Alemania
Living in the Ice Age
Jesse Simon
Damiano Michieletto’s new staging of Jenůfa – intended
originally as part of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s ongoing Janáček cycle
in collaboration with Sir Simon Rattle – was one of the many productions
sidelined during the Covid pandemic. Although it had its première in February
of 2021, performed to an empty house and streamed online, it would have to wait
another year before its debut in front of an audience. With a slightly altered
cast and musical direction taken over by Thomas Guggeis, the first public
performance was a triumph, placing considerable vocal riches in the service of
a thoroughly engrossing drama.
Mr Michieletto’s excellent staging was something of a
rarity in that it seemed wholly at ease within the symbolic logic of its
presiding concept. The action was set in a large cube-shaped space, slightly
offset from the geometry of the stage and lined by several layers of textured,
translucent floor-to-ceiling partitions which allowed characters to enter and
exit from the back, albeit along an indirect path. The space itself was empty
save for a few austere wooden benches, which were reconfigured for different
scenes, and one bench with a handful of candles and religious artefacts; the
set suggested a modernist church, and the figures who came and went, dressed
primarily in greys and whites, did not seem to belong to any specific time or
place.
The first act established the staging as a
well-directed, if fairly straightforward drama. The minimalist neutrality of
the setting offered little to distract from the succession of elegantly crafted
scenes, in which the complex relationships and character dynamics of the story
were rendered with unfussy clarity. Mr Michieletto often used the volume and
emptiness of the stage to great effect: in the scene between Jenůfa and Števa,
a growing alienation was underlined by their positions at the opposite ends of
a very long bench. Yet nothing seemed forced – there were no visual flourishes
that drew unwanted attention to their own ingenuity – and even the act’s one
conspicuously odd moment, in which the drunk Števa hauled a giant block of ice
onto the stage, seemed acceptable within the context of the action. If the
staging often seemed understated, its attention to character and lack of
ponderous conceptual baggage were decidedly refreshing.
Janáček: Jenůfa. Damiano Michieletto, director. Thomas Guggeis, conductor. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, May 2022. © 2022 by Bernd Uhlig.
It was only mid-way through the second act, when a
large iceberg began to descend from the ceiling, that the symbolic order of the
staging locked into focus. The ice which Števa had brought on stage and the ice
to which the unwanted baby was soon to be consigned were not mere thematic
threads, they were part of the continuum in which the staging took place; it
was suddenly apparent that the set itself was intended to resemble a large ice
cube in which the passion and reason of the characters had been frozen into
immobility. The image was so perfectly suited to the action that Mr Michieletto
felt no need to overstate it. While the iceberg was an intriguing presence in
the second act, and was used to even greater effect in the third, it was never
allowed to eclipse the action; the characters went about their business
oblivious to the giant metaphor hanging directly above them.
If Mr Michieletto brought style and intelligence to
the drama, it was Evelyn Herlitzius who gave the evening its most arresting
jolts of unfiltered emotion. There was no more galvanic moment in the first act
than the Kostelnička arriving to put the drunken Števa in his place, and it
gained its excitement not merely through Ms Herlitzius’s vocal power, but by
the way in which she was able to compress so much complexity of character into
the span of a relatively brief scene. If the other characters seemed mere
figures in a drama, the Kostelnička was a living distillation of the complex
back-story on which the drama was constructed, and in berating Števa, she
revealed her own past disappointments and a bitterness that would dictate her
future actions.
Ms Herlitzius was even better in the second act: over
the course of four captivating scenes – with Jenůfa, with Števa, with Laca and,
finally, alone with the crib – the death of the child evolved naturally and
plausibly from an evil thought into an unquestionable necessity. What made the
performance so terrifying – and so thrilling – was her ability to convince not
only herself, but also the audience, that her actions came not from a malicious
heart, but rather from a genuine, if misplaced, desire to save Jenůfa from a
future of misery. While her chilling pronouncement at the climax of the second
act and her appearances throughout the third were fraught with fear and grief,
Ms Herlitzius kept the character far from any hints of instability or madness,
and her final scene, in which the truth of her actions could no longer be
denied, was presented with magnificent lucidity.
Janáček: Jenůfa. Damiano Michieletto, director. Thomas Guggeis, conductor. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, May 2022. © 2022 by Bernd Uhlig.
If no other performances could rival Ms Herlitzius in
sheer intensity, the grandmother of Hanna Schwarz was a close match in vocal
power. Although a considerably smaller role, her appearances in the first act
were commanding through clarity of tone and ease of projection; she suggested a
figure who had once been as strong-willed as the Kostelnička, but who had
retained a greater degree of compassion. Stephan Rügamer provided the evening
with an engaging Laca whose plaintive tone and impassioned delivery was often
highly expressive without ever growing wayward. If he was never convincingly
dangerous – even his violent outbursts in the first act could not efface
his gentleness – one never doubted his firmly held (if awkwardly expressed)
affection for Jenůfa.
Asmik Gregorian’s performance of the title role was
consistently beautiful in tone and phrasing, and her prayer in the second act
was a moment of rapturous purity amidst the gathering desperation. As a
character, however, she often seemed meek and deferential, accepting the abuses
of Števa and the controlling wisdom of the Kostelnička with demure restraint.
This may have been a feature of the staging, which was interested less in Jenůfa
herself than the surrounding forces which had numbed her to the point of
passivity; certainly in the final scenes of the third act – a moving plea for
the Kostelnička’s pardon followed by tentative attempts to reject Laca – Ms
Gregorian revealed greater complexity and authority than she had allowed in her
earlier appearances.
Thomas Guggeis led the orchestra through a finely
measured, tightly controlled performance, attentive to the rhythmic steadiness
underpinning many of the opera’s most volatile scenes. Although Mr Guggeis was
rarely prone to exaggeration and favoured a lean detailed orchestral sound over
any excesses of lustrous passion, the music that emerged was articulate,
well-paced and wholly sympathetic to the spirit of Mr Michieletto’s staging, in
which only a little heat was required to trigger an unstoppable thaw.
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