The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (76 page)

Mid-nineteenth-century Russia, in a village on the banks of the Volga.
Kát’a is unhappily married to Tikhon, a feeble character under the thumb of his martinet mother, Kabanicha, in whose dreary house the couple live.
Kát’a confides to the cheerful Varvara, Kabanicha’s foster-daughter, that she and Boris, another man in the village, are secretly in love.
Tikhon leaves on a business trip and Kát’a is afraid that in his absence, she will yield to temptation.

As the hypocritical Kabanicha receives the attentions of Boris’s father, Dikoy, Varvara helps Kát’a to arrange an assignation with Boris, and at the same time meets her own lover, Kudrjas.
Kát’a and Boris are impassioned but full of guilt; Varvara and Kudrjas, on the other hand, are love’s young dream.

A storm breaks out in the village, and the superstitious peasants take it as a sign of God’s wrath.
Varvara warns Boris that Kát’a’s husband Tikhon has unexpectedly returned, and that Kát’a has had a nervous collapse.
Kát’a then appears in a hysterical state and publicly confesses her adultery, before rushing off into the storm.
Boris pursues her along the banks of the Volga, and tells her that his father is sending him away to a trading post.
Kát’a bids him farewell and then, bereft of hope and self-respect, drowns herself.
A search party recovers her body.
Tikhon rails at his mother, but Kabanicha can only stand stiffly over the corpse, thanking the gawping villagers for their help.

What to listen for

No opera is more replete with the sheer sadness of human existence, and all its tragedy is embodied in the opening bars of its prelude, with its slow and achingly mournful initial theme, developing into an outburst of raging despair and a fierce assertion of fate, underpinned by drumbeats.
The music for Kát’a herself (lyric soprano), underpinned by warm string and woodwind, is swathed in a delicate sweetness and gentleness rare in Janáček’s work, as well as a fleeting but soaringly rapturous lyricism which is pulled inexorably back to earth – reflecting Kát’a’s
aspirations and the grim reality of her situation.
Her final monologue and mad scene, its two parts divided by a moment of shattering silence, is almost unbearable in its bleak intensity.
Although the opera proceeds with lightning concentration – it can be performed without an interval in less than two hours – its terrible underlying sadness is relieved by the grotesque comedy of Kabanicha (contralto) and her admirer Dikoy (bass), and the charm and innocence of Kudrjas (light tenor) and Varvara (light soprano), a love which will survive Kát’a’s suicide.
Note also the sleigh bells which recurrently symbolize the dream of escape from the village, the use of a violent ostinato drumbeat to indicate the hopelessness of that dream, and the evocative use of a haunting wordless chorus.
The opera is heavily scored, and singers can find it hard to project the text over the orchestration.

In performance

As with
Jenůfa,
it is crucial for a production to convey a specific social milieu in which Kát’a’s imprisonment by the conventions of a narrow rural community, and the impossibility of her making her own choices or changing her circumstances are made plausible.
A staging like Katie Mitchell’s for WNO, transplanted to a mid-twentieth-century context in which adultery is no longer horrifying or exceptional, fails to address the obvious question as to why Kát’a doesn’t simply run off with Boris and to hell with the rest of them.
A brief but telling episode of the opera is the scene in which the villagers respond so superstitiously to the thunderstorm that they will not even consider the use of a lightning conductor.

At the Met, Jonathan Miller’s production showed clapperboard houses suggestive of New England puritanism; Trevor Nunn’s production at Covent Garden showed the whole stage embedded in swirls of mud, evocative of Munch’s
The
Scream
and symbolic of the forces which hold love and liberty back, as well as graphically representing the sheer dreariness of village life; Christoph Marthaler in Salzburg and Neil Armfield for Opera Australia have both transported the opera into the concrete desert of modern urban tower-blocks.

Recordings

CD: Elisabeth Söderström (Kát’a); Charles Mackerras (cond.).
Decca 421 852 2

DVD: Nancy Gustafson (Kát’a); Andrew Davis (cond.).
Glyndebourne production.
Arthaus 158

The Cunning Little Vixen
(
Příhody Lišky Bystroušky
)

Three acts. First performed Brno, 1924.

Libretto by the composer

This unique comic opera, with its underlying pantheistic philosophy and wonder at the natural world, is based on some popular cartoon characters published in a Brno newspaper.
Act III, Bystrouška’s death and the final assertion of the glory of natural renewal are Janáček’s own invention.

Plot

The Forester catches a spirited young vixen cub, Bystrouška.
Captive in the farmyard, she endures taunts from a Dog, converts the Hens to feminism and makes a dashing escape.
Bystrouška evicts a Badger and sets up home in the forest.
In a nearby inn, a Parson and Schoolmaster lament their lost loves; the Forester meanwhile becomes obsessed with pursuing Bystrouška.

Bystrouška falls in love with a handsome Fox, and they marry in front of all the creatures of the forest.
Bystrouška then produces a huge number of offspring.
The Forester confronts a Poacher (who is about to marry a gypsy girl once loved by the Schoolmaster) and puts down a trap for Bystrouška.
Bystrouška mocks the trap and goads the Poacher, who finally shoots her dead.

The Forester is inspired by the beauty of nature and the
sight of young vixens reminds him of the unstoppable renewal of life.

What to listen for

Janáček’s fascination with notating the rhythms and cadences of speech in musical form extends in this opera into the world of animal cries and noises.
Children’s voices are sensitively used for the vixen’s cubs and the insects.
There are some enchanting dances, such as the little waltz for the cricket and grasshopper in the opening scene.

The opera is full of lively and imaginative orchestral scene painting, evocative of the richness and variety of forest life, but it only offers one extended lyrical passage for the human voice: the (baritone) Forester’s exultant peroration to the glory of the nature.
Bystrouška is a delightful role for a light soprano with the requisite feisty personality and the capacity to project over a full orchestra.
Desire for contrast and a more mannish timbre often leads to the role of the Fox being assigned to a mezzo-soprano, but it is clearly written for a soprano.

In performance

There is always the danger of sentimentalized, Disneyfied tweeness infecting stagings of this opera, but the pantomime element has to be there somewhere.
David Pountney’s much-travelled production skilfully treads the fine line.
Some directors eschew animal costumes altogether; others have used film as a means of representing the splendour of the forest.
A famous production of the 1950s was that of Walter Felsenstein in Berlin, rehearsed over several months, which drew extraordinarily vivid animal impersonations from the singers.
More recently, an edge of natural savagery was strongly emphasized in a production by Nicholas Hytner for the Châtelet.

Recording