Generous Czech
OPERA EDWARD BOYLE
I have a particularly warm admiration for Janacek—his finest music is so movingly frank and compassionate, and no musician was ever more deeply 'committed' as collector of folk material, teacher, theorist, organiser and (when he had the time) composer. His honesty matched his humanitarianism and his deep sense of lyrical beauty. As he himself remarked in his old age: 'I penetrate be- cause there is truth in my work.'
Janacek's opera Jenufa is now being re- vived at Covent Garden under Rafael Kubelik, in the production which Kubelik himself originally introduced into the Covent Garden repertory in December 1956. This re- vival is entirely welcome, as is Kubelik's own reappearance-, yet I did find myself wondering whether Jenufa quite deserves the high place in Janacek's output which writers on his music have generally accorded it. Certainly the opera contains many episodes of great and charac- teristic beauty; composed between 1894 and 1903, and first performed (with great suc- cess) at Brno in January 1904, it was Janacek's first mature stage work. But he was still at this time relatively inexperienced as an operatic composer, and it is not therefore surprising that there are moments in the opera when the music hardly seems adequate to match the strong dramatic situation.
Take the crucial moment at the end of Act I when Laca slashes Jenufa's cheek. Here the music just doesn't quite rise to the dramatic intensity of the situation—and the same is true, I feel, of the conclusion of Act II, when the guilty Kostelnicka cries out in terror as the moaning wind forces open the window; there is a deliberate whipping-up of tension in the music at this point, an explicit emotion- alism, quite different from the genuine in- tensity of expression, often highly compressed, which is such a notable feature of some of Janacek's very finest works. Indeed, Act II as a whole, though composed in a much shorter time than Act I, sounds generally less spon- taneous; it is the lyrical sections of the two outer acts which surely move us the most.
It must be admitted that the current pro- duction appears, in places, rather sketchy. In Act III, for instance, at the climax of the drama, the Kostelnicka, after her moving con- fession of guilt, surely ought to be led away compassionately, whereas in this production she just bustles out. And there were places where the English version (when one could hear it) sounded somewhat literal and awkward. Of the singers, Richard Cass;lly performed the part of Laca with ringing tone and ex- emplary articulation; he was a joy to hear. John Lanigan was almost equally successful with the less grateful part of the drunken, braggart Steva; Marie Collier, as Jenufa, seemed a little too much a woman of the world for a Janacek heroine, but her singing and in- tonation were clear and accurate. I was least happy with Astrid Vamay's performance as the Kostelnicka—admittedly much the most difficult part. Her singing sounded too effort- ful, and, more serious, she missed the all- important element of respectability in her role; the Kostelnicka is not by nature a murderess, but a bourgeois foster-mother driven demented by the catastrophe of Jenufa's illegitimate child. Ku' elik was not always suc- cessful in enabling the voices to come through, and I thought he missed some of the originality of Janacek's scoring. But his rhythmic vitality in the splendid Recruiting Dance was really superb, and he deserved his warm reception.
As I have indicated, I doubt whether Jenufa, for all its beauties, can really be ranked with one or two of Janacek's later operas—notably The House of the Dead, that sombre and haunting masterpiece of his very last years, or even The Cunning Little Vixen, with its delicate handling of tender emotion. But we can certainly be grateful for this present revival of an opera by a composer some of whose greatest music is still too little known. I wonder how many SPECTATOR readers share my intense admiration, on the evidence of a fine Czech recording, for the Glagolitic Mass- a blazing short masterpiece, revealing a quite exceptional mastery of choral technique. I have never yet heard a concert performance, and I have failed so far to find even a vocal score either in London or (surprisingly) Prague.
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