsome prince loves food, but is happily not overweight...

...Miller has allowed or encouraged Israel to design a number of toylike buildings that are scattered about an otherwise empty stage, making the fictional burg of Kalinov look like a playground where a gigantic but undisciplined child abandoned its expensive toys...

...Something of the work's social and psychological impact was lost, yet thanks to the music and a skillful adaptation, a greater work emerged...

...The Katya of the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila was superbly sung and acted...

...It would also have more fully justified the distraught young woman's rushing out into the drenching night...

...Susan reappears in a temper, with too much makeup and her dress awry...

...Having written about the opera itself before (see "On Music," NL, May 4-18, 1998), I won't go into more plot summary...

...in the New York Times, writes, "It is increasingly clear that besides Britten, the 20th-century composer who left us the strongest body of operas was Janâcek...

...Thirty-four years later we can happily say this is no longer so, either for Jenûfa or for the composer's other major operas...

...That ravine is crucial to the opera...

...The third important female character, Kabanicha, was sung and acted rather routinely by the Canadian mezzo Judith Forst...

...the Dunmows can doff their aprons and don their medals and jewelry...

...And so it does, admirably recorded on Chandos by the City of London Sinfonia and an excellent cast under Richard Hickox's knowing baton...

...Otherwise the judgment holds...

...Dinner is served, and the elders troop out to a lovely theme from the opera's beginning...

...Katya's mind wanders much the same way as Nina's at the end of The Seagull, and may well have influenced Chekhov...

...Lord Dunmow was Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Grand Duchy of Monteblanco...

...Just as Susan, running off, exclaims, "I will not wear it, I cannot marry him," the Monte - blancans arrive, "to a brisk but formal fugue," as Anthony Burton has it in the booklet...

...much comic mileage is got from this later on...

...He suggests that they go into the garden, but Susan wants them to see it in the moonlight and Philippe defers...

...Nothing of this is imparted by the Met's preposterous staging...

...But for something less known and less extreme, I commend to you Sir Lennox Berkeley's A Dinner Engagement, in a premiere recording (Chandos 10219...

...Kitchens are his hobby...

...Berkeley is considered the most French of English composers, and that song with its French text will recur in füll when Prince Philippe and Susan begin their romance...

...Unfortunately, the Volga is neither seen nor sensed in Miller's production...

...The music is humorous much of the time (think Jacques Offenbach and Arthur Sullivan), yet can turn wonderfully lyrical where appropriate...

...Possessed, Katya leaps to her death...

...Mrs...

...Here, in any event, I want to show what Jonathan Miller's perverse direction has done to the Met production, abetted by Robert Israel's totally inappropriate scenery...

...The oath, re-enforced by Kabanicha's insulting remarks, causes Katya's emotional collapse...

...Indeed, orchestrally the performance could not have been better...

...Kneebone proudly asserts that her helping with the bridge teas of a Mrs...

...It can be said in her defense that the role calls for a contralto—a rare bird these days—and that it is so profoundly unsympathetic that only a singing actress of major stature can make it special...

...It is where Varvara and Kudrjás conduct their carefree trysts, and Katya solemnly yields to Boris...

...They simply wander off and return after what might as well have been a mere nocturnal promenade...

...The scoring is for the English Opera Group's standard complement: wind quintet, harp, percussion (including timpani), string quartet, and double bass...

...After much more comic and romantic to-do, the whole cast joins in a septet, each singing his or her own thoughts and feelings—with the returned grocery boy afraid that the Duchess' promise to pay the Dunmows' debt will not be honored...

...Kneebone repeats in her Cockneyfied English...

...Melody proliferates, but is tempered by neoclassical restraint...

...No matter," she says, "I have often thought that with a good pâté toast ruins the flavor...

...Could Dunmow stand for a couple who once had done more...

...But back to Leos Janâcek and Katya...

...There have BEEN quite a few interesting opera recordings in the past year...

...Note the amusing names: Kneebone forthe maid who must do work on her knees...

...If you want something wildly eccentric and experimental, there is György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, rereleased on Wergo (three numbers are confusingly given...

...Thus we find Lord and Lady Dunmow in their modest Chelsea garden apartment...

...The Dunmows are so impoverished that they can now afford only a cleaning woman, Mrs...

...She sends him off on a long business trip, and makes him force Katya to swear she won't so much as look at another man in his absence...

...The young ones are left in the kitchen, which Philippe finds to be in charming disorder...

...Kneebone must be stopped from grating too much cheese into the soup, but finally all is duly in the oven...

...Told that it actually is the kitchen, she responds, "How delightful...

...one character was cut, others conflated or abridged...

...Although tall and strong, Mattila beautifully suggests a fragile and vulnerable creature, quite unlike her recent Met triumph as the perverse and headstrong heroine of an otherwise appalling production of Salome...

