Perfect teamwork

I don’t usually associate the Vienna State Opera with adventurous programming, but staying in the city for a few days last week I was able, by chance, to catch the première of a double bill of two quite exceptionally rare operas, one of which largely deserves its fate, the other certainly doesn’t. They were performed in the wrong order — if one of a double bill is notably inferior to the other, clearly it should be done first. As it was, we began with Janacek’s Osud, perhaps the rarest of his operas, in a quite brilliant production by David Pountney, who is an old hand at this piece. I can’t remember much about his ENO production of it in 1984, but I don’t think it was much like this one. At his insistence the work was performed in German, which seems a sensible idea. Surtitles, in German and English, were available, on handy individual screens, which I’m sure Pountney didn’t approve of. I found them a godsend, since Janacek often makes it difficult for the singers to project their words over his seething orchestra.

Osud is so extremely bizarre that it’s both a good thing and almost a tragedy that its music is consistently so wonderful. It is characteristic of the composer from the opening bar onwards, streaming and jagged string lyricism accompanied by pounding timpani and alternating with ebullient brass. It’s almost possible to take it as ‘abstract’, and in view of the unrewarding complexities of the plot very tempting to. As usual with him, the states of mind of the characters and their relationships are weird, but for every prosaic incident on stage he seems to be ever more stimulated to transfiguring music in the pit, while the characters semi-declaim and indulge in strange repetitions.