|
Back
The Everyman We Would Rather Not Recognise Bregenz
Festspielhaus
07/23/2026 - & July 26, August 3*, 2026
Leos Janácek: The Travels of Mr. Broucek
Peter Hoare (Matej Broucek), Mihails Culpajevs (Mazal, Blankytný, Petrík), Károly Szemerédy (The sacristan, Lunobor, Domsík), Tatev Baroyan (Málinka, Etherea, Kunka), Jan Stava (Würfl, Caroskvoucí, Schöffe), Linard Vrielink (The Composer, Harfoboj, Miroslav Zlatník), Paul Curievici (The Painter, Duhoslav, The Voice of the Professor, Vojta od Pávů, II. Táborita), Lukás Barák (The poet, The other poet, Oblacný, Vacek Bradatý), Gaja Napast (Císnícek, The child prodigy, The student), Jana Kurucová (Kedruta), Svatopluk Sem (Svatopluk Cech, I. Táborita)
Prazský filharmonický sbor, Lukás Vasilek (chorus master), Wiener Symphoniker, Robert Jindra (conductor)
Yuval Sharon (stage director), Jon Bausor (sets, costumes), Yi Zhao (lighting), Hannah Wasileski (videography), Crispin Lord (choreographic movements, collaboration with directing), Anke Rauthmann (dramaturgy)
(© Anja Köher/Bregenzer Festspiele)
Leos Janácek was no model of academic docility. The son of a Moravian schoolteacher, he was a gifted but notoriously difficult student whose musical independence was accompanied by a formidable capacity for making enemies. He was briefly expelled from the Brno Organ School after writing a withering critique of his teacher’s conducting; years later, his savage review of an opera by Karel Kovarovic earned him the composer’s enduring enmity. When Kovarovic became director of Prague’s National Theatre, he was hardly inclined to forget the insult, and Jenůfa was initially denied the Prague premiere Janácek so desperately wanted.
The irony was that Janácek’s first major operatic triumph arrived only when he was already fifty. Jenůfa, premiered in Brno in 1904, eventually liberated him from the provincial obscurity in which he had spent much of his career as a teacher, choirmaster and organist. What followed was one of the extraordinary late flowerings in music: Kát’a Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Affair and From the House of the Dead, alongside the Sinfonietta, Glagolitic Mass and his remarkable chamber music. It was during this period of belated recognition that Janácek turned to Matej Broucek, Svatopluk Cech’s complacent Prague petit‑bourgeois, beer drinker and landlord—a figure considerably less heroic than the protagonists of the operas for which Janácek would become famous.
First performed in Prague in 1920, The Excursions of Mr. Broucek sent its anti‑hero on two journeys calculated to expose the poverty of his imagination. The first took him to the Moon, where he encountered an artistic intelligentsia whose ethereal aestheticism proved every bit as absurd in its own way as Broucek’s philistinism. The second transported him to fifteenth-century Prague during the Hussite wars, where a society animated by religious conviction, communal solidarity and heroic sacrifice confronted a man whose principal concern remained his own safety and comfort. Janácek’s satire consequently cut in both directions: at the bourgeois who worshipped material security and at the lofty idealists whose abstractions were scarcely less ridiculous.
There was something almost perversely appropriate about Bregenz presenting The Excursions of Mr. Broucek after La traviata, the other opera at the Bregenz Festival this year. If Verdi’s heroine belongs to the grand tradition of operatic self‑sacrifice, Janácek’s protagonist represents something considerably less exalted: the comfortable citizen who would rather be left alone with his beer, his television and his sausages. Yet this distinctly unheroic fellow eventually travels to the Moon and is hurled back into fifteenth-century Prague, where he encounters artists, idealists, warriors and patriots, and discovers that none of these elevated worlds has much use for a man whose principal philosophy is to avoid inconvenience.
That premise makes The Excursions of Mr. Broucek an unusually apt choice for Bregenz, whose main‑house programming has long been distinguished by its willingness to rescue works that more conventional theatres have allowed to languish. Janácek’s opera, premiered in Prague in 1920, has remained an outsider even within its composer’s output. Unlike Jenůfa, Kát’a Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen, it never quite established itself in the international repertory. The reasons are not difficult to discern: its two excursions are dramatically discontinuous, its humour constantly collides with solemnity, and its mixture of fantasy, political satire, historical parody and social observation refuses to settle comfortably into any one genre.
But there was considerably more at stake here than an eccentric excursion into Janácek’s lesser‑known works. Broucek was a particularly unpleasantly recognisable specimen of humanity. He was not wicked, heroic or even especially stupid. He was simply incurious, self‑satisfied and determined to preserve his modest comforts at almost any cost. When confronted with the Moon’s aesthetic idealists, he wanted dinner; when confronted with the Hussite struggle for national and religious freedom, he wanted to avoid being killed. His extraordinary journeys thus exposed the rather less extraordinary limitations of the man himself. The satire became most effective when one realised that Broucek was not an aberration but a specimen of the species.
