Staatsoper Berlin 2019-20 Review: Kát’a Kabanová

By Elyse Lyon
(Credit: Bernd Uhlig)

As the Berlin Staatsoper opened its revival of Andrea Breth’s “Kát’a Kabanová,” a few hundred meters away, at the Alte Nationalgalerie on Museum Island, preparators put the final touches on a new exhibition of female artists. These two events, geographically close but outwardly unrelated, proved to resonate with one another in unanticipated ways.

The Nationalgalerie’s exhibition drew attention to female artists who succeeded, against all odds, in winning professional success during an era when they were barred from formal education and suffered from restricted freedom of movement. “Kát’a Kabanová” spoke of a far more common experience: that of women of the same era who remained imprisoned by their gender, and were even destroyed by it.

Trapped Women

In Breth’s production of “Kát’a Kabanová,” the issue of women’s restricted freedom of movement emerged as one of the main drivers of the opera’s final tragedy. Other aspects were highlighted as well, chief among them alcoholism and the sinister side of religion, but one of the production’s most poignant elements was its depiction of its female characters’ circumscribed lives in contrast with the men’s wider worlds.

Suitcases, with their allusion to travel, became a prominent symbol. At first, these seemed little more than unimportant detritus, just more bits of rubbish tossed onto the stage amid scattered straw, old rubber tires, beat-up armchairs, radiators, an ancient television. As the production proceeded, however, they assumed increasingly prominent roles.

In the opera’s penultimate scene, Kát’a’s departing lover, Boris, poured blood from his suitcase as if pouring gasoline from a gas can. It was this blood in which Kát’a would smear her forearms in the moments before she died. A puzzling scene, but an evocative one: wasn’t it travel, after all, that set into motion the tragedy? Kát’a’s husband was obliged to travel; Kát’a herself was obliged to stay home. In this disparity between gender roles—men who must travel, and women who must stay home—the seeds of adultery and destruction took root.

This contrast between the wide world of men and the narrow, constrained world of women resonated through the singing as much as the staging.

The opera’s two primary female figures, Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Kát’a and Anna Lapkovskaja’s Varvara, sang with a ceaseless, impassioned intensity that suggested their small-town life was the entire sum of their existence. While both characters expressed a longing for the wider world—Kát’a with her dreams of flying as birds do; Varvara with her eagerness to run away to Moscow with her lover—neither gave the impression of having experienced that world already.

The men they professed to love were shallow characters at best, ludicrous wrecks of human beings at worst; and yet the emotional intensity both women expressed suggested a lack of awareness that the world might contain other, more lovable men. They resembled prisoners who desperately expend all their passions on the sole available outlet.

 

 

Wounded Men

The women’s lovers, in stark opposition, sang as if their small-town affairs were only a minor facet of existence.

Florian Hoffmann, as Varvara’s lover Kudrjaš, appeared thoroughly bored with the environment around him. Unlike Westbroek, who colored each word she sang with an infinite and ever-shifting variety of emotion, Hoffmann rarely seemed to stir with any real feeling at all. Where Lapkovskaja’s rivetingly coquettish Varvara audibly thrilled at the mere thought of her lover, Hoffmann’s Kudrjaš slouched through his role with a bland boredom rarely alleviated with the slightest stirrings of tenderness toward her. It seemed his real emotional life lay elsewhere: that he was frittering away his time until he could escape to a more agreeable environment, one where his scientific interests would be understood rather than derided by superstitious rustics.

Simon O’Neill, in comparison, portrayed Kát’a’s lover Boris as a troubled and vulnerable character. Boris was no two-dimensional womanizing cad, but rather a lonely young man still reeling from the deaths of his parents. One heard his desperate, almost infantile need for physical affection, followed by the contentment of satisfied desire when Kát’a succumbed to their mutual attraction. In the final scene, as he lamented his parting from Kát’a, his voice rang with real sorrow and anguish.

It was a psychologically astute representation of the tragic mismatch between the opera’s male and female characters. Boris was not a cartoon villain, but rather imprisoned by gender roles in his own way: grieving his parents’ loss, starved for love and intimacy, knowing no place to seek such affection except in the arms of a woman. All the same, he remained oblivious to the destructive effects of his behavior toward Kát’a. As Westbroek’s voice rose to heights of hysterical agony, O’Neill expressed only pleasure in his satisfied desires. He sang of his sorrow at parting, but never noticed the extremes of her suffering.

Stephan Rügamer’s Tichon, too, offered a psychologically intriguing portrait of a damaged man. From the moment of his appearance in act I, it was evident that something was deeply out of kilter in his psyche. He appeared (and sounded) anxious and anguished to the point of insanity. As he entered, he stripped his pants off and squatted in a washing pail, where Karita Mattila’s Kabanicha washed him like a baby. He evoked a ludicrously overgrown infant: his voice petulant and fearful, his white underwear reminiscent of a diaper, his entire body so floppy and helpless that the women often held him upright. His formidable mother, one surmised, had made him into her puppet. Barred from venturing into the world on her own terms, Kabanicha had destroyed her son with overbearing care so as to exert her will through him.

