The late 1960s were very different depending on where you experienced them. In the United States it was the time of flower power and free love, of Monterey Pop and Woodstock (although also of Altamont); in mainland Europe, however, the student uprisings of 1968 led to a brief but intense moment when it seemed that a socialist revolution was genuinely within reach. These opposing versions of the same turbulent period featured prominently in the new production of Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr Brouček that opened recently at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Between the lively staging of Robert Carsen and the generous musical direction of Sir Simon Rattle, the evening offered a vigorously entertaining journey through one of Janáček’s most curious and least-known operas.
Mr Brouček was the major operatic work written in the two decades that separate Jenůfa from the later period works on which Janáček’s reputation rests (another opera, Destiny, went unperformed in Janáček’s lifetime), and the story of its creation reads like a tale from present-day Hollywood development hell: composition of the first part took nearly ten years and involved no fewer than five credited librettists; and when the first part, conceived initially as a standalone work, was nearing completion, Janáček decided to add a completely new second part continuing Mr Brouček’s adventures. While the protracted genesis of the opera may explain its diversity of musical approaches and oddities of structure, it doesn’t quite account for its strangeness.
The story, taken from two novels by Svatopluk Čech, concerns the eponymous Mr Brouček, a petty landlord and general misanthrope who spends his evenings drinking himself into a stupor at his local pub. In his drunken state he imagines that he has travelled to the moon, where he encounters a variety of strange characters who, in Janáček’s retelling, nonetheless bear a striking resemblance to the staff and regulars at the pub. Just as Mr Brouček is about to get himself in trouble in his new surroundings, the drunkenness wears off and he finds himself safely back in the ‘real’ world. The second part follows the same basic structure except that the moon is replaced by fifteenth-century Prague at the time of the Hussite Wars.
Although director Robert Carsen kept the action in its native city, he shifted it forward from the late-nineteenth century to the final years of the 1960s, a decision so unexpectedly obvious it was close to genius. Admittedly it involved some tinkering with the exact order of events: the story unfolded in a conflation of 1968 and 69, a time when Apollo 11 brought the first humans to the moon and when student uprisings led to the arrival of Soviet tanks on the streets of Prague. While historians and pedants may have been annoyed by Mr Carsen’s cavalier approach to chronology, the era as a whole offered a more-or-less perfect fit for the opera’s two wildly divergent episodes.
The year 1969, of course, marked the end of over two-thousand years of speculation on the nature and contents of the moon: the silver globe that had fascinated Anaxagoras, Ariosto and Jules Verne – and that, even in the early-twentieth century, had received imaginational visits from Jerzy Żuławski, Georges Méliès and Fritz Lang – turned out to be nothing more than a desolate and uninhabited mass of rock circling the earth. Mr Carsen’s staging, which opened with the pub regulars crowded around a television watching the moon landing, thus began at a transitional moment in lunar mythology, a time when worldwide interest in the moon would have been at its peak. (The opera’s orchestral prelude was accompanied by footage of the Apollo mission and it was uncanny how well Janáček’s music fit with the images of early space travel).
Janáček: The Excursions of Mr Brouček. Simon Rattle, conductor. Robert Carsen, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, March 2025. © 2025 by Arno Declair / Staasoper Unter den Linden.
The moon people from the libretto, a group of vapid artists and hack poets who don’t eat meat but subsist on the smell of flowers, were an ideal analogue for the hippie movement that was flourishing in the States around the time of the moon landing, and Mr Brouček’s drunken voyage took him to a world of beads, long hair and tie-dye (although the modish moon dancers had a welcome touch of Carnaby Street). If the staging’s chaotic assemblage of far-out costumes and groovy sixties signifiers didn’t quite add up to a coherent narrative it didn’t much matter: everyone on stage seemed to be having such a good time that it became impossible not to get swept up in the whirl of period references (shout-out to whomever in the production team decided to use the first 13th Floor Elevators LP as a prop) and cheerful chaos.
The second part, which transposed the siege of Prague in 1420 into the student uprisings of 1968, seemed a good fit conceptually, but didn’t work quite as well dramatically. The preparations of the underground resistance fighters was relatively straightforward, and the inexplicable shift of action to the 1969 world ice-hockey championships – in which Czechoslovakia beat the Soviet Union – did have its own dreamlike logic, but the arrival onstage of a chorus of ice-hockey players couldn’t quite recapture the frenzied spectacle of Part One, and the attempt to use absurdity as a means of keeping the staging light-hearted served mostly to draw attention away from Mr Brouček’s cowardice. (The final seconds of the staging, however, did feature a magnificent kicker that will not be spoiled here).
