Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
In Australia what helped most to make Janáček’s operas known was The Australian Opera’s production of Jenůfa, in the 1970s. In England it was a different story, thanks to Australian conductor Charles Mackerras.
Mackerras tells how, as a young student in Prague in 1947, he attended a production of Kát’a Kabanová in the National Theatre, not knowing what to expect:
What a revelation this performance was to me! Here was a composer whose very name I hardly knew, who had been dead 20 years, writing an opera in an entirely different idiom from anything I had ever known, who used the human voice and the inflexions of his strange-sounding language in an absolutely original way, and whose instrumentation and harmony produced colours and sounds unlike anything I had heard.
Mackerras became a leading champion of Janáček’s music. He persuaded Sadlers Wells Opera to stage Kát’a, the first performance of any Janáček opera in England, and he conducted the first performance in 1951.
These two works, Jenůfa and Kát’a, are doubtless the best place to start with Janáček’s operas. Max Brod, who translated both for their first performances in German, called Jenůfa the flower of Janáček’s genius and Kát’a the ripe fruit. But the two operas are very different. A good production of Jenůfa is sensitive to its very specific Moravian village setting, its social dynamics and special folk and linguistic colour. The story and its handling are affecting and beautifully structured; they follow Gabriela Preissová’s play quite closely. The story is well known of Janáček’s difficulties in having this opera he completed in 1904 taken up in Prague and recognised as a masterpiece. The delay was frustrating, and helps explain Janáček’s extraordinary outburst of creativity, an Indian summer, following Jenůfa’s Prague production in 1916.
Kat’a Kabanová was first composed in 1919-21, when Janáček was 65, followed by The Cunning Little Vixen (1921-3), The Makropoulos Affair (1923-5), and finally From the House of the Dead (1927). Among the other works composed during this last period were the Glagolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta, which eventually took Janáček’s music into the world’s concert halls as well as its opera houses.
The success of Jenůfa confirmed Janáček’s certainty in his creative gift. From then on his style was to be entirely personal, disconcerting many early hearers, but through more frequent performances recognised as unique and convincing. Janáček’s choice of subjects was his own, and he wrote his own librettos, radically adapting literary originals.
A woman 38 years younger
Of the sequence of operas beginning with Kát’a the first three were all inspired by Janáček’s love for a woman 38 years younger than he, the wife of an antiques dealer in the Bohemian town of Písek. He had met Kamila Stösslová during the First World War at the Luhacovice spa, where he went for his rheumatism. His love for her lasted until his death in 1928. She showed little understanding of him, and responded to few of the hundreds of letters he wrote her. But the three operas, and other works such as the string quartet ‘Intimate Letters’ can only be understood in terms of Janáček’s relationship with Kamila. They reflect his changing attitude to her: in Kát’a it is wishful thinking, the subject being a married woman who has an affair in her husband’s absence. In The Cunning Little Vixen the female character (the vixen) is portrayed as a contented, resourceful, and ultimately self-sacrificing wife and mother, and in The Makropoulos Affair the central character is a 300 year-old woman, glamorous and captivating, but herself ‘as cold as ice’.
Janáček had become resigned to the real nature of his relationship to Kamila. In 1920 he wrote to her: ‘I’ve started writing a new opera. The main character there is a woman, so gentle by nature…a breeze would carry her away, let alone the storm that breaks over her’. Fifteen months later, Janáček wrote to Kamila ‘I don’t know whether to call it “The Storm” or “Katerina”. Against “The Storm” as a title is the argument that there already exists another opera by that name; against “Katerina” that I write nothing but female operas’.
The attraction of Katerina and her story was that it spoke to Janáček’s very deep feeling for women whose aspirations and predicaments were like hers. Highly significant also was that he discovered her in a Russian play. Janáček had owned a copy of its author’s complete works since 1902, but he missed both the Prague and the Brno productions of Ostrovsky’s play The Thunderstorm in 1919. He bought a copy of Vincenc Cervinka’s new Czech translation and in October of that year began negotiating to use it as an opera libretto.
Russophile
Janáček was a Russophile. Many committed and nationalistically minded Czechs of his generation found in things Russian a counter-attraction to the German culture of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy ruling their country. Janáček learnt Russian, visited Russia several times, and helped form a Russian circle in Brno. He gave his daughter Olga a Russian name. Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata (in an eccentric reading almost opposite to its creator’s message) inspired several works, and Janáček considered basing an opera on Tolstoy’s great novel about the adultery of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage, Anna Karenina.
Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-1886) was the leading Russian playwright of his time. His plays are socially realistic choosing subjects from the ‘lower’ classes, and preaching human sympathy and a passion for justice. The Thunderstorm (‘Groza’ in Russian – the word also means ‘terror’) was the most popular of Ostrovsky’s many plays. Premiered in 1859, it was performed over 4000 times in Russia up to 1917. Its documentation of the life of the merchant class in a provincial town was based on research undertaken by Ostrovsky on an economic and ethnological survey of the upper Volga valley in 1856-7.
Janáček’s adaptation omits most of the detailed social observation and criticism in the play, so it is illuminating to learn that Ostrovsky wrote The Thunderstorm not only for the actress Lubov Kositskaya, but also partially about this actress. He was so involved with her that the play can be read as his suit for the affections of the woman who was to act its central role. Whether Janáček knew about this or not, he certainly intuited the parallel with his own relationship to Kamila Stösslová.
The first reaction to Ostrovsky’s play, when it was new, was moral outrage from many ‘right-thinking’ people: ‘No respectable parent should take his daughter to see it…There are no such women as Katerina’ (the same things were said about Bizet’s Carmen a few years later).
Although Ostrovsky’s play has strong social concerns, they are grounded not in public life, but in issues of family and property. In an influential contemporary essay on The Thunderstorm, Russian critic Dobrolyubov argued that Ostrovsky was concerned to show the effects of the tyranny of the ‘samodurs’ (autocratic rulers), merchants and traders who expected their wealth to give them unchallenged power, and – often hypocritically – upheld an old code of morals. These are represented in the play by the bullying mother-in-law, Kabanicha, and her brutish soul-mate, the merchant Dikoj, uncle of Boris who will become Katerina’s lover. According to Dobrolyubov, Katerina introduces ‘a ray of light into the realm of darkness’. He emphasises the ‘deadly boredom of Katerina’s life…her longing for freedom, space, boundless liberty’.
Like many inexperienced young girls married into the families of merchants, Katerina leads a loveless, passive life and gives herself over to dreams. But when her husband Tichon is away on a business trip, she gives in to temptation, encouraged by her sister-in-law Varvara who, as an unmarried woman, enjoys a freedom society denies her married sister. Katerina meets Boris, ‘the only person in the dreary provincial town with the education and imagination to be able to share her dreams and enthusiasm’ (these are the words of the leading English authority on Janáček’s operas, John Tyrrell).
Katerina’s public confession of her adultery reflects a common Russian readiness for public self-abasement, later reserved for political sinners. The critic Dobryulov portrayed Katerina’s weak-willed lover Boris and her mother-dominated husband Tikhon Kabanov as suffering similarly from the tyrannical ‘samodurs’, whom they dare not oppose for fear of losing their hope of taking over their wealth and power. David Pountney, a producer of the opera, calls Tichon and Boris ‘the two half-men between whom Kát’a is lost’.
Music that shifts the emphasis of the play emotionally and spiritually
Although Janáček’s adaptation was fearless in reducing Ostrovsky’s play to its essentials, and omitted much of the social detail (with some puzzling consequences) what remained was much more than the simplistic adulterous love triangle (some critics of Ostrovsky found little more than this in the play). Janáček’s music, David Pountney observes, ‘invariably shifts the emphasis of the play on to its emotional and spiritual content’.
A rich tapestry of tellingly-placed musical motifs makes clear the composer’s involvement with Kát’a and her tragic search for happiness. The musical treatment of Janáček’s selection from the play brings psychological elements to the fore, in an almost expressionistic way. The external trigger of Kát’a’s final collapse – which is also her rebellious affirmation – is a storm. It has a mental counterpart in the pounding kettledrum rhythm of the ‘fate’ motif. This is heard first in the opera’s overture, then linked with the sleigh bells of Tichon’s departure, and dominates the end of the opera. Janáček keeps some of Ostrovsky’s discussion among the crowd on stage about what the storm means, contrasting the superstitious old order, which interprets it as divine wrath, and the modern educated approach (represented in the opera by Kudryash) which explains it as ‘electricity’.
The crowd takes shelter from the storm in a ruined building covered with frescoes of hell and damnation. In the play this has been prepared by earlier glimpses of the age-old moral and superstitious world of provincial Russia. The merchants’ wives may be ‘dressed in their finery’, but they still shelter here when it thunders. In Janaček’s opera this stage external, the frescoes, pushes Kát’a’s guilty conscience over the edge. Reading Kát’a’s ecstatic description to Varvara of her visions, and hearing the music, suggests Janáček has an instinct for depth psychology.
I could die of happiness, going to church,
and imagining I was rising up to heaven
…in that pillar of light I could see angels flying
and singing.
I’d drop down on my knees and cry.
Why I prayed or cried, I’d no idea…
And oh, what dreams I had, what dreams!
