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| The revived fin de siècle Margarita Zieda, Theatre Critic | |
| How should music be visualised? how should it be dealt with on the stage? this question has preoccupied the minds of opera theatre producers since the early 17th century. And the fact that opera was born within the very apex of society’s most moneyed segment, where considerations of budgets within which the framework of creative expression should be contained just didn’t exist, didn’t make this challenge easier to manage. the artistic genre, with its aristocratic genes, born of palaces and luxury, has remained a challenge for artists to this very day, with only a few enjoying success in unlocking its true essence. Even Richard Wagner wasn’t able to solve this challenge theatrically, even with his concept of bringing together all of the art and spiritual balance of his era into a unified powerful work – Gesamtkunstwerk – which would transform a person into a creature of a higher quality. the opera he created far outpaced the reality of the 19th century, dominated by its industrial thinking, but his opera’s theatrical implementation got bogged down in the old opera production methods. New radical works demanded a different production method, right from the ground up. But, what kind? At the beginning of the year, Alvis hermanis offered his solution to this challenge through the staging of leoš janáček’s opera Jenufa at the Brussels Royal opera house La Monnaie, which succeeded in opening audiences’ eyes and ears to music, enabling them to hear the music with an unusual power, specifically through the production of the opera, through its visual theatrical solution. in describing this phenomenon, all of the european reviewers declared in writing, without provincial exaggeration, that this performance was a real event. Back to the roots Today, when opera theatre stages have become seriously dominated by impressions of contemporary reality, hermanis returns to the past when staging works from whichever era, taking an interest in the place, the time and the conditions in which the specific opera work originated. in the case of janáček’s Jenufa, this is the period known as Fin de siècle, which began at the end of the 19th century and lasted into the 20th century, ending abruptly with the first World War. it was an era in which conventional tradition and radical avant-garde existed simultaneously and in which a new style was created alongside artistic eclecticism. in different cultural spaces it was called jugendstil, Secessionism or Art Nouveau. this new style of total art, born at the turn of the century, which developed from an understanding of the connectedness of all things, aspired to embrace a person completely – starting from the layout of gardens, architecture and interiors, creating not just the furniture but also each fork and spoon to correspond with the design of the tiles and ornamentation of the carpet in the dining room, and finishing with the design of books in people’s hands and their cigarette cases as well. this time, at the turn of the century, when janáček wrote his Jenufa, was obsessed with the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, with the conviction about the living unified harmony of individual things, with the view that all living phenomena are interwoven with the same powers, that the true essence of things is created by an invisible, never waning “flow of life”. the developers of jugendstil were no longer convinced by the impressionistically variable and elusive impression of the moment; instead, they emphasised permanence, endurability, the fusing of individual things into inseparable interconnections. In a similar way as the Fin de siècle artists, only now a century later, as the key to the staging of Jenufa hermanis chose a unifying principle for disparate types of art, all feeding from the one source. in collaboration with conductor ludovic morlot, video-artist ineta Sipunova, costume artist Anna Watkins, choreographer Alla Sigalova, the singers, the choir and the La Monnaie orchestra he developed a unified story in which the viewer’s gaze and feelings while listening to the music and singing are simultaneously immersed in searches by followers of the common trend in painting, choreography, theatre and costume art. With the centrifuge-afflicted challenges of contemporary opera, in which music and visuality mainly develop in their own individual directions, be it postmodern eclecticism or the transfer of stories from another century into today’s realism, it transpires in both cases that in following the theatre’s storyline on the stage, the viewer hears the music more and more weakly. the viewer’s concentration is dispersed in various directions simultaneously because the music and the theatre do not develop in unison. hermanis, in staging Jenufa, has been able to make the music become incredibly audible, specifically because the visuality, without illustration, strengthens what can be heard in the music, instead of taking the audience member in a different, other direction. Folklore becomes avant-garde once every century The names of only five composers are etched in gold letters in Brussels’ La Monnaie auditorium: leoš janáček can be found in the place of honour alongside giuseppe verdi, Wolfgang Amadeus mozart, claudio monteverdi and gioachino Rossini. This czech composer belongs to those artists who moved away from the routines developed by their contemporaries and looked for other paths. the Fin de siècle was a time in the arts when, alongside the widely embraced and cultivated realism, doubts about photographic reality, in which the secrets of life and the complexity of the human could not be incorporated, began to be expressed. Artists began to look behind the external impression of the phenomena of life, searching for form in their works, which would allow them to form a link with something deeper, for which they used the description “the truth of the soul”. And it was specifically in these searches that a concept like beauty was rehabilitated. the space where they searched for the truth of the soul was in the territory of dreams, mythology, legends, stories and folklore. | |
