Tuesday 4 December 2018

Janáček: a more than earthly joy passed this way



A decade ago our Viennese friends Tommi and Martha indulged us on a whistlestop driving tour of Moravia, embracing Janáček territory from Brno via Luhačovice all the way to his birthplace in Hukvaldy as well as architect T's interest in Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat and the Bata development in Zlin. We stopped in Brno only for an afternoon, so I didn't have time then to take in its full wonders. Nor did it seem as pulsing and vital as it does now, with its thriving art, theatre and music scene and new artisan coffee bars all over the city. On that first visit I managed to visit the garden house in the grounds of the Organ School where the composer and his wife lived in later life, this time other crucial locations including the Augustinian monastery where Janáček was a lonely boarding chorister and music-maker


and the grave in the city cemetery pictured up top (the white chrysanthemums on the left are my offering, bought from one of the flower sellers at the gate). The quotation is from Janáček's setting of Tagore's The Wandering Scholar, with the selective words 'With his strength gone, his heart in the dust, like a tree uprooted'. Quite different from the life-goes-on optimism of his operatic epilogues, most radiant of all that in The Cunning Little Vixen after the heroine's death. where the Forester sings of  forest summer magic, adding that 'men and women will walk with heads bowed, and realise that a more than earthly joy has passed this way'. No wonder Janáček wanted this played and sung at his funeral. And how he loved animals - there are photos of him with a number of pet dogs at his home in Brno. I like this one featuring miniature poodle Cert ('Devil').


The pretext this year was the stunning Sixth International Opera and Music Festival known simply as Janáček Brno, and featuring all the operas for the second time. I'll be writing about my slice of the experience on The Arts Desk on Saturday. But the main point here is to highlight a production I didn't see, by Jiří Heřman, Artistic Director of the Janáček Opera Company. He's the same superb director whose very moving view of Smetana's Libuše, looking from Masaryk's founding of the Czech state 100 years ago backwards to the foundation myth and forwards to a second liberation, was the highlight among the five events I witnessed.


The Cunning Little Vixen was premiered in Brno's beautiful National Theatre (now the Mahen Theatre, pictured above), on 6 November 1924, opened the Janáček Theatre in 1965 and inaugurated the renovated building at the start of this year's festival. Although I didn't get to see an opera there, I was given a tour around the stage, auditorium and newly redesigned foyers.


Heřman's production, screened via Opera Vision and thus, miraculously, available on YouTube indefinitely, offers such a sensitive and profoundly moving interpretation, so detailed and yet doing no fundamental violence to anything in the work's scenario. Its starting point is a historical fact which not many of us outside Czechia knew about: that Rudolf Těsnohlídek, creator of the Vixen stories in his Brno newspaper Lidové noviny, found an abandoned baby girl in the woods near where he lived, in Bílovice nad Svitavou not far from Brno (I intended to take a short train journey there, but still had too much to see in town, so as the Vixen and her Fox sing, 'wait until next May comes'). His discovery led to the founding of the Dagmar Children's Home, designed for free by master architect Bohuslav Fuchs, many of whose buildings I explored thanks to the Tourist Information Centre's excellent little book on Functionalism in Brno. I'll be writing anon on here about my itinerary, which included the Stadion Sokol where the premiere of the Glagolitic Mass took place.


So Dagmar is the setting for the opening scene, illustrated in the first of three production photos by Marek Olbrzymek above, where the children all take delight in their wooden toys (this was genuine, says Herman, from a generation all too used to computer games). Eventually the eggshell walls


crack open to reveal the natural world beyond.


Never in my experience - which so far totals six productions - have the adult and children's worlds been so perfectly in balance, or so beautifully and touchingly united in the final scene. Heřman's many ideas are as thoughtful as those of the (over) intellectual Stefan Herheim, sidestepping or postponing the obvious, but he's far more tender and human with the personenregie, which makes us warm so much to Forester and Vixen. Do set aside time to watch and shed a tear or two.


10 comments:

David Damant said...

Your tour of Moravia and mine show our different ways of looking at the world. Moravia contains Slavkov, formerly Austerlitz, where Napoleon achieved his great victory in 1805 and dictated his terms to Austria and Russia in the chateau - which was the seat of the Kaunitz family, and which contains the historic oval saloon built by the great Kaunitz for the visit of Maria Teresa ( they planned the destruction of Frederick the Great, but unfortunately for them he was great). A somewhat ironic visit by Napoleon since Metternich, who later presided over the end of Napoleon's empire, had married a Kaunitz girl. And along the road there is the most beautiful chateau at Buclovice ( "what a place to come home to !") the seat of Count Berchtold, the man who sent the telegram of war to Serbia in 1914. One can see the actual room there where earlier Berchtold and the Russian foreign minister had a misunderstanding about Bosnia-Herzegovina, which contributed to the tensions leading up to 1914. On Janacek, I suggested to a former Director of the Edinburgh Festival that Janacek was perhaps the greatest opera composer of the 20th century. "No" was the reply" one of the greatest ever"

David said...

