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New York Times
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why Isn't My Favorite Composer More Popular?
When I was just getting started as an operagoer, I went to see 'The Makropulos Case,' the Czech composer Leos Janacek's tale of a woman desperate to elongate a life that has already lasted three centuries. It left me exhilarated, dazed and with only one thing on my mind: buying a ticket to return the next weekend. I'm not the only one to have this reaction. 'People felt they had to come back,' Yuval Sharon said recently about the audiences when he directed 'The Cunning Little Vixen,' another thrilling, heart-rending Janacek opera. 'It was unlike any piece they'd experienced. It just seizes you.' That's still my feeling about Janacek's operas. On Sunday, when the Cleveland Orchestra finished an elegant but crushing concert version of 'Jenufa,' which ends with a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation after extraordinary suffering, I would have happily sat through it again, right then and there. For this brutal account of small-town woe, Janacek wrote earthy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths. There are obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters, as well as passages of folk-inspired sweetness. Janacek loved to transcribe birdsong and people speaking; his vocal lines, molded to the flow of the Czech language, have uncanny naturalness even in lyrical flight and emotional extremity. His climaxes — never more soaring than at the stunned yet hopeful end of 'Jenufa' — are radiant. Neither his heroes nor his villains are uncomplicated; he presents heightened, impossibly vivid situations that are also deeply nuanced. 'They're amazing dramas,' Sharon said. 'They just blast through the stage. They just go.' Yet even many regular operagoers don't know these pieces. They are as propulsive and viscerally affecting as Arthur Miller plays, but those who haven't heard them often think they're esoteric, strictly for connoisseurs. Nothing could be further from the truth. 'My experience is that the audiences that come adore the work,' said Anthony Freud, who has programmed Janacek at companies in Wales, Houston and Chicago. But those audiences don't tend to come en masse. 'When you're budgeting ticket sales with Janacek,' he added, 'you're going to have to cushion it with 'Bohème' and 'Traviata.'' Toward the end of the 20th century, it seemed that Janacek's operas were becoming regular presences on major American stages, if not quite staples like 'Carmen.' From 1990 to 2010, the Metropolitan Opera — where my life was changed by that 'Makropulos Case' — presented 10 runs of four works. Houston Grand Opera did a Janacek cycle around that time. Conductors like Charles Mackerras, who painstakingly revealed the composer's intentions in new editions of the scores, were crucial advocates. But the surge stalled. While Janacek isn't ignored entirely — Cleveland's was my third American 'Jenufa' since 2019, after full stagings in Santa Fe and Chicago — he's rarer than I would have predicted, or hoped. The Met hasn't performed a Janacek opera since 2016. The reasons aren't entirely mysterious. His works are accessible to listeners but challenging to perform, necessitating substantial, and expensive, rehearsal processes. (They're easier to find in opera- and resource-rich Europe.) Patrick Summers, Houston Grand Opera's longtime music and artistic director, speculated that Janacek, and other not-quite-core repertory, has been the victim of a generally praiseworthy development: the increasing success of new American opera. With most companies doing ever-fewer titles in a season, there is more competition for each slot given to less familiar work. Summers gave the hypothetical example of a company that wanted to do both 'Jenufa' and a contemporary American piece — for example, Kevin Puts's 'Silent Night,' which Houston will present next season. ''Jenufa' wouldn't replace 'La Bohème,'' he said. 'It would replace 'Silent Night.' So you have to choose, and these days you might well choose 'Silent Night.'' For the art form's health, though, there needs to be room for both. The son of a village schoolteacher, Janacek was born in 1854. While he was a gifted musician from childhood and a highly regarded organist and teacher, he struggled for recognition as a composer. It was 'Jenufa' that truly established his reputation, though not right away. After germinating for years, it premiered in 1904, but it wasn't until a dozen years later that a performance in Prague brought him real celebrity. Soon after that, in the summer of 1917, he met Kamila Stosslova. Both were married, and Stosslova was nearly 40 years younger, but they developed an intimate more-than-friendship. The relationship — almost completely, and agonizingly, unconsummated — inspired a late-in-life creative flowering that bloomed until Janacek's death, at 74, in 1928. The fruits of this period include a pair of searching string quartets, and the stirring orchestral Sinfonietta and 'Taras Bulba.' Even more remarkable was the burst of four operatic masterpieces: 'Kat'a Kabanova,' about a country girl driven to suicide after a brief affair; 'The Cunning Little Vixen,' in which human and animal characters collide in a warm yet entirely unsentimental allegory of nature's transformations; 'The Makropulos Case'; and 'From the House of the Dead,' based on Dostoevsky's novel set in a Siberian prison. Bleak yet beautiful, 'Jenufa' remains his best-known opera. On Sunday the Cleveland Orchestra and its music director, Franz Welser-Möst, captured Janacek's intensity without stinting his tender lyricism. The frigid winds of the second act passed through the ensemble in frosty swirls. The cast was superb, with Latonia Moore a sumptuous and passionate Jenufa, and Nina Stemme harrowing as her stepmother, who attempts to preserve her family's honor through a monstrous sacrifice. As always with Janacek, the audience — about two-thirds of capacity at Severance Music Center — cheered mightily at the end. And as always, that reaction gave me hope. There are other glimmers for Janacek lovers. Des Moines Metro Opera will present 'The Cunning Little Vixen' this summer. The Met has plans to import a grim 'Jenufa' directed by Claus Guth, who staged this season's hit 'Salome.' When I spoke to Yuval Sharon, he was at the airport on the way to Switzerland, where he was meeting about a production of 'The Excursions of Mr. Broucek,' a rarity even by Janacek standards. I hope as many opera houses as possible join their number. For them, and for audiences, I can only echo Anthony Freud: 'There's nothing to be scared of.'
