UNPOPULAR MASTERPIECE : HALFHEARTED REVIVAL OF JANACEK’S ‘JENUFA’

The Metropolitan Opera--big, rich, glamorous, smug and just a tad tired--opened the season last week with Puccini’s presumably indestructible “Tosca.” Ho hum.

Montserrat Caballe sang the title role and Luciano Pavarotti impersonated Cavaradossi in the spectacular overproduction concocted last year by Franco Zeffirelli. The local press found the whole thing something of a travesty.

Donal Henahan in the New York Times just laughed it off. Peter G. Davis in New York magazine formulated a devastating description of the principals:

“Visually embarrassing and devoid of vocal brilliance, this sluggish Tosca and Cavaradossi only managed to suggest a pair of slightly passe opera stars indulging themselves at the composer’s expense.”

Under the much-publicized circumstances, the next item on the Met agenda, Janacek’s “Jenufa,” must have looked like serious penance.

The Met hasn’t done the opera often. The performance Wednesday night, in fact, was only the 15th in the history of the company. The statistic is particularly sobering when one realizes that Janacek wrote his masterpiece in 1903.

The current staging, a dutiful revival of a production that caused little commotion even when it was new 10 years ago, is hardly a triumph of enlightened musical theater. But, compared to the ritualized concert-in-costume one so often encounters here, it is cause for at least modified rapture.

Most of the rapture relates to the conducting. In his belated Met debut, Vaclav Neumann offers an authentic, poetic perspective of Janacek’s score. The Czech maestro sustains a marvelous lyrical flow, balances orchestra and voices impeccably, avoids any temptation to overstress, yet slowly, inexorably builds the drama to a poignant climax in the romantic eruptions of the final scene.

Neumann’s mellow dynamic scheme and essentially transparent instrumental textures actually make it easy for one to understand the English text. Under the circumstances, alas, that may be a mixed blessing. Yveta Synek Graff and Robert T. Jones have provided a stilted translation that simulates the Czech speech patterns faithfully while it mangles our language.

The Met, incidentally, must be the last American company to resist taking up the obtrusive crutch of super-titles.

The cast, hardly a collection of internationally celebrated specialists, is dominated by the radiant, sweet-toned, gentle Jenufa of Roberta Alexander (who inherited an assignment rejected by Hildegard Behrens). With time, the young American soprano may find greater emotional nuance in the character, and she may find a bit more vocal bloom for the ecstasy of the reconciliation scene. After only three performances, she already fills the basic requirements of this difficult role with intelligence and understated pathos.

Most performances of “Jenufa” are stolen by the artist portraying the stern Kostelnicka, a woman whose distorted sense of moral rectitude drives her to infanticide. The vehicle is one of the great dramatic challenges in the literature, a challenge that has brought triumph in recent years to such disparate singing-actresses as Nadezhda Kniplova, Astrid Varnay, Sena Jurinac and Leonie Rysanek.

Mignon Dunn, patently miscast here, is an able, conscientious singer and hardly an actress at all. She makes big, healthy mezzo-soprano sounds, trains one eye on the conductor, strikes an occasional self-conscious pose and ultimately conveys no grandeur, no inner torture, no vulnerability, no tragedy.

Timothy Jenkins, the burly Laca who had seemed so promising in Seattle last season, produces the right Heldentenor sonorities in this context too, but seems musically less flexible, histrionically less sympathetic.

William Lewis offers a crisply delineated, dry-toned characterization of the cad, Stewa. Geraldine Decker, another Seattle holdover, produces a wobble in search of a voice as Grandmother Buryja.

The conventional production, credited to the late Guenther Rennert, has been handed down to a house factotum, Phebe Berkowitz. It may once have been tense, focused, atmospheric. Now it is merely efficient.

Guenther Schneider-Siemssen’s decors, a bit too grand for this intimate folk drama, serve the needs of old-fashioned picture-book realism decently.

An audience that had gone predictably crazy over “Tosca” mustered moderate enthusiasm for “Jenufa,” and there were many, many empty seats. It gives one pause.