While the staging was conceptually brilliant and undeniably entertaining, its inspired visuals and stage action were somewhat less attuned to the character drama that can give the stories their satiric edge. This was nowhere more apparent than in the figure of Mr Brouček himself who, despite being on stage for most of the opera’s two parts, remained completely opaque. At times it seemed that the staging was using Mr Brouček as a generic man without qualities against whom the ridiculous (part one) and heroic (part two) actions of the surrounding characters could be measured; yet he seemed too self-contained to show up the pretentions of the moon artists, and too inscrutable to fit with the boastful coward persona of the resistance scenes. His indifference to the fantastic events around him – which should have given the character his maddening universality – came across as merely ill-defined.
Janáček: The Excursions of Mr Brouček. Simon Rattle, conductor. Robert Carsen, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linde, March 2025. © 2025 by Arno Declair / Staasoper Unter den Linden.
If the staging left Mr Brouček somewhat indistinct, there could be few reservations regarding Peter Hoare’s assumption of the title role, which was less a performance than a total embodiment. With his beaten hat and shabby brown suit he was the very image of the ‘little man’ that would become such a staple of early-twentieth-century comedy, and whenever he moved, every limb seemed to droop from drunkenness. His ability to wander through each scene nearly oblivious to the surrounding action was, itself, a considerable feat of comic acting; and while Janáček – who apparently despised the character – reserved his most stirring music for the other roles, Mr Hoare’s vocal performance was never lacking in lithe, characterful phrasing. His defence of eating in the moon scene – the one subject about which the terminally indifferent Mr Brouček seemed to have a passionate opinion – was delightful, and his imagined visit to the tunnels beneath the Prague castle were suffused with drunken wonder.
Due to the structure of the opera, most of the rest of the ensemble cast took on three or more roles, their characters in the pub plus their analogous figures on the moon and in the resistance. Lucy Crowe distinguished herself early as Málinka, the pub waitress in despair over the supposed infidelity of her boyfriend; her anguished pleas were a highlight of the opening scene. Her Etherea, however, was even more impressive; in an act that often makes unusual demands of its singers, Etherea’s scenes are perhaps the most melodically accessible, and Ms Crowe gave them a soaring quality wholly appropriate to the lunar setting. Although the figure of Kunka in the second part is comparably peripheral to the action, Ms Crowe ensured that the character’s passionate farewell to her father conveyed all the necessary sorrow.
Janáček: The Excursions of Mr Brouček. Simon Rattle, conductor. Robert Carsen, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linde, March 2025. © 2025 by Arno Declair / Staasoper Unter den Linden.
Aleš Briscein sang with great clarity and ardour in his first scenes as Mazal, and was amusingly neurotic as the moon-poet Blankytný, but his finest moments came as the revolutionary Petřik in the second part. It was Gyula Orendt, however, who seemed most committed to the diversity of his roles: it would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the pedantic Lunobor and the quietly commanding Domšik, yet Mr Orendt captured the essence of each character perfectly, presenting Lunobor’s staccato platitudes and Domšik’s elegant severity with equal conviction. But Mr Orendt’s finest appearance was as the spectre of Svatopluk Čech, author of the Brouček novels, whose impassioned monologue near the beginning of Part Two was arguably the vocal highlight of the evening.
Over the past dozen years Sir Simon Rattle has conducted nearly all of Janáček’s mature operas at the Staatsoper Berlin and his performances almost invariably contain the affection and conviction of someone who wants the audience to share his own enthusiasm for the music. On this evening that same spirit seemed to be enhanced by a sense of delight in the discovery of a less-familiar work. The score is unusual not merely because Janáček’s hectic rhythms can sometimes seem at odds with the text, but also because the opera’s two parts seem to occupy different sonic worlds: the second part, with its patriotic choral scenes, its mysterious evocations of the Prague underground and its sparkling vocal writing is perhaps the more conventionally satisfying of the two, but the first, in which rhythmically propulsive sections are punctuated by arrestingly luminous moments, is in some ways the more fascinating. Sir Simon’s ability to capture the unique character of each part – without making them seem wholly disconnected – was, indeed, one of the evening’s greatest strengths.
It is difficult to imagine that The Excursions of Mr Brouček will ever occupy the same place in the repertoire as Janáček’s more ostensibly serious operas, if only because the story’s core of period-specific satire renders it less immediately accessible than his tragedies. It was nonetheless a delight to see and hear the opera in such a committed production: if Sir Simon made a consistent argument for the quality of the music, the visual invention of Mr Carsen’s staging found considerable charm in the unlikely adventures of an even more unlikely protagonist.
Desde 1996, informamos con independencia sobre música clásica en español.
La lectura es libre. Si quieres participar en los comentarios, crea una cuenta.
🙌 Registrarse ahora
Comentarios