Aus einem Totenhaus’: Leoš Janáčeks letzte Oper (review)

Janáček’s final opera Z mrtvého domu [From the House of the Dead] has attracted a fair amount of critical attention over the years but no independent publication. Ulrich Lenz and Stefan Weiss’s ‘Aus einem Totenhaus’: Leoš Janáčeks letzte Oper is thus the first book on the subject, though ‘book’ is not the mot juste. With almost a third of the pages taken up with a new literal German translation of the text, it falls more into the category of a guide rather than a scholarly monograph. The remaining pages are made up of seven essays, mostly generated by a mini-conference associated with the 2009 production in Hanover, a production directed by Barry Kosky and described in Ulrich Lenz’s chapter ‘Wider die Stilisierung: Ein Bericht aus der Theaterpraxis’. It seems a missed opportunity not to have provided more than four grainy photographs of the performance.

The essays are not all entirely centred on the work. Inna Klaus’s ‘Totenhaus Gulag: Dostojewski, Janáček und die Musik der Straflager’ is appropriately titled—with the exception of the word ‘Janáček’. Her account of the entertainments presented at the early Soviet gulags (i.e. at about the time Janáček was writing the opera) is itself an interesting topic based on extensive research, but it has little to do with Janáček’s opera, discussed only in the last two pages. Lorenz Luyken’s essay ‘Wissenschaft und Kunst: Gedanken zur Originalität in Janáčeks Spätwerk’ is equally detached from the subject of the book. It dwells mostly on German analyses of Janáček’s wind sextet Mládí [Youth] by Peter Gülke and Diemar Ströbel and on Janáček’s own published analysis (JW XV/152, 1897) of Dvořák’s late symphonic poem Vodník [The Water Goblin]. Why not the later opera at hand? For that one needs to go to Markéta Štefková. Her subtitle (the role of speech melody in ‘Janáček’s musical poetics’) may sound unpromising—this is a wearily repeated subject in Janáček publications—and the first few pages of her twenty-page article are indeed taken up with the speech melodies with which Janáček illustrated four of his feuilletons (JW XV/238, 241, 242, and 246). Much more profitable, however, is her consideration of a comment by Milan Kundera about Janáček’s astonishing ability to convey two contradictory emotions simultaneously in his music. With a clearly written commentary (well illustrated with long, annotated music examples), confining itself to the climactic section of Šiškov’s great monologue in Act III of From the House of the Dead, she is able to demonstrate Kundera’s point most effectively and help explain some of the power of this passage.

Janáček’s unexpected death in 1928 and the growing interest in his work in Germany at the time gave extra impetus to early German productions of his final opera, still unperformed at his death. Soon after its premiere in Brno in 1930 and even before its first Prague production, German theatres began to stage it and within a year there had been four: in Mannheim, Oldenburg, Berlin, and Düsseldorf. By then, however, German attitudes to culture and especially non-German culture were quickly polarizing and this cast a pall particularly over the productions in Oldenburg and Berlin (one of the last shows at the Charlottenburg theatre before it was closed down). Melanie Unseld provides an excellent picture of the sort of difficulties faced by the production team at the small but innovative German theatre in Oldenburg (it had previously given Wozzeck). What is clear is that the two local reviews, of which substantial excerpts are printed here, need to be read against the wider political background that Unseld provides in order to understand their subtexts. This is more an article documenting the deteriorating artistic conditions for modern works in...