...Another inspiration, clearly, was the straitened postwar circumstances of many British aristocrats...

...He may think that a number of open umbrellas make a striking effect, or he may not know how to stage a dramatic scene for a few characters with so many extras milling around...

...Varvara, Kabanicha's lively foster daughter and Katya's only ally, has discovered it and substituted another one...

...She thinks it was "clever and witty" to decorate the drawing room as a kitchen...

...In his Met debut, the Finnish tenor Jorma Stivasti sang with ample voice, but looked and acted like a paunchy middle-aged businessman, not someone to have turned Katya's head...

...a breeze would carry her away—let alone the storm that breaks over her...

...There is no romance in the air, no "magic of the summer night," as Lord Harewood puts it in Kobbé's Opera Book...

...She replies that she was right about the dress, but wrong about not marrying the prince...

...She shrinks at the mere thought [of hurting, of evil...

...Paul Dehn reported in an article that he and Berkeley were friends who enjoyed dining in each others houses: "On these occasions we always spoke glowingly of each other's food so that when the English Opera Group commissioned us to write a light one-act opera, it seemed proper that the action should be set in a kitchen...

...If you want a standard masterpiece well executed, I can recommend Verdi's Falstaff, conducted by Sir Colin Davis with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO 0055...

...worse yet, smoke trickles from the oven door...

...The Storm (1859...

...There is more French from the wonderfully droll trio preparing the Monteblancan national dish, cold cherry soup: Lady Dunmow reads the recipe in French, Lord Dunmow translates, and an awed Mrs...

...The guilt-ridden Katya, taking the thunder for God's wrath, falls to her knees confessing her 10-day love affair to Tichon, Kabanicha and a couple of others...

...On this Friday, Lord Dunmow has already had a hard time with the errand boy who delivered some groceries for the much anticipated dinner and, as per instruction from his boss, Mr...

...Buckingham, very upper class for a grocer...

...She uses it for her romantic escapades with the young clerk Vanya Kudrjás, and now temptingly tosses it before Katya...

...her horrified mother would have her in the bedroom, making up with the expensive lipstick and getting into the costly dress her parents have bought for the occasion...

...Katya is an unhappily married young woman in the small town of Kalinov on the Volga, inhabited mostly by greedy, brutish merchants...

...Consequently, Kalinov should be a real town, oppressive and censorious, in which a wealthy, despotic, hypocritically proper widow can dominate and destroy her family...

...The ravine represents nature at its most assertive: It provides both privacy and a grassy bed for the contrasted couples—the merry Kudrjás and Varvara, and the passionate Boris and Katya—enabling them to play out their different dalliances...

...The elders go out to inspect the tiny back garden...

...A true artist, Mattila was worthily matched by the lovely Magadalena Kozenâ as Varvara...

...On Music A Ruined Life, a Salvaged Dinner By John Simon NOT SO LONG AGO, in 1971, Paul Henry Lang wrote in Tiie Experience of Opera, "Janâcek's Jenûfa, very popular all over Central Europe, failed to establish itself in this country...

...With a clever libretto by Paul Dehn—better known as a screenwriter, but the librettist also of William Walton's delightful The Bear, after Chekhov—Berkeley's work has been compared to Francis Poulenc s. The Frenchman was a friend of (and early influence on) the Britisher, who was then studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger...

...The Prince likes his ladies to look soignée (well-groomed), a term that keeps cropping up...

...Jonathan Miller has been complaining that, not receiving many commissions these days, he may quit—a threat I fervently hope he will carry out...

...After considerable struggle with her conscience, Katya goes to meet her hitherto decorous admirer, the highly educated but likewise weak Boris, in the ravine...

...The Grand Duchess is a benevolent version of Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell...

...The singing, however, was uneven...

...When Lord Dunmow moons about his ambassadorial glory days, and recalls a Monteblancan shepherd's song about a lover whose girl awaits him in the moonlight, the music becomes enchantingly wistful...

...As Janâcek described her to his platonic beloved and muse, the young wife Kamila Stösslová, Katya is "gentle by nature...

...Berkeley modestly wrote his publisher, "I think you will like the little opera—it is very light, and meant only to divert, but that I think will do...

...Buckingham, refused to accept his Lordship's charging them to his overburdened account...

...Philippe will be interested...

...Perhaps it was cheaper to reconform the existing set pieces into an empty square just behind the Kabanov house, an unlikely place for amorous games that renders the whole garden key business nonsense...

...It must not be forgotten that although Katya is an unhappy romantic dreamer with a touch of poetic exultation, she lives in a truly stifling, petit bourgeois milieu...

...Despite all, it was still lovely to hear this remarkable work which someday may reach us in a worthy mounting...