New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
For His Met Opera Debut, a Director Takes On ‘Salome'
The director Claus Guth, wearing a scarf and coat, was pacing the frigid auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera during a recent rehearsal of Strauss's 'Salome,' going over lighting and visual cues. It was only a few days before opening night, and he was optimistic. 'New York can carry you on an enormous, beautiful energy,' he said. 'It's an adrenaline — not a stressful feeling, but a sensation of being alive.' Guth, 61, who was born in Germany and has spent most of his career in Europe, has won acclaim for his experimental, exacting approach to operas new and old. Now, he is bringing those sensibilities to his Met debut, directing a new production of 'Salome' that opens on Tuesday. Inspired partly by Stanley Kubrick's film 'Eyes Wide Shut,' Guth has infused the opera, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's decadent retelling of the biblical story, with elements of a psychological thriller. Menacing figures walk around in ram masks on a black-and-white stage. A naked woman appears and disappears. A girl strokes a doll's hair before pulling out its arms and hitting it violently against the ground. Guth said he wanted to highlight the suffocating rules of the Victorian society portrayed in Wilde's play. He focuses on telling the back story of Salome, the 16-year-old princess and stepdaughter of King Herod, portraying her as a victim of abuse and trauma who becomes obsessed with John the Baptist, eventually demanding his head. 'I wanted to bring to life this rigid system — the invisible lines around what is allowed and what is not allowed,' Guth said. 'It's a portrait of a young woman growing up in this world, with its strange rules, trapped in a family prison.' 'Salome' is one of opera's most emotionally charged and demanding works. For Guth's staging, the Met has lined up the soprano Elza van den Heever in the title role; the baritone Peter Mattei as John the Baptist (known in the opera as Jochanaan); and the tenor Gerhard Siegel as King Herod. The Met's music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducts. Guth's Met debut is coming somewhat late in his career, but it is the start of a longer-term relationship with the company. In future seasons, the Met will import his 2023 staging of Handel's opera-oratorio 'Semele,' a co-production with the Bavarian State Opera, and his production of Janacek's 'Jenufa,' which premiered at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London in 2021. Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, described Guth as one of Europe's most inventive directors, saying his 'commitment to coherent storytelling' set him apart. 'There aren't that many directors who are brilliant enough to be original but are also able to tell the story in a way that doesn't require a guidebook to understand what you're seeing,' Gelb said. Guth was born in Frankfurt and grew up in what he has described as 'quiet, wealthy surroundings.' As a child, he dabbled in Super 8 films, but he felt he was not being exposed to the gritty realities of life. He moved to Munich for college, studying philosophy, literature and theater, with dreams of becoming a film director. In his 20s, he had an epiphany about opera while working as a camera assistant on a production at Bayreuth, the festival in Germany that Wagner founded nearly 150 years ago. In this art form, Guth saw a way to combine his interests in music, theater and visual art. 'Suddenly, it clicked,' he said. 'My passions came together.' He rose swiftly in the European theater scene, with celebrated stagings of contemporary operas like Luciano Berio's 'Cronaca del Luogo' at the Salzburg Festival in 1999. He garnered praise for his unconventional approach to classics, especially those by Strauss and Wagner, including the 'Ring,' 'Der Fliegende Holländer' and 'Tannhäuser.' When Gelb approached Guth about staging a new 'Salome,' he already had a production under his belt at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. But Guth wanted to create something entirely different for his Met debut. 'It's boring for me to do the same thing,' he said. 'I need risk.' The Met's 'Salome' was originally planned as a co-production with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, where it premiered in 2021. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, though, the Met cut ties with the Bolshoi and built its own sets for its staging. For his 'Salome,' Guth said, he wanted to give the title character a sense of agency — to show that she's 'not just the puppet and product of her education.' 'It's the biography of Salome — the development of a young person,' he said. 'I was looking for something that everybody could connect to.' Nézet-Séguin said that Guth had made 'Salome' freshly relevant by shining a light on the abuse of children and vulnerable people. 'He manages to emphasize a story that is really telling for our times,' Nézet-Séguin said, 'without detracting at all from the opera.' The Dance of the Seven Veils, one of the opera's defining scenes, is often portrayed as a striptease. But in Guth's version, the dance is a moment of reckoning, as seven versions of Salome, including van den Heever, portray the horrors of her upbringing. Van den Heever said Guth had created a 'dance of the fragmented mind, of the subconscious.' As a 'six-foot-tall person who is supposed to be in the body of a 16-year-old,' van den Heever said, she initially found it difficult to inhabit the character. But, she said, she was helped by Guth's clear vision of the opera and an emphasis on working as an ensemble. 'You are always part of a greater story,' she said. 'You're part of a tableau, of a painting.' In the lobby of the Met recently, Guth basked in the morning sun before heading to rehearsal. Although he has not worked at the Met, he is no stranger to New York. In 2023, he brought a show called 'Doppelganger' to the Park Avenue Armory, staging Schubert's 'Schwanengesang' as a dreamscape in a soldiers' hospital. He first encountered the Met in the 1980s, when he came to New York for an internship at CBS. Back then, as a young man, he bristled at the traditional, gaudy look of some productions. But he found himself drawn to the music. Decades later, he appreciates the energy and focus of the Met's singers, orchestra players, staff and crew. 'The Met is enormous, but it sometimes feels very intimate,' he said. 'I feel immense joy and gratitude. I feel at home.'
