Translated material
Drama of a Quiet Place
The Mariinsky Theater staged “Jenufa” by Leos Janacek
The opera Jenufa is not staged in Russia, but it suits it extremely well. Not according to the plot (from the life of Moravian peasants), but due to the state of strong internal tension that leads the plot to the finale. The unbearable oppression of predestination, which turned the heroes’ lives into a nightmare, ends with an escape from reality and the saving illusion that somewhere else, in another time, it will be good. With such feelings we part with Jenufa and Laca, young people whose life together begins with a tragedy - the murder of a child whom Jenufa’s stepmother drowns in an ice hole (so as not to interfere with her stepdaughter’s marriage).In this story, all the characters are related to each other, as indicated by the genealogical diagram on the super curtain. However, the reason is not only in a closed environment, where freedom is impossible and personal life is always visible, but in the fact that people bound by ritual traditions themselves make their lives and the lives of those around them unbearable. Jenufa, who gave birth to a child out of wedlock and was abandoned by her beloved Shteva, is tormented by her stepmother, a childless widow herself, wishing her happiness. It tortures, driving someone else’s life into the framework of social dogma. The sexton is the core of this drama, family - in appearance, psychological, existential - in meaning. Dramas of self-torture, when the reasons lie in the person himself, whose personality determines his fate.
As well as the later operas of the Czech classic - “Katya Kabanova” (1921) with its hopeless Russian melancholy and “The Makropoulos Remedy” (1926) with its terrifying story about the elixir of youth, “Jenufa” (world premiere - in 1904 in Brno ) is a repertoire opera in the West, which is taken on by prominent directors and opera houses: Robert Carsen in Antwerp (1999), Calixto Bieito in Stuttgart (2007).
In Russia, the history of “Jenufa” is limited to two productions made in 1958 in Novosibirsk (director Lev Mikhailov, artist Josef Svoboda) and Moscow (Bolshoi Theater, Dyachikha - Irina Arkhipova). In fact, with the Mariinsky Theater performance, the life of Janáček’s opera in Russia begins with a clean slate. Expectations before the premiere were high: they concerned both the work, which could either open or die again for our theater, and the director - young Vasily Barkhatov, who had just graduated from the Russian Academy of Theater Arts, for whom "Enufa" is the first big work, and even in largest opera house.
The director passed the exam. The sanitary standards necessary to be called a work of theatrical art were met in Barkhatov’s performance. There is no senseless wildness on stage, characteristic of the Russian opera mentality. The characters look like real people, and not carriers of a diaphragm: they sing not to broadcast spontaneous vocal energy into the audience, but mainly to demonstrate emotions and situations, the voice is part of their theatrical palette, and not some kind of bulging beauty separate from everything else .
For the Russian opera stage, such a natural existence is already a reason for serious joy: if a director at the beginning of his career shows a cultural level that one need not be ashamed of, there is hope that in the future he can grow into a director.
But in order for the director to manifest himself in Jenufa, something more is required than the natural flow of the plot in the circumstances proposed and firmly fixed by the scenography. Perhaps the artist Zinovy Margolin proceeded from the fact that opera is unknown in Russia and the threads of its dramaturgy will not be grasped by the public, so he deliberately simplified the image to the elementary: a ghetto, a pit, a corral. "Jenufa" as a drama of place. A compressed space suspended somewhere in the universe: a black dead sky, below an isolated island of organic life - a fenced courtyard illuminated by large floodlights. Hard artificial light, but no true warmth, no joy, no and cannot be happiness. The image is clear and is exhausted almost instantly in the introduction, where there are straight backs and heads covered with scarves of silent women, always waiting for something. You immediately want to escape from here, but you will have to wait until the end: water begins to flow from a huge house hanging over the pit to finally flood this damned place. A sigh of relief and the only event that takes the performance into a new orbit.
In such a situation, everything depends on the actor: if he is capable of psychological life, then the performance ceases to be an illustration of a plot from a crime chronicle, but becomes an expressionist drama growing out of everyday rubbish. In the case when Dyachikha is the desperate and strong Larisa Gogolevskaya, and Enufa is the hot, as if wounded inside Irina Mataeva, this is possible: there is no need to prove that these people are at the last line and life is a painful test for them. But if Dyachikha is the reservedly official Irina Loskutova, and Jenufa is the unhappy, but seven-locked Tatyana Pavlovskaya, it is simply necessary to prove all this.
And if Valery Gergiev had taken the matter seriously, the orchestra would have explained for the actors what they, for various reasons, could not express. But the orchestra is drowning out the singers, and the conductor is not yet up to subtleties: the freshness, originality and beauty of the music do not become properties of the performance.
The fact of its appearance in Russia is optimistic: “Enufa” is a standard product that does not open a new world, but adequately fills the repertoire gap. But the result is vague: whether Janacek in this form will become part of our cultural baggage is a question to a greater extent of the musical quality of the performance, to which there is no affirmative answer yet.