Yuval Sharon’s production approached this uncomfortable idea with considerably more restraint than I had feared. Having endured his Lohengrin at Bayreuth, where Elsa and the inhabitants of Brabant were transformed into moths, I approached another Sharon staging with some trepidation. The Bregenz Broucek, fortunately, revealed a director far more securely in command of his material. There was imagination aplenty, but the imagination generally served Janácek rather than competing with him.
The production’s visual triumph belonged to Jon Bausor. His Prague was at once recognisable and fantastical, a world of angular façades and cramped domestic interiors from which Broucek’s house could suddenly detach itself and become a flying machine. The transformation into the lunar landscape was particularly ingenious: geometric creatures emerged as something between Cubist sculpture, science‑fiction fantasy and theatrical puppetry, while Broucek, the solid and stubborn Earthling, found himself absurdly stranded among beings for whom the physical and spiritual worlds were entirely different propositions. Hannah Wasilewski’s video work and Crispin Lord’s choreography completed the illusion without overwhelming it.
The second journey was more earthbound but no less visually accomplished. Bausor’s medieval Prague was excavated almost literally beneath the bourgeois present, and the painstakingly aged costumes gave the Hussite scenes an almost archaeological authenticity. Here, however, the production exposed its principal limitation. Sharon sometimes treated the medieval world too reverently, when Janácek’s satire could have benefited from something much more anarchic. The lunar scenes had the necessary strangeness; the Hussite episode occasionally looked rather too much like an exceptionally well‑designed historical pageant. A stronger dose of grotesquerie, Dadaist absurdity or outright slapstick might have made the contrast between heroic national mythology and Broucek’s shameless cowardice considerably more devastating.
Yet the production remained most successful when it allowed the two worlds to illuminate one another. The moon exposed the philistine’s inability to understand idealism; medieval Prague exposed the absurdity of patriotic grandiloquence when confronted by a man who possessed neither courage nor convictions. And Broucek, after all his adventures, returned home unchanged, inflated by the heroic exploits he had invented for himself and ready for another beer. The joke was funny precisely because it was so bleak.
Peter Hoare made this return to mediocrity irresistibly watchable. His Broucek was not a cartoon drunkard but a calculating, self‑preserving opportunist, and that distinction gave the character an unexpectedly sinister dimension. Hoare’s agile tenor remained fresh through a role that kept him almost continuously on stage, while his diction, stamina and finely judged acting gave every evasive gesture and self‑serving excuse its proper weight. He did not need to manufacture laughs: the comedy emerged from the extraordinary seriousness with which Broucek regarded his own insignificance. The result was both amusing and faintly appalling, since Hoare made it impossible to dismiss the character as a mere fool.
The rest of the cast matched him with considerable distinction. Mihails Culpajevs displayed a bright, penetrating tenor in his multiple assignments, Tatev Baroyan brought a gleaming soprano and considerable theatrical versatility, while Károly Szemerédy and Jan Stáva anchored the lower voices with authority. The decision to employ a predominantly Czech‑speaking ensemble was particularly felicitous, giving the opera a linguistic authenticity that was difficult to manufacture artificially. The Prague Philharmonic Choir, prepared by Lukás Vasilek, was magnificent, its singing in the Hussite scenes possessing precisely the combination of fervour and grandeur that Broucek himself found so intimidating.
The musical performance was no less persuasive. Robert Jindra, himself a native of Prague, proved an ideal advocate for Janácek’s unusually volatile score. He brought an almost orchestral richness to the music without sacrificing its sharp edges, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra responded with playing of considerable precision, transparency and colour. The score’s sudden eruptions, sardonic instrumental gestures and lyrical episodes were handled with confidence, while Jindra kept the two sprawling journeys moving towards their comic and dramatic destinations. At times the interpretation could have used more contrast: the moments of stillness were not always as charged as they might have been, and a little more dynamic volatility would have made the explosions of sound even more telling. Nevertheless, Jindra’s command of the idiom was beyond question.
What made the evening ultimately persuasive was the strange way in which Janácek’s opera managed to turn its own awkwardness into an advantage. It was neither a conventional comedy nor a conventional historical satire, neither fantasy nor social realism. Its very instability mirrored its protagonist, a man perpetually deposited in worlds that he neither understands nor deserves. Bregenz did not entirely solve the work’s dramaturgical problems, and Sharon might profitably have pushed its absurdity further. But it did something more valuable: it made this eccentric, infrequently performed opera seem theatrically alive.
And perhaps that was the most disconcerting achievement of all. Broucek’s beer, television, cowardice and smug indifference may belong to a Czech bourgeois world of another century, but the man himself has not disappeared. He merely changes his surroundings. Janácek sent him to the moon and into the Hussite wars; Bregenz sent him back to us.
Ossama el Naggar
|
