A few weeks ago, Steve Smith sent a link out into the world on Twitter, and included his opinion that it showed some strong arts reporting from the Village Voice, after a period of, well, neglecting arts coverage by laying off most or all of their arts staff. Steve is a great writer and a smart guy, so I clicked the link and read the article.
Just this once, I gotta say: Steve was wrong.
Tara Isabella Burton wrote the article in question, and if you haven't seen her name in the NY classical music press much, it might be because she is currently a graduate student at Oxford, working on a doctorate in theology and fin de siècle French literature. She has published a number of articles on religion, culture, and place, according to
her web site. Her
portfolio has no music reviews listed except for the one Steve touted....and maybe it should stay that way.
Her article has the title
"Strong Heroines Dominate the Met Opera This Season." Now, probably she didn't write the title, but she should have objected to it. For one thing, her article concerns three operas, Kaija Saariaho's
L'Amour de Loin, Leos Janacek's
Jenufa, and Richard Strauss's
Salome.
Those three represent about one quarter of the Met's fall season, when the company also performed
Tristan und Isolde,
Don Giovanni,
L'Italiana in Algeri,
La Boheme,
Guillaume Tell,
Aida,
Nabucco, and
The Magic Flute. Burton doesn't make much of a case for the "strong heroines," and I'd certainly like to see her explain why she picked out those three operas as particularly representing strong women. Isolde is no weakling, and neither is Donna Anna, for example.
My guess is that
Jenufa, L'Amour de Loin, and
Salome are the three operas she was able to see on a trip to NYC. Or maybe they had a special significance to her theological interests;
Salome is, more or less, based on a Biblical story; the Saariaho addresses the relationship of Clémence, Countess of Tripoli, with God; Janacek's Kostelnicka is the widow of a deacon.
But there's a much, much more serious issue in the article than my quibbling above: one can reasonably ask where she was and what she was paying attention to during Act 2 of
Jenufa, because she gets two major plot points completely wrong.
If you haven't seen the opera and you're not familiar with the plot, here's a nice big SPOILER WARNING for the rest of this blog post.
First, there's this rookie mistake:
... October and November saw the quiet, dark, and hauntingly realistic Jenufa, Czech composer Leoš Janá?ek's's 1904 portrait of the relationship between a young woman (Oksana Dyka), her mother-in-law (Karita Mattila), and their shared act of well-meaning infanticide. A verismo opera, it turns its focus away from mythic figures and toward the lives of average people.
No, actually, the Kostelnicka is not Jenufa's mother-in-law. Jenufa is unmarried at the beginning of the opera, and the Kostelnicka is her
stepmother, Jenufa's father's second wife. Now, I haven't seen the Met's program, and maybe there's no family tree, which I consider to be absolutely essential for understanding who is who, how they are related, and why they are in the particular positions they're in at the start of the opera. But
here's the Met's synopsis for the fall production, which makes the relationships perfectly clear.
Here's the even more serious howler; note that the Kostelnicka is now correctly identified as Jenufa's stepmother:*
Although Jenufa's circumstances are, in part, dictated by the men around her (after all, her accidental pregnancy serves as the driver for the plot), the crux of the opera lies in Jenufa's and her stepmother's choices and desires — for a fresh start, for a new life, for freedom. They kill Jenufa's unwanted bastard child because they seek to determine their own lives. Both survive to see the curtain fall, a feat for any female opera protagonist, gaining the possibility of at least bittersweet endings.
Well, no. That's not what happens at all. The Kostelnicka drugs Jenufa, then later picks up the baby, scurries into the night, and throws the child into a stream.
It's possible to miss the line or two where the drugging takes place, but
if you are watching the stage, it is not possible to miss the fact that
Jenufa is sound asleep when the baby is taken. And I'm confident that the production is clear on this point, because
I have seen it in both LA and SF. I have some beefs with it, but lack of clarity isn't one of them.
These plot points are crucial for the overall moral arc of the opera. When the truth emerges about who killed the baby, Jenufa
forgives the Kostelnicka, in one of the great moments of maturity and insight in all opera.
So the question arises: was Tara Isabella Burton asleep or in the bar for Act 2? And why did she not bother to
read the synopsis of an opera that she was going to write about but evidently had not seen before? **
Update: I've sharpened the above a bit and added the paragraph starting "These plot points are crucial." I'd like to also address a comparatively minor issue in Burton's article: she refers to
Jenufa as a verismo opera. I winced when I saw this. I understand why she arrived at this description, given that it's possible to look at the opera in the most lurid possible way: young woman is pregnant by a scoundrel who won't marry her, baby is murdered.
At least one of the critics who saw the US premiere in 1925 made the same mistake. Because the opera was sung in a German translation, because virtually no one in the US had any familiarity with Janacek's musical idiom, because a good synopsis might not have been available, I can forgive that error of a critic writing more than ninety years ago. But to make it now is to miss the moral complexities of the work. The Kostelnicka is motivated not only by love for Jenufa, as hard as that love is, but by her experience of being married to Jenufa's father, who was a wastrel in the same ways that Steva, father of Jenufa's baby, is a wastrel. Laca, Steva's half-brother, truly loves Jenufa, and takes extreme, abusive, and debatable measures to keep her from marrying Steva. Jenufa herself grows emotionally over the course of the opera, and, depending on the production, sees the potential bleakness of her eventual marriage to Laca, because they have come together not in joy, but in sorrow.
Compare the above with the superficially similar
Cavalleria Rusticana, and you'll see why it does tis great opera a disservice to label it verismo.
Links to 1925 reviews of Jenufa, quoted on this blog:
* Bad copy-editing here, that this inconsistency slipped by.
** Look, you don't forget the plot of this one after the first time you see it. You just don't.
