La fedeltà premiata
Royal Academy of Music
Jenùfa
English National Opera
Everyone agrees that Haydn’s operas are a disappointment, given what is now widely regarded as his supreme musical stature, but it’s hard to say just why. In the case of La fedeltà premiata (Fidelity rewarded), which the Royal Academy of Music staged brilliantly — my efforts to persuade soi-disant opera lovers to go to these productions of the music schools are, it seems, a total failure — one reason could be the insanely complicated plot, which I abandoned any attempt to follow. Richard Wigmore, in his Faber Guide to Haydn, quite rightly points out that the finale to Act I is as extended as any Mozart finale, and gathers an impressive momentum. The big difference is that we don’t give a damn about Haydn’s characters, especially not when they are parts of a send-up of the pastoral mode. The director Alessandro Talevi rather let that go by updating the action to now, with most of the characters tourist nerds, apparently competing in some inane TV contest, which would obviously be lost on me. That meant that it became a satire on modern life rather than on an artistic convention, a crucial alteration.
It was all slickly carried through, and the sets were exceptionally attractive, but what did it all mean? The music varies between placid or stormy arias and some genuinely, if abstractly, tense ensembles. What mattered was that the standard of singing was impressively high, with the Chinese mezzo Fu Qian outstanding, and surely destined for a major career. Acting was of a decent quality, too, and if only Haydn had been more involved in the enterprise and I had had a less vague idea of what was going on it could have been a yet more enjoyable evening.
Space is short these days, so I can’t celebrate ENO’s first revival of Janacek’s Jenùfa in the detail that it deserves. It is without question the best operatic event in London at present, one of those evenings that justify the form of opera and leave one exalted after first being thoroughly upset. There are some obvious criticisms to make of David Alden’s production and the set designs of Charles Edwards — I take it they were what Alden wanted. Not only is there no point in setting Jenùfa in some grim industrial wasteland in post-Stalin Eastern Europe, but using the full stage all the time means that the characters seem strangely to prefer being yards apart and shouting at one another to being intimate in love or loathing, as they in fact are. And the Kostelnicka’s sitting room, though not its lack of any furniture or decoration, is on a scale to satisfy Ludwig II. The intensity of Eivind Gullberg Jensen’s conducting, however, and the identification with their roles of the two chief female singers, are so involving that one soon stops being irritated by these absurdities. Less forgivable is the coarse characterisation of the Mayor and his family in Act III, which tugs Jenùfa in the direction of Smetana’s folk comedies. Since one of the triumphs of this great work is Janacek’s overcoming of conventions that his predecessors had endorsed and institutionalised, a triumph which we see being precariously won in the course of Act I, it’s particularly irritating to see him dragged back to them by insensitive direction. Amanda Roocroft, however, has deepened her interpretation of the title role immeasurably, and Michaela Martens is so stunning a Kostelnicka, that they, and the adequate male leads, though they are a very noisy pair, vindicate this as one of the 20th century’s greatest operas.
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