 View from the performance of Jenufa at the Brussels Royal opera house La Monnaie. 2014 Photo: Karl and Monika Forster Publicity photo | |
| In european music, it was not just the development of new sound material, with which the Second vienna School worked in the most radical way, and not just Richard Strauss and Alexander Scriabin and other composers who integrated new instruments into their music that became avant-garde. the forgotten ancient music forms, as well as folklore, which had completely slid away from the conventions of the time, also became avant-garde. A return to primary sources became modern, and folklore was the driving force for the avant-garde, transforming itself into a new musical language focusing on the future in the works of Béla Bartók, igor Stravinsky and leoš janáček. Having completely abandoned the realist aspirations in the music of his contemporaries, janáček embarked on the road in the intrinsic sense of the word. having left prague behind, he searched for the truth in the countryside, visiting native moravian villages and listening to ancient songs as performed by simple folk. What he himself called “windows to the soul” opened up for janáček through folklore. inspired by the rural reality and the musical material still used daily by the people there, which he had researched for an extended period, he created Jenufa, which differed radically from other village operas composed in czechoslovakia and elsewhere in europe at that time. As the composer himself maintained, folklore, which became the source of inspiration for his opera, was not cited in his score with a single note. the opera’s melodies, which, to the ear of the novice, sound like completely authentic folk songs, cannot be found in any folklore notation. far from the colourful, romanticised folk singing conventions, janáček’s score entered the ears of his contemporaries with such a directness, with such sharpness, at gaps and angles and in such a melodically cut-up way that for many decades conductors attempted to “improve” the music, to round it off and smooth it out. later interpreters, however, have returned specifically to these angles with true joy, hearing in janáček a future music contemporary. Jenufa is a story about love – unrequited, drunken, cut with a knife so that it does not reach anyone, abandoned and yet unexpectedly open to the possibility of blooming. in looking for a story for his opera, janáček’s attention was drawn to gabriela preissov’s play Her stepdaughter, which had been a sensation in prague at the end of the 19th century. events there take place in a rural village, where the main character, in contrast to the young girl in the opera’s title, is jenufa’s stepmother. She tries to set up jenufa’s life in the way she thinks best, based on the tragic experience of her own life. And it is this specific previous experience that interferes now, repeating the tragedy, but with a new scope. Tthe stepmother attempts to get a husband for the young woman using every possible method. But, because jenufa has an illegitimate child about whom nobody is to know, the stepmother kills the child, taking it out of the house in winter and putting it under a block of ice. the child’s body is discovered in spring when the wedding takes place and the stepmother confesses to the act. for his music, janáček selected material that is strained with the movements of the soul, defined by longing and pain and has no place for a romanticised view of love, which is a fundamental reason for living. A century later, hermanis followed in janáček’s footsteps during his summer vacation, tracing a route once taken by the composer, and encountered the visuality of the folklore – colourful moravian folk costumes – which form the visible part of janáček’s searches for “windows to the soul”. this is something completely opposite to the typical attempts by contemporary directors when staging any of janáček’s operas, in which they create the “authentic” environment of an eastern european province by depicting people suffering material poverty. instead, hermanis asked costume artist Anna Watkins to show these people ensconced in their folkloric beauty, which, together with the music and singing, created the whole source of inspiration for the janáček opera. And, through the actual practice of staging 21st century opera, the reanimated folkloric ethnic costume on the stage turns out to be just as exotic and radically avant-garde as it was at the turn of the previous century. Here, though, we should recall the Jenufa staged by the czech team at the latvian National opera in 2005, in which one could also see an attempt to move in the folkloric direction with the costumes.visually, that performance got stuck at an undesirable level of kitsch. But this does not happen in hermanis’ performance, both due to the extremely fine work of the costume artist as well as because the folkloristic costumes are an integral part of the root system of janáček’s opera, operating on the stage in all its richness and power. The entrance of Fin de siècle The optical solution for the magnificent performance that begins as the curtain is raised, with the first note, is completely locked in with the visual thinking that was developing at the turn of the century alongside janáček’s searches in music. the ornaments and paintings from which ineta Sipunova created the intensively powerful theatrical composition that develops uninterruptedly for