Leos Janáček’s artistic opera Osud (Fate: Destiny), which the composer never heard staged during his lifetime, returns to the place where it received its German premiere. The work was first performed in October 1958 on consecutive days in Brno and Stuttgart. The revised edition, published as part of the Janáček Complete Edition, will be used in the interpretation by the new production team at the Stuttgart Opera. Sylvain Cambreling conducts the production by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito which receives its premiere on 11 March 2012, followed by a further seven performances this season.
Janáček’s music drama Osud was composed in 1904/05 after the completion of Jenůfa, and in many ways complements it – an urbane companion piece. The opera contains scenes from an artist’s life; the protagonist is the composer Zivny who, at the beginning of the work, meets his former lover Mila again in a spa resort. The couple reunite and live from then onwards with their son. Four years later, a disaster occurs when Mila’s mother, who had previously thwarted the liaison, drags her daughter and herself to their deaths in her madness. After many years, Zivny’s opera, which tells of the tragic liaison, is to be premiered. In the Conservatory, he explains the plot to his students. In a dramatically-culminating story, it is clear that the fiction is based on his own life story. An interview with Sergio Morabito, co-director and chief dramaturge in Stuttgart, about his work on the new interpretation.
[t]akte: Leoš Janáček’s Osud has a history linked with Stuttgart: a day after the premiere in Brno, the opera was first performed here in 1958. Has this been a contributory factor in deciding to stage the work now?
Sergio Morabito: a starting point was the search for a piece to complement Schoeberg’s Die glückliche Hand, in the course of which we came upon Janáček’s opera. Both pieces were long regarded as unplayable, and as artistic dramas, they have much in common. Osud is a work dating from Janáček’s period of crisis after the composition and unhappy premiere of Jenůfa, a difficult time for him. His international breakthrough followed the Vienna performance of Jenůfa in 1916 and in the creative euphoria of the following years, this work fell into oblivion. In addition, his advisers, in particular Max Brod, scared him with the judgement that the work could not be saved.
It is interesting that in bringing the two works together, two different lines of tradition coincide, both emanating from Strindberg: one is the Symbolist miracle play, the ‘station drama’, which greatly influenced Schoenberg, who even wanted to have Strindberg write a libretto to Die Jakobsleiter. The other follows on from Strindberg’s naturalistic dramas, such as The Dance of Death, The Father and Miss Julie, to which Janáček’s opera demonstrates strong affinities, as in the hellish family life depicted in the second act. In this battle between Živný and his mother-in-law, other people’s lives are endangered and finally destroyed.The reciprocal mad recriminations lead to the tragic end where the mother drags her daughter and herself to their deaths in order to to punish the dowry hunter, as she calls her son-in-law. In the claustrophobic “marriage and family trap” of the second act, we feel this closeness to Strindberg, which is what makes the piece so thrilling. It is difficult to understand why Janáček’s opera repeatedly provokes negative reactions which say that it suffers from an abstruse plot. All of this is found in the contemporary drama of the time: the conflicts between the artist and the bourgeois world, class conflicts, the battle of the sexes. It is strange that in an opera there is such a great demand for conventional dramatic narrative models. Yet, in working on the opera, we now feel very strongly how compellingly the piece is written. The way Janáček virtuosically finds a dramatic form for his complex material fills us with enthusiasm. It is quite exceptional.
Part of the verdict also relates to the libretto which Janáček had a decisive hand in shaping. He asked a young teacher to write dialogues for his scenario. In the process, what resulted was a very mannered language. However, we notice that this language, in all its floweriness and artificiality, is very precise in its metaphors: it is worth investigating it and having our ears open to it. In its overall conception, the work is completely valid and compelling in itself. I believe that today we are are at a quite different point in its reception, and that other dramatic criteria and possibilities can be discovered in it than, for example, those that Max Brod found. Indeed, he not only translated other operas by Janáček, but in the process at the same time frequently arranged, polished and harmonised them. There was barely a single work by Janáček which was staged in the form in which it had been written; even the vocal and orchestral parts were retouched, sometimes quite drastically. In this respect, Osud is an extreme case, but not an isolated one.
Since the work was never performed during the composer’s lifetime, there is no final version authorised by him. The posthumously-performed versions include many stages of revision. The new edition now recreates the completed version of 1907, in which later retouchings and corrections in the composer’s and other hands have been removed.
For the first time many things have been documented which are of crucial importance for a production of the work. For example, the stage directions have been correctly translated for the first time. An extreme example of this occurs straight away in the first act at the reunion of Živný and Mila: for the first time it becomes clear that it is Mila who provoked this encounter. In all the versions which are in circulation, it is stated that she attempts to avoid this encounter. Mila has received red roses as a present, which remind her of the humiliating moment where she was attending one of Živný’s premieres in Prague when she was already pregnant, and was ignored by him. She has the strength to repeat this encounter and to approach him a second time with the red roses in her hand. This is what leads to the rekindling of the passion, and ultimately to the decision, against all obstacles, to live together and to marry. This is no unimportant detail, but establishes the play and its characters. This was naturally very surprising for us. Now we know what Janáček actually wrote. We are no longer groping in the dark and through this, we have gained legitimate interpretative leeway.
