Opera - Peter Conrad wonders whether he has ever before heard singing of such beauty
Janacek's subject is the eternal female, of all species and in all ages: his heroines range from a bushy-tailed, predatory fox in The Cunning Little Vixen, immediately replaced by her offspring when a hunter shoots her, to a 300-year-old prima donna, kept alive by an alchemist's elixir, in The Makropulos Case. These days, his eternal woman is incarnated by the soprano Karita Mattila, who has just sung her first performances of Kat'a Kabanova in San Francisco and has a live recording of Jenufa, made at Covent Garden last year, due for release. Mattila's lustrous voice exactly captures the anguish and elation of Janacek's unstable creatures, at once carnal and spiritual; thanks to the frenetic intensity of her acting, you live through their distracted emotional histories as you watch and listen.
Kat'a Kabanova is Janacek's compression of Ostrovsky's play The Storm, a premonition of the Russian revolution in which the ardent Kat'a is brutalised by the venal, hypocritical merchant class into which she marries. She finds happiness briefly in an adulterous liaison; unable to forgive herself, she jumps into a river during the eponymous tempest. A Paris production by Gotz Friedrich a while ago treated the downpour as a radical uprising, with students distributing dissident tracts in the rain. In San Francisco, the director Johannes Schaaf prudently avoided politics, and instead dumped 300 gallons of lukewarm water on the stage; it was Mattila - inflamed by desire, then guiltily deranged by its gratification, dying at last in a grateful merger with wind and water - who created the storm.
Mattila has an uncanny capacity to transform physiology into psychology. Her movements turn the character inside out, and it is her body that seems to be singing, thanks to that white-hot, nervously palpitating voice. Imprisoned in matrimony, her Kat'a relieves her pent-up tension by exercising in a creaky rocking chair or penitentially polishing silver. Undressed for bed, she has orgiastic dreams of flight, and flails her arms as if trying to take off. Yet she prays for bondage, demanding that her husband make her swear oaths of loyalty and obedience; when he demurs, the casual way in which she toys with her pigtail and then lets it drop shows that, in a moment, abject dependence has changed to contempt. Then, after all these reversals, she suddenly slumps on the floor in a faint, exhausted by her own volatility. I felt, I must say, like doing the same (and this was only the end of the first act).
Having pumped that lake on to the stage, Schaaf wisely stood aside during the storm and let Mattila, a muddy naiad in a nightie, perform a solitary mad scene that changes dramatic distress into tender, precious musical peace. Her rawness is at first painful to witness. She beats her chest and batters her reeling head in self-reproach, or lies down flat on her back to settle into a welcome grave. Glimpsing her lover for the last time, she stares at him and then, with fierce tenacity, holds his invisible image before her in her open hands. Then birds flute and trill while the overflowing river vocalises: madness mercifully relieves Kat'a from the need to exist in society and attunes her to elemental nature, so her death - when she drops into the water, repeating that earlier, instantaneous fall to the floor - is a literal release.
A pity that Schaaf's clunky production then reappeared, as men with sou'westers wheeled on a metallic mortuary table and laid out the corpse on it, ready for surgical investigation. Donald Runnicles conducted cautiously but effectively; Albert Bonnema as Kat'a's weak, trifling lover and Ute Doring as the liberated sister- in-law who disastrously schools her in rebellion were both excellent. And, as I listened to Mattila's account of Kat'a's yearning insomnia, or her final pantheistic delirium, I wondered whether I had ever heard singing of such heartfelt beauty.
Catering to my infatuation, her record company has let me hear her forthcoming Jenufa, superbly conducted by Bernard Haitink. The character here is earthier than the winged, seraphic Kat'a. At Covent Garden, Mattila's Jenufa began as a downtrodden, barefoot, almost gleefully sluttish peasant who, in what must be the longest emotional journey of any operatic protagonist, is gradually changed by physical pain, rejection and grief, rising at last to a sacrificial, transfigured forgiveness. The vocal range is equally extended: wrenching cries of misery are followed by softer, calmer elegies of stoical acceptance, and meek prayers alternate with spasms of rabid fury. In the final scene - when Jenufa pardons both the stepmother who killed her illegitimate child out of muddled, maddened love and the spurned lover who slashed her face with a knife - Mattila's throaty, choked despair gives way to high notes that are a sunburst of warming, healing sound. Moral modulations like this take Wagner's heroines several hours; Janacek tersely brings them off in a couple of minutes. With the orchestra simultaneously lamenting and rejoicing, you finally understand what Aristotle meant by calling tragedy cathartic.
Jenufa is released by Erato on 6 January 2003. Karita Mattila appears in recital at the Barbican, London EC2, in April 2003
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