many hours are mainly the works of czech painter Alfons maria mucha. this artist was interested in everything that remained beyond rational explanations in relation to people, life and the world. he was preoccupied with the latest psychological theories in paris, which had selected the psychological research of subconscious processes as their goal. mucha was truly obsessed by spiritism, ancient mystical and esoteric traditions, finding through them connections with the latest theosophical teachings. the artist tried hypnosis together with camille flammarion, one of the most famous astronomers of the time. mucha considered the medium’s gestures and mimicry caused by the musical and verbal excitement of these experiments to be broadcasters of the expression of sought reality. mucha used these findings in the renewal and enrichment of his decorative art. In the visual composition created by Sipunova, mucha’s works are combined with themes and motifs of artists from earlier periods and other styles – jakub Schikaneder, joža Uprka and josef mánes – which harmonise with the Jenufa story and create an archetypal flow of images. they correspond with phenomena that enter people’s lives in every era and are repeated in other centuries and aesthetic systems. the whole structure of the performance is revealed through this harmonisation. By casting the first two acts of the opera back into a different era, hermanis sets the second act in today’s poverty-stricken environment, which, it’s true, is only economically poorer, for there’s a pile of books next to jenufa’s bed. the interior of the house has not been renovated for ages and one can sense privation everywhere, but there is a television that is running nonstop and which the stepmother watches after the performance’s most tragic event – the killing of the child. But this everyday object taken from modern times proportionately takes up one third of the space on the stage, with the visual design from a different era developing continually on the huge screen in a colourfully toned-down way but with an uninterrupted intensity. | |
 View from the performance of Jenufa at the Brussels Royal opera house La Monnaie. 2014 Photo: Ineta Sipunova Publicity photo Courtesy of Ineta Sipunova | |
| “The key is precision,” says hermanis in an interview about Jenufa held at La Monnaie. one of Sipunova’s revelations during her work was “that it’s almost impossible to add any of the other artists of the time to mucha’s works. Not the wall hanging designs from the master of english jugendstil, moore, or any others. they just don’t sit well together, nor do those of the 21st century. there is an erotic tension in mucha’s graphics that doesn’t exist in the works of other artists. i don’t know how to explain it, but, in putting it together, you understand that there isn’t, and that’s it. other masters of jugendstil have beautiful flower ornamentation, but they don’t have erotic tension. the destruction of the unreal vivid dreams of youth was at the basis of my construction concept. the first act is colourful dreams – summer, the second is memories of dreams – winter, and the third act is a rehearsal for spring that finishes with a complete cleansing so that something new and orderly can be constructed.” At the end of the performance, when the musical story moves in the direction of possible true love, red rose designs slowly bloom on the stage, with Sipunova developing the lines drawn by mucha’s hand and his conviction, but a century later. Dance also develops continuously in the performance along with the music, painting and theatrical artistic solutions. Not in a folkloric or contemporary version, but with the presence of an estranged, high, other-worldly feeling. Alla Sigalova, abandoning her strongly recognisable artistic signature, has been able to create an endlessly changing design ornament from living humans that reflects century-old artistic attempts to peer into the visible order of the other world. Namely, to look into death. And this death is purely and delicately beautiful, when outside the frozen windows of jenufa’s little room the only recently born baby, wearing its little red hat, moves from the hands of one white maiden to the next and further on to eternity. Epilogue German colleagues had already warned me that the effect of hermanis’ production of janáček’s Jenufa staged at Brussels’ La Monnaie would be shocking. And this was one of those rare times when, with the sounding of the first notes of the music and the raising of the curtain, what was experienced made me think about art not just as an aesthetic but also as a metaphysical event, something that’s usually encountered only at brilliant concerts but almost never at an opera performance. Before attending Jenufa, i spent many hours at Brussels’ new museum, the Musée Fin-de-siècle, which moved into the four-storey Royal museums of fine Arts of Belgium in December of last year. When i watched the performance, the shock mentioned by my german colleagues set in, and it seemed as if it was caused by a feeling that nothing less than the spirit of a different era had come to life on the stage. coming into contact with this phenomenon, which can’t be placed in a simply aesthetic calculated total, every reviewer tried to write it up without esoteric declarations, in understandable language. And the unifying formulation, in which everything is able to come together, is the fact that this is an extraordinary performance because it allows the music to be heard in an unusually powerful way. in interviews hermanis tends to cite his teacher, latvian theatre and cinema critic luminary valentīna freimane, who has told her students that she is able to forgive artists a lot, except not knowing what others have done before them. one of europe’s most respected newspapers, Switzerland’s neue