I would see great golden cathedrals
and mountains and trees,
and feel I was flying, flying up high
with invisible voices singing everywhere!…
And the smell of cypress trees!
I am falling into some sin!
It’s like standing on the edge of a cliff,
with someone pushing me off…
Kát’a goes on immediately to describe her night-time longings, the loving words she hears whispering in her ear, and how someone seems to be holding her, warmly, ardently, and leading her away. She confesses to Varvara that she loves another man, who is not her husband.
The sense that Janáček is ‘reading’ all of Kát’a’s conscious and unconscious experience is heightened by the very pervasive presence of the River Volga in the music – not only at the end, when Kát’a casts herself into the river. She has heard ‘voices of the Volga’ at key points throughout the drama. In Ostrovsky’s play we are told Katerina has heard voices; the composer, of course, has the option of making them audible.
The Volga has been interpreted as a symbol in the play of the everlasting freedom to which Kát’a escapes. Those who saw David Pountney’s production of Kát’a Kabanova for Opera Australia will remember that much of the action was staged over water. Pountney’s perception is that Janáček literally gives the Volga the last word. Pountney writes of the river as an antithesis to the frailty and insecurity of the society along its banks, and as a metaphor for the opera’s inner emotional dynamic: the sensation of something of great weight and depth travelling at speed. Janáček in a short 1924 autobiography wrote about his search for a subject before settling on Kát’a Kabanová: ‘…the masts on the Volga loomed high and the waters of the Volga in the moonlight were as white as the heart and soul of Kát’a. It would be quite impossible now to find the first thread…in the ball of my brain…each of my operas germinated in my mind a good year or two without my having stopped its development by a single note.’ The association of water with love and death is very strong in this opera taking place alongside the Volga, especially the wonderful double love-scene between Kudriash and Varvara, Boris and Kát’a, and Kát’a’s self-tormenting, her final meeting with Boris, and of course her death by casting herself into the river. The Freudian association of water with female sexual arousal and with the longing for death as a return to the womb, seems just around the corner, but Janáček’s vision is poetic rather than conscious, despite his well-attested interest in psychology.
Early critical reactions
Early critical reactions to Kát’a Kabanova outside the Czech lands tended to focus on the puzzling strangeness of Janáček’s musical idiom ‘a short-winded composer…the phrasing so abrupt and broken up that one is never conscious of a continuous flow…a kind of perpetual recitative’, or from Ernest Newman: ‘a rather scrap-by-scrap composer, finding it difficult to think consecutively for more than two or three numbers at a time’.
Once familiar with Kát’a Kabanova in the context of Janáček’s music one is more likely to have the opposite reaction – this is one of his most satisfyingly integrated works, its musical invention constantly interwoven with the drama and linked by motifs, from start to finish.
If there has to be a criticism, it may be that Janáček’s very personal use of his dramatic source leaves some tensions between the words and the music. The end of the opera, especially, almost wrenches the audience straight from the poignancy of the lovers’ last meeting to Kát’a’s suicide and Kabanicha’s triumphant reassertion of her dominance. Tikhon lies sobbing over Kát’a’s dead body, while Kabanicha, bowing to this side and that, says ‘Thank you, thank you my good people for your kind services’. This is a chilling reminder of the ‘realm of darkness’ which has destroyed Kát’a. Her words make better dramatic sense in Ostrovsky, being her response to the help of the men who retrieved Kát’a’s body. There couldn’t be a better illustration of Janáček’s daring in choosing just what he needs to emphasise; the orchestra restates the fate theme and the voices of the Volga are heard last of all.
The composer was right in his choice of title for the opera: in Janácek’s Kát’a dominates – she is the only fully fleshed-out character, only enough being given of others to affirm that Kát’a’s experience is the focus of the opera.
A young girl who knew Janáček and attended the early performances of Kát’a Kabanová in Brno told Janáček how one passage made her ‘shiver from an indescribed feeling’. Janáček played those bars to her on the piano and wrote them down with a dedication: ‘Because you recognised the motiv of the most poignant happiness in Kát’a Kabanová’. It is the music heard in the orchestra when the lovers meet for their last embrace, unable to utter a word. Max Brod, bothered by Janáček’s dramatic loose ends, preferred Jenůfa, the first flower of Janáček’s genius, but also admired Kát’a Kabanová’s abundance of sheer musicality, and admitted that its emotional force and sheer technical finish surpassed everything Janáček had written. Janáček became so attached to this opera that he spoke lovingly of it in the last hours of his life. Well might Charles Mackerras become its champion, and an opera company make it the basis of its Janáček repertoire. More than any other opera of his, Kát’a Kabanová proves that Janáček is one of the greatest of musical dramatists.
First published in Opera~Opera, 2002