I enjoyed the San Francisco Opera‘s new production of Janacek’s Jenufa—just not quite as much as all my friends said I would. They were right about the singing, which was beyond terrific. Karita Mattila as Kostelnicka, William Burden as Laca, and Malin Bystrom as Jenufa herself—the three major vocal roles—were as good as any opera singers I’ve heard in recent years, and the supporting cast was for the most part excellent. The orchestra music, too, was wonderful, thanks to visiting conductor Jiri Belohlavek. (My apologies to all the Czechs in the audience for the absence of diacriticals on these names: my keyboard just won’t manage them.) And the opera itself, though it ended weirdly (I’ll get to that in a moment), was gripping from start to finish, as Janacek almost always is. He not only had a great eye for plot; he also finessed every detail of every sung syllable, insuring that diction, feeling, and music all coincided perfectly. When you go to a Janacek opera—or, for that matter, to a Janacek recital—you often feel that people were actually meant to sing their thoughts and speeches.
But opera is not a purely musical form, and here is where this S.F. Opera production faltered. The direction (by Olivier Tambosi) was so perverse as to be annoying, and the result was that the characters and their fates didn’t always make sense. Unless he hired women singers who all happened to have some kind of congenital ague, which seems unlikely, he made a very strange decision in telling Mattila and Bystrom (and to a certain extent the other women) to move awkwardly, weirdly, stiffly, and ungracefully at almost every point of their stage appearances. Arms and ankles were flung out at odd angles; large stones (which littered the landscape, due to the coincidental prevalence of the word “stone” in the libretto) were used to prop up faltering steps; physical weakness appeared to stand in for emotional distress. It was all very strange and off-putting, and as far as I could tell had nothing to do with the experiences the characters were going through. Given how hard Janacek himself worked to make the language and music mesh seamlessly, it would seem a director could do the same thing for gesture and movement. But no, this Tambosi wanted to make his mark in some way, and he did it with big rocks and shudders.
Jenufa is an opera that takes some figuring out, because to a certain extent it is a “problem” play. That is, every element of the first two acts points to an unhappy ending for the main character: she has doom written all over her from almost her first appearance. And yet Janacek chose, for reasons of his own, to give her a kind of redemption at the end, allowing her to recognize the worth of the man she has finally decided to marry and overcome the sadness of her illegitimate child’s death. Short of Hollywood-style tampering (which seems unlikely in this case), there had to be a reason he decided to do this, and it is the director’s job, I would think, to create a setting in which this turn of events seems, if not natural or predictable, then at any rate acceptable. Here, the ending felt utterly tacked on, because no one had bothered to think through a directorial vision that would allow it to make sense.
I have been going to the San Francisco Opera since my early twenties, which means I lived through the Lotfi Mansouri years that preceded Pamela Rosenberg as well as the David Gockley years that have followed her. Only during that brief period of Rosenberg’s reign as General Director did we consistently get operas that worked as theater. I know we can never get the past back again (that is what almost all tragic operas tell us, in one way or another). But I do wish we could have another golden age of opera in San Francisco—an age in which theatrical direction matters, so that the director’s job is seen as something that is meant to help the performers get across their roles, and not hinder them.