Zürcher Zeitung, calls valentīna freimane the “witness to the century”. She willingly shared her reflections on hermanis’ Jenufa in the context of contemporary opera art with studija readers. Margarita Zieda: Today, opera theatre stages have been massively taken over by postmodern collages and the transfer of activities from other centuries to the reality of today. to go back in time to when the particular opera was created is not modern; one could even say it’s old-fashioned. Watching this development, you have still maintained a different view. in your opinion, why, in the staging of operas, is it important to remember another era, without reducing everything to today? Valentīna Freimane: You see, i am a culture fanatic. Not just a fan of some individual period of art, a particular direction or a particular artist. i admit that from time to time we need artists who break loose and for them to strengthen new forms and a new vision of the world – and that’s their right – to disavow anything from the past in their creative work, to cross it out and create some sort of new proposals as if they were in a laboratory. But culture, as a certain dimension of the shared life of mankind, exists from the fact that eras, directions and expressions of art are united there. Both in confrontation as well as in standing shoulder to shoulder, influencing each other and so on. i believe that the culture of mankind develops from this mutual collaboration and mutual influence. it’s quite naïve for me to talk about it, because everybody knows that no national culture develops in a glasshouse but rather through collaboration or even through being at loggerheads, but in every respect through contact with other cultures. mankind really only lives through the mutual cross-fertilisation of cultures. the same thing could be applied to the development of genres as well as to the works of a single artist. i also look, with respect and interest, to those laboratory works where you always have to concentrate on one specific point, otherwise you can’t find or think up anything new. But, when the one new thing has been invented, then it immediately starts to collaborate with what already exists. plus, it exists not only from yesterday but through the centuries and millennia. the pre-requisite of any culture, or national culture, too, is this kindred connection with everything that mankind has created and that has already entered our everyday lives. M.Z.: What do you miss when looking at an interpretation of opera that has been entirely transferred to today, as all of the other latest productions of Jenufa in europe have been? V.F.: I miss the depth of the past, because every work of art produced today is just a point where four lines cross. to the left and right are the furthest and closest influences on today’s art; they can be used or not used, but they exist and they fill the atmosphere. the line to the past goes downwards, and the line to the future goes upwards. And this specific point where the lines intersect is the present moment, where the work of art on the stage exists. And this gives weight and also content to this point. My positive example in this respect is the conscientious development of french culture. there, it is a deliberate and formulated principle. Nobody in france is surprised that the Comédie Française theatre exists. this theatre, of course, also changes somewhat internally, but it considers the maintenance of the old traditions as its obligation, looking at the way these old traditions could impart their nuance and their distinctiveness on the theatre art created by the modern person. Because what’s modern and contemporary enters in anyway, along with the person who is working there. And the french don’t understand the modern view and modern interpretation in the sense that one should dress and behave differently. modernity enters with the relationship between the characters, in the spiritual life of the characters, imparting something of our understanding to them. But the french dislike changing costumes. they simply don’t understand how you could think that a person couldn’t feel modern and speak in a modern way while wearing ancient costumes. the french really love all the aesthetics of the past, and the Comédie Française actors, for example, are taught how to wear a costume. We just don’t have that sort of instruction. No other european theatre schools, except the french, teach you how to wear a costume, the types of movements and the kinds of movement that develop in a person when wearing costumes from another century. the actors have to know all of the details. for example, what sort of undergarments women wore at the time, because how you feel is affected not only by the costume you wear but also everything you wear under it. you have to know all of the steps in a dance for the relevant movements to develop. And, they truly feel as they would in today’s clothing in their costumes. Why should they change this then? it’s not the customary way they do things. And in paris, actors who are employed at, for example, Comédie Française, aren’t forbidden from playing in avant-garde theatre as well. this was particularly interesting in the 1950s, when the theatre of the absurd was gaining strength. in those performances, actors who later went on to act in classical tragedies – Racine and corneille – acted in a completely different way. this also imparts multi-dimensionality to the actors themselves, if they are capable of moving themselves in different directions based on both their past experience as well as on today’s discoveries. then their art becomes multi-dimensional. And it works really well in the opera genre, because here we’re discussing the fusing of a number of arts. M.Z.: What, in your view, makes people talk about hermanis’ Jenufa as an event at the european