Wrestling with masterful abstraction: ‘Jenůfa’ at Lyric Opera
Lise Davidsen and Nina Stemme. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
Within the operatic canon, Jenůfa is an oddity for multiple reasons. The opera, considered by many music scholars to be composer Leoš Janáček’s masterpiece, is not only one of the few written in a language other than Italian, German, or French, but it is also a starkly realistic and unsentimental story, its plot more in line with the dramatic works of Chekhov or Ibsen than Janáček’s contemporaries. (For reference, Madama Butterfly notably premiered in the same year). In view of that fact, it is easy for the piece to feel out of place on the expansive stage of the average opera house, presenting a challenge for directors, designers, and singers alike. This tension between genre and medium is apparent in the production currently onstage at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, originally staged at the Royal Opera House, with moments that both electrify and fall flat.
The plot, taken from the play Její pastorkyňa by Gabriela Preissová, is a character-driven drama set in a small village in Moravia concerning a love triangle between the troubled young woman Jenůfa (soprano Lise Davidsen) and her two feuding cousins Laca and Števa (tenors Pavel Černoch and Richard Trey Smagur, respectively). As relationships develop and secrets unfold, the story brings in themes of social pressure, abuse, infanticide, redemption, and, ultimately, forgiveness.
For those unfamiliar with the score and libretto, there is a reason for the level of regard afforded to Jenůfa. The lush score is beautifully realized by the Lyric’s orchestra under Jakub Hrůsa’s baton and the libretto, written by the composer in his native Czech, is poetic in its plainspokenness and use of repetition as a means of emphasis and dramatic exploration. An irony, considering it holds the distinction of being one of the first operas to be written in prose. For opera lovers who have not experienced this work in any form, this iteration presents a prime opportunity.
The performances, too, merit commendation. Davidsen’s voice absolutely soars during the titular character’s Act Two “prayer” aria, buoyed by an acting performance that emphasizes the youth of the character. Acting is too often overlooked in opera performance, so it is worth noting that Černoch is also a standout in this regard, bringing a palpable sense of depth to perhaps the most difficult character to sympathize with. His Laca comes off as a grown-up child, struggling to cope with the strength of his desires and discovering the complexities of adult emotions through his relationship with Jenůfa across the three acts. It is a testament to Černoch’s skill and the care that has been put into dealing with the more problematic aspects of this story by the production as a whole that his absolution at the end of the opera comes off as earned, with Laca having clearly demonstrated growth from the entitled adolescent from the beginning of the story.
The set and staging, however, is more of a mixed bag. Scenic designer Michael Levine has opted for abstraction, albeit an abstraction drawn with period-appropriate objects. This is most successful in his Act Two set, in which he realizes Jenůfa and her mother’s cramped home as a cage comprised of wire bed frames, the same beds he used in the mill set in Act One, whose discarded mattresses litter the stage in a scene of desolate abandonment that mirrors the central character’s psychology. However, in other scenes, the starkness of the production’s design ethos can leave massive areas of negative space that distract the audience’s eye from the action. This is especially egregious in the aforementioned Act One set, in which huge swaths of the midstage are left as a bare no-man’s-land, too far upstage to be acoustically useful to the singers, but too far downstage for the audience to easily ignore.
The staging is also at its weakest in the first act, though the odd bit of bizarreness does also crop up elsewhere. Characters are positioned awkwardly and cross with unclear motivation, not helped by bizarre choices like seating them in chairs that face upstage, forcing them to turn sideways in order to avoid singing into the back wall. Later strange directorial choices, like the decision to put a company member in a raven mask on the roof of the house in the second act, at least represent strong choices that fail to land, whereas this weakness of the blocking seems uncharacteristically inept considering the overall competence of this production.
The issue is that opera is, at the heart of it, a medium that traffics in a certain brand of artificiality. In Jenůfa, Janáček attempted and, I would argue, succeeded in using that genre to tell a deeply human story. The challenge he left to interpreters of this work was how to negotiate the naturalism of his work and the presentational style of the genre. Perhaps no production could ever hope to do so 100% effectively. Certainly this production presents a valiant effort with no shortage of either the sublime or the disappointing.
Jenůfa runs through Nov. 26 at 20 N. Wacker Dr. For tickets or more information, please call (312) 827-5600 or visit lyricopera.org.
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