At the first performances of the work in 1958, Osud was performed both in Brno and Stuttgart in arrangements by Václav Nosek and Kurt Honolka, in which the plot opens with a section of the 3rd act set in the present. With this reordering the story is narrated as it were in flashback, that is to say, the original dramaturgy with its diverse references, intensifications and interconnections of elements of the plot is neutralized. The original order of scenes was first used in a production in 1984. What is your view of this open, experimental form of the work?
It is precisely Janáček’s decision to narrate the story in three dispersed scenes, investigating and illuminating a period stretching over fifteen years, which makes the piece so exciting. There is not one fixed period in time from which we can look back. Janáček indeed attempts to find a form for the tragedy of a whole life. If I told the story in retrospect, the main character Živný would be the creator of the opera and the autobiographical protagonist. Through this, the work would become a confession. At the same time it is clear that Janáček has written much of himself, of his anxieties as in a puzzle picture, into the figure of Živný, in turn reflected in Lensky, the composer of his fictitious opera. The interesting thing is that in the opera Živný’s artistic work only features very indirectly, and we cannot ultimately judge it. The verdict on Živný’s artistic output remains a matter of speculation – we do not know how brilliant he is or how much of a failure. This is not the primary interest in the piece, rather it is about his failure as a human being. One could perfectly well put forward the thesis that Živný is a gifted artist who has the courage to insist on performing his work as a fragment to the surprise and displeasure of experts, which was indeed a revolutionary idea for Janáček’s time. Živný describes his opera as complete, but without the last act, this was in God’s hands.
he dramatic trick of quoting fictitious music seems to give Janáček the latitude to compose specifically melodious music, a less rugged, almost Puccini-like music quoted in the Živný opera, and in the large dance and folk music tableaux of the outer parts. Osud is full of thrilling and extremely dramatic music. Does the quasi-quotation of a fictitious work allow a composer a special freedom?
Janáček indeed finds quite different levels, as the imaginary sound worlds of the composer and his own either intermingle or separate from each other. Partly, Janáček himself speaks in the music of Živný, such as in the storm music of the 3rd act. But there are naturally places where what we hear is clearly a quotation from the opera, such as the love melody in the 2nd act which first Živný, then Mila sings. At the end it is sung in a distorted way by the insane mother. Here there is quite precise differentiation, when there is singing within the action.
A view on the dramatic approach?
Of course our set designer Bert Neumann also had the task of finding an aesthetic link for the connection with the Schoenberg – that is to articulate the contrast and similarity between both works figuratively and spatially. For the Janáček, the contrast between the intimate chamber drama scenes and the large crowd tableaux is crucial. In the first act on the promenade in the Moravian spa town of Luhačovice, where people went about as nationally-conscious Czechs, we feel something of the immense euphoria of the summer holiday resort, a sparkling atmosphere which Janáček also greatly enjoyed for many years. It is exciting to set the two levels against each other: the impressionistic, sketched with many small snapshots and highlighting the tiniest solo roles, and the intimate chamber drama of the first encounter between Živný and Mila, which is an attempt to deal with their complicated and painful history. In the second act, the family scene, it is clear that Živnýs productivity has run dry in the routine of daily married life and he holds fast to what he once created. In the atmosphere of the Conservatory in the third act, Živný breaks into his own story so to speak, and it leads to a terrible self-exposure. It is in the contrast between these levels that the great attraction lies. The analysis of the figures is truly great Janáček – in their characterization, their seismographic distress, his grasp of these people, in the acceleration of time and the laconic, by which means the composer can convey a whole world of emotions in a few bars.
Questions by Marie Luise Maintz
Osud – The Critical Edition
Osud (Fate: Destiny) was written between the premiere and the revisions of Jenůfa. It is an opera full of musical experiments, of the search for new harmonic, rhythmic and instrumental possibilities. Here we find for the first time in a pure form the “cathartic waltz”, extensive polyrhythmic passages, the use of the most extreme ranges of the instruments, an organ, a piano and, for the first time, even a viola d’amore.
The Critical Edition of Osud is based on a thorough comparison of all surviving sources. A copyist’s copy of 1905 authorised by Janáček, in which the revisions of 1906 and 1907 are marked, is of the greatest significance. In addition to this, there is a manuscript copy by Janáček which was used for practising (a vocal score) and his own copy. Further important sources are the orchestral parts of the time and the copy of the libretto, which were intended for the Prague Vinohrady Theatre. The edition returns to Janáček’s original version after the 1907 revision, not only in relation to the music, but also to the text. The new performance material enables the opera to be performed in its original version for the first time, without the later additions and corrections.
Jiří Zahrádka
from [t]akte 1/2012