 

Postwar Confusion

While the source material for “Kát’a Kabanová” is a product of the 19th century, the opera itself was composed in an entirely different era: the years immediately following World War I, when not only the validity of gender roles but the entire structure of society had been called into question.

Under the direction of Thomas Guggeis, the orchestra and singers compellingly evoked the upheaval and confusion of the opera’s postwar context. Strikingly, the performance began in complete darkness, devoid of even the glow of light from the auditorium’s exit signs. Guggeis conducted the initial minutes with a lighted baton in a pitch-black orchestra pit. It seemed a directorial choice intended to disconcert, immersing the audience in a perplexing world where none of the ordinary rules applied. As the opera progressed, in a similarly disconcerting vein, the curtain fell at unexpected moments, frequently descending before the singers had entirely finished their lines.

The relationship between words, staging, and music was pointedly puzzling from beginning to end. It was impossible to predict the ever-shifting mood and color of the music. The opening scene was dominated by a sense of turmoil and sudden brutality: Pavlo Hunka as Dikój physically assaulting O’Neill’s Boris; Rügamer’s Tichon, debased and half-mad, sucking down liquor to still his trembling limbs.

Meanwhile, the orchestra interjected tenderness and warmth where the story and staging portrayed only bleakness. Cruel Kabanicha’s entrance was timed to coincide with a surge of warmth and tenderness from the orchestra pit; a nostalgic brightness accompanied Tichon’s desperate drinking; intense anxiety modulated unexpectedly to ineffable tenderness. Neither the libretto nor the staging elucidated the rationale behind these shifting musical moods.

It was this musical confusion that conveyed the opera’s deepest meaning. The characters themselves were confused, their feelings and actions disjointed from logic. Each soloist seemed to exist in a solitary world, their private universes barely overlapping even with those of family members and lovers. Lapkovskaja’s Varvara, despite the overwhelming bleakness around her, sang with the delighted vivacity of a happy youth; Westbroek’s Kát’a, mired in agony, fretted about bringing shame to her husband, a man who was quite obviously already debased. Mattila, as Kabanicha, masturbated at the dining table, then climbed atop Hunka’s sloppy-drunk Dikój and thrust her hand down his pants in a wonderfully absurd scene of bleak, comedic degradation. No character appeared to notice any of these joys or tortures or absurd depravities. All were lost and solitary, moored in their private experiences.

Westbroek, singing the central figure of the opera, expressed this addled, anxious atmosphere with dramatic brilliance. In the second scene of Act one, she delineated her character’s inner world with a particularly spellbinding power. As her extended dialogue with Varvara commenced, Westbroek sounded merely girlish and nostalgic. A hint of tension crept into her voice but receded before one could be sure of having heard it rightly.

Over the course of the dialogue, however, that initial shade of tension unfolded into tortured hysteria. At times, each word burst from her throat like a bullet expelled by some tremendous interior pressure. Almost weeping, almost screaming, she trembled in horror before her imagined abyss. The orchestra, meanwhile, depicted the paradise she sang of, creating an unsettling contrast against the terror in Westbroek’s voice.

As Westbroek sang of her own confused mind, the meaning of the work became clearer. Those baffling shifts of mood, those scenes of unutterable bleakness accompanied by bright cheer from the orchestra pit: it was all intended, one understood, to speak to a deep truth of human existence. It was an expression of the perplexing human soul: how we act on feelings we don’t understand, and which we often believe we don’t feel in the first place. It spoke to the same confusion that Janáček and his peers knew all too well, having freshly endured a war during which the world went mad with slaughter for reasons few understood.

An Ambiguous Conclusion

The final curtain, like all those that came before it, descended a heartbeat before the action onstage was satisfactorily concluded. After Mattila sang Kabanicha’s cryptic final lines with an unforgettably elevated, almost saintly demeanor, Hoffmann’s Kudrjaš, carrying a plastic bag of water containing a goldfish, leaned over a discarded tire, seemingly on the verge of releasing the fish. The curtain dropped before we discovered whether Kudrjaš had released his fish or not—and, if he had, to what purpose: for it to suffocate and die on bare earth, or to swim off in living freedom down the trickle of muddy river traversing the stage.

It was a suitably inconclusive ending. The goldfish appeared, at first glance, to represent Kát’a’s departing soul, and to offer a glimmer of dubious hope that her death might have released her from the agonies of life into some freer existence.

It also echoed, however, the uncertain fate of Varvara, who had just absconded to Moscow with her lover. Varvara’s cheerfully sinful nature had allowed her to do what Kát’a could not: to defy society and fly away, unimpeded by Kát’a’s soul-destroying guilt.

Perhaps, one might muse, the goldfish was really Varvara. Perhaps she, like the artists in the Nationalgalerie’s exhibition, would succeed in defying the world and creating a life on her own terms. Perhaps not. After all, for every inspiring story of women defying the historical constraints placed upon them, there are just as many Kát’a Kabanovás: women whose dreams proved not a ticket to success, but to self-destruction.

And so the opera rightly ended with the same confusion and uneasy perplexity that defined its entire length—the same confusion and uneasy perplexity that defined Janáček’s time and now defines ours, as it will doubtless do forever, since it defines the human soul.

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