level? V.F.: I think it’s specifically this richness. that’s the thing that gave me the greatest joy. And i see a high-quality result in the development of the director himself in this performance, a transition to a new level of quality, something that had only just revealed itself in hermanis’ previous opera productions but hadn’t been completely resolved. like in The soldiers, which was created at the Salzburg festival, where this polyphonic activity and special searches had already appeared for how a contemporary theatre can bring together in a visual form and action the brutally harsh – i’d like to even say raw – way people’s relationships, people’s physical suffering and needs are presented in lenz’s drama and modern music, which – as in the case of Bernd Alois zimmermann – is not illustrative or guiding and doesn’t feel invigorating, but is rather analytical music that is trying to encompass very complex and conflicting spiritual processes within its sound. And still there were some “gaps”, places that for me personally seemed drawn out or simply where the metaphor already seemed a little hackneyed. Although, overall, the performance itself was wonderful. But there were parts where you could be critical. But in the recording of Jenufa that i watched, i agreed with everything and lived along with it from beginning to end. there was never a dull moment. Secondly, parallelism and simultaneous activities enrich and simultaneously also elucidate each other here. The performance takes place continuously on a number of levels, and these levels are connected with the internal content and meaning and they aesthetically supplement each other. they confront each other. Because, on one level, modernist aesthetic principles in their usual meaning dominate and, on the second level, a completely different side of modernism actually dominates, where this aesthetic can express itself only in the selection of the detail, where modernism settles in a kind of folk-type democratic daily life process. And these levels work together wonderfully and never illustratively fall or stumble behind each other, but supplement each other. All the elements and the various levels are so fantastically brought together in the performance that they can’t be separated from each other at all, because all of it works as an aggregate. And that’s the surprising thing in this performance. this is also specifically why i think that this is a new and higher level in hermanis’ work. this is one absolutely organic whole, which is very difficult to achieve in a performance and especially in the field of opera. many varied forms of art operate in opera together, but they all operate with one heartbeat in this presentation, fused together within one organism. And the way in which these diverse elements are so extraordinarily purposefully fused, also spiritually – this is very rarely encountered in a contemporary opera performance. I don’t have a special moral right to comment on the show itself, as the small screen of a computer doesn’t reveal all the idiosyncrasies. Well, i could ask where does the contemporary directorial aspect in this composition come in? i am convinced that in performances that are so saturated with cultural richness the main contemporary aspect is the director himself, with his selection, with his choice. With the kind of elements he has selected. And that is the modern aspect, as this is the modern person’s view of the cultural richness of the past. There is no moment of pure ethnography in this performance. there isn’t! there’s not a single moment that you could take from this choreography and offer to amateurs, even at something like the Song festival. it isn’t the usual dear folk aesthetic that feels close to us and which we find suitable when we go dancing in our folk costumes. it’s a very carefully developed use of folk choreographic movements created in drawings, which fulfils completely different roles and has no life of its own. it lives together with the music, which isn’t purely folk at any moment. it lives together with the activity that is taking place on the stage at a different level, with the content. in no place in this opera has an orchestrated folk song or folk dance music been transferred in a pure way. there is a motif. And all of the motifs in the music, the costumes and movements, the fact that people come in contact with each other, how they behave towards themselves and how they behave with others in the circle dance and how the mutual drawing is created – none of this corresponds in any way to any ethnographic instructions and movement drawings. for example, the folk costumes. their features are in some details much intensified, while others are removed from the ornament. the white balloon-like sleeves of the female costumes are augmented and, consequently, a completely different colour and drawing concept is created for the viewer when all of them line up and move together. All of this organic aggregation from the aesthetic features from another era is firmly grasped and the details firmly selected from the point of view of the modern educated person of today. the director has not for a moment wallowed romantically in the beauty of a bygone era. the view is from the perspective of the modern person. And the viewer’s perspective is that of today. people have always dreamt of the possibility of travelling into a different era. Science fiction is full of stories of getting into a time-machine and heading back into the past. During the performance we were living in various time dimensions. the viewers living in their current dimension are transported back into the past, but we enter that past with the perspective of today and understand everything there differently. Translator into English: Uldis Brūns | |
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