...Their daughter, Susan, is of direly marriageable age...

...Janâcek had to tighten the five-act text to accommodate the music...

...In dangerofbeingnoticed even at night, and with only hard streets for beds, are Katya and Boris likely to make out...

...Susan wants to help in the kitchen...

...Reminiscing about those times "he becomes hilariously boring," as Peter Dickinson remarks in The Music of Lennox Berkeley...

...A tyrant who resents her daughter-in-law as a rival, she bullies her and forces her son to do likewise...

...I have never seen one...

...Raymond Very was an adequate Kudrjás...

...This would have been much more effective if played out before shocked townspeople in a public scandal...

...On the opera's Decca recording (4218522) Nadézda Kniplová lets us at least hear what can be done with it...

...it is an almost invisible, narrow ditch way upstage, hardly enough for drowning a kitten...

...The distinguished Czech conductor Jiri Belohlávek conducted this secondrevival of Katya Kabanova since its 1991 premiere to splendid effect...

...The men's roles are rather subaltern, but could have been more persuasively rendered...

...This charming comic one-acter in four scenes was written in 1953-54, the first of four Berkeley operas...

...Katya has a husband, Tichon, who loves her, but is weak and completely dominated by his widowed mother, Marfa Kabanová, known as Kabanicha (wild sow...

...Kneebone, who comes once a week on Fridays...

...So Miller and Israel betray the work from beginning to end...

...The lovers remain and Philippe quizzes Susan gently about what the retreating soignée lady was saying at his arrival...

...Miller has most of them standing outside in the downpour like village idiots, instead of stepping into the shelter, where there is room enough for all...

...It is not conveyed, as it could be, by light reflections at the opera's start...

...Certainly Poulenc's delectable Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947) was known to Berkeley, but a no less likely stimulus could have been Britten's Albert Herring of the same date...

...Now the offstage chorus summons Katya, intoning "a vowel between U and O, like the Volga sighing," as the stage direction has it...

...He and Susan are brought close together by their shared culinary interests, and the cold cherry soup that Philippe tastes approvingly...

...Clear, indeed, it is...

...The story concerns Katerina, changed to its diminutive, Katya, by the composer (who claimed, rather peculiarly, to want to avoid confusion with the Empress Catherine...

...and they are expecting for dinner the Grand Duchess of Monteblanco and her son, the bachelor Prince Philippe...

...Equally inept is Miller's staging of Act III, Scene 1. It takes place in a tumbledown summerhouse on a terrace by the Volga...

...A number of people are caught in the eponymous thunderstorm of Ostrovsky's drama...

...Meanwhile, there are some dramatics...

...Anthony Tommasini, reviewing this season's revival of the Metropolitan Opera's 1991 production of Katya Kaban...

...The festival was cofounded by Benjamin Britten, who had briefly been Berkeley's lover and remained a lifelong friend...

...Cute miniature houses and churches in little clumps with lots of space between do not convey a mean, suffocating environment...

...Half mad by this time, Katya hears the voice of the Volga calling her in an alluring wordless chorus...

...The text is in rhymed verse for the arias and ensembles, in prose for the recitatives accompanied by the piano, to be played by the conductor...

...Tommasini does, however, conspicuously and unfairly ignore Richard Strauss, whom he presumably considers an epigone...

...He has caught a glimpse of the vanishing Susan and overheard her parting remark...

...Ellibank at Wimbledon qualifies her for the grand ducal dinner, the musical treatment is hilarious...

...But the set design becomes an utter disaster in Act II, Scene 2. This is supposed to take place in an overgrown ravine just behind the Kabanov garden, accessible through the gate whose key Kabanicha keeps hidden...

...Told that her hosts have been reduced to one Friday servant, the Duchess exclaims, "How delightful to be able to tell from your servant's arrival which day of the week is a Friday...

...The only Czech in the cast, she can sing soprano or, as here, mezzo with equal ease, and the scenes for the two women were among the evening's all too isolated highlights...

...Even when there is concern that the soup may be ruined, she proclaims they can eat the pâté de foie gras she brought as a present...

...Chris Merritt, as the weak Tichon, just about passed...

...The opera's libretto is by the composer, based on a Czech translation of Alexander Ostrovsky's Russian play...

...At the palace I can never tell one day from another...

...All other major opera composers either wrote too few operas (thus Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich) or have failed as yet to catch on sufficiently (thus Prokofiev, Martmu and Henze...

...Berkeley's instrumentation is always surprising and engaging, as when the bass flute, bass clarinet and horn accompany the Duchess' aria about Susan's beauty being dowry enough...

...When Dunmow is unable to find the Melba toast he prepared, or Mrs...

...That setting was also well suited to the small Jubilee Hall stage, where the English Opera Group performed it as part of the 1954 Aldeburgh Festival...