Saturday, July 25, 2020

Leoš Janáček’s Opera In and About Time

In his massive three-volume treatise Time and Narrative, the philosopher Paul Ricœur addressed the need to recognize that a narrative can be in time or about time. The former is more frequently encountered, but the latter has its own distinctive qualities. Ricœur presented Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway as a representative example of the latter, and one can probably argue that James Joyce’s Ulysses falls in the same category.

On the other hand music can only exist in time. As a result, an opera libretto based on a narrative about time can only do justice to the music if it is also in time. Ricœur was not yet a teenager when Karel Čapek wrote his play, The Makropulos Affair (Věc Makropulos in Czech); but Čapek probably knew full well that he was approaching time as a subject, rather than simply a setting in which his narrative unfolded. Thus, when Leoš Janáček prepared his own libretto from Čapek’s text for an operatic interpretation of the play, he may well have appreciated the distinctive role that time played without the benefit of Ricœur’s insights.

One can appreciate that role in this weekend’s Opera is ON streaming of a San Francisco Opera (SFO) performance of Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair. One cannot avoid the looming presence of a clock in Frank Philipp Schlössmann’s sets for all three acts of this opera, whose performance was co-produced with the Finnish National Opera. Furthermore, it would not be difficult to see that the clock is actually moving, emphasizing that the nature of “real time” is as significant to the narrative and the music as it is to the pace of the plot as staged by Olivier Tambosi with the music conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek (who made his SFO debut when this opera was first performed).

Emilia Marty (Karita Mattila, center) in the law office of Dr. Kolenatý (Dale Travis, right) with his client Albert Gregor (Miro Dvorsky, left) (photography by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

I feel fortunate in having seen both the production that Frank Zamacona directed for video capture in November of 2010 and the revival that took place in October of 2016. Zamacona knew how to do justice to the full scope of stage imagery for each of the opera’s three acts as well as to close-up shots that captured those character traits that were key to the unfolding of the narrative. In 2010 the leading role of Emilia Marty was sung by Karita Mattila, whose body language consistently reflected her character’s enigmatic personality. In many ways, however, those enigmas provided mirrors that reflected the motives and desires of all the other characters crossing her path. So it was that the observer in the audience could be drawn into the story of a legal dispute over a will that has been going on for almost 100 years and the resolution of that dispute through the intervention of a woman (Marty) over 300 years old who has not lost her youthful appearance. Furthermore, that observer could accept that story without dismissing it as absurd.

The key to following the plot is to accept the absurdity, rather than challenge it. Acceptance, in turn, is reinforced by the stunning athleticism that Mattila brings to Marty’s 300-year-old character. The intensity of her approaches to movement (as directed by Tambosi, no doubt) reflect the very intensity of her situation. We are initially cued to that situation as we (and all the other characters) come to realize that she knows more of the details behind the legal dispute than any of the other characters do. To return to the about-time nature of the narrative, her character is consistently framed by the rich and complex path that leads form a distant past up to the present in which the legal dispute will eventually be resolved with little satisfaction to any of the characters (including Marty herself).

All this complexity may seem like more than an audience viewer can manage; but Tambosi’s staging and Zamacona’s video direction bring a clarity to all of the complexities that make viewing a bracing but satisfying experience.

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