Personally, I can't think of anything more dull than looking at the sites of former battlefields, but they must be very suggestive to the military historian. There was plenty of Napoleon memorabilia available in Brno - Austerlitz is very close. On our whistlestop tour we did visit beautiful Lednice, or rather the palace park, so lush and beautiful.

Indeed, Janacek is one of the greatest ever. The list does become rather long when one also brings in composers famous for only one or two operas, but he has five regularly performed in the opera houses of the world. A list provided in one of the pieces of Brno literature shows him at 18th among the most performaed opera composers, just below Britten, his equal. Weird that Kalman comes above them.

David Damant said...

I find it difficult to place Britten near Janacek. But when I discuss works of art in the topmost class I want them to be about the human predicament in a general sense. I do not go to tragic opera ( or the play Hamlet, or a novel such as Wuthering Heights) to enjoy myself, but to have the emotions purged with pity and fear etc. There are bits of Britten when one suddenly feels that he has got it, but only bits. And when Britten does discuss general themes about humanity, they seem to me sometimes powerful but rather obvious, as in the War Requiem ( as a result easy to understand). Peter Grimes is a masterpiece and a pure drop of tragedy, but the dimension of genius is not of the highest

David said...

Put simply, you're wrong, and you have a blind spot there: so 'one' should read 'I'. Shostakovich put the War Requiem alongside Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde as the greatest work of the 20th century, and over time I've come to agree with him. Not only Grimes but The Turn of the Screw, Billy Budd and (for its transcendence) Death in Venice are up there with Janacek's greatest.

David Damant said...

I suggest that it is not a matter of right or wrong, but that I look for certain things in great art ( anyway, in the greatest) that you ( or Shostakovich ! ) do not look for. Take what is perhaps the top point of The War Requiem ....." I am the enemy you killed, my friend". This music ( and indeed the whole work) impressively portrays the pity of war, as Owen wrote. But the music does not stand back, it does not distance us from the particular and does not lead us to reflect on how we stand in the face of life and death. Mozart does that as the Commendatore is dying. In David Cecil's essay on Wuthering Heights, his comment is that Emily Bronte asks of the universe," what does it mean? " Of course we cannot answer these questions whilst this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close us in. But the virtue which is achieved is, one can say, detachment, the same virtue that Bertrand Russell attributes to philosophy ( or at any rate his kind of philosophy) that is that by this distancing we can stand aside from our extraordinary and at bottom tragic predicament, and achieve a balanced stance. I suppose that this is close to Aristotle's statement that we go to tragedy to have our emotions purged with pity and fear, and thus achieve a catharsis, though that parallel needs working out. All this does not take away from The War Requiem as a masterpiece, and the fact that the music stays on the practical ( if that is the right word) level of analysis makes it very powerful and it speaks to very many people including those who have not thought through the pity of war. [ I will have a new listen to Death in Venice]

David said...

The balance of War Requiem is in the context. 'Strange Meeting' is as spare as 'Das Abschied' in Das Lied von der Erde. Not everyone likes the redemptive epilogue that follows - but that's followed by the irresolution of the tritone. Everything is in perfect equilibrium in War Requiem - it's harder to say that of Don Giovanni, which owing to Da Ponte's expansion of Bertati's one-act libretto dips a bit in the middle. So does Death in Venice, but Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw are other examples of perfection of form.

Susan Scheid said...

You remind me again how much more Janacek I’d like the chance to hear live. It is an ongoing frustration to me that the Met Opera is so hidebound. This year, again, nothing by Britten or Janacek and nothing, even, by Richard Strauss.

David said...

Famously Daniel Kramer of English National Opera said on an early morning radio programme that they would not for at least some seasons be doing 'Janacek and other obscures'. He'll never live that one down. I do hope you watch this wonderful Vixen on YouTube. I use it a lot more now that I've got a sensational bluetooth box which brings such wonderful sound to accompany the image. The Royal Opera is doing a Janacek series which was meant to be done by Ivo van Have but has now been divided up between other great directors - Richard Jones is to handle Katya Kabanova, Katie Mitchell The Cunning Little Vixen.

Josie Holford said...

All I can add to this erudite discussion is that I am currently listening to the "Ceremony of Carols" and it is glorious.

David said...

Isn't it just? Britten's genius at its most simple and direct.