The Devil’s Wall in Litomyšl: Smetana’s last opera, at his birthplace

Only one of Bedřich Smetana’s eight completed operas – The Bartered Bride – is regularly seen outside Czechia. But you can see all eight by coming to Litomyšl, the composer’s birthplace, where there is a yearly festival in his honour, and this bicentenary year of Smetana’s birth made it an auspicious time for a visit. Last night’s performance of The Devil’s Wall, the last of the eight, was given by the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre based in Ostrava at the eastern tip of the country.

We are set in legendary medieval times: the opera’s title refers to a sheer rock face above the river Vltava, at a place where the Devil is said to have flooded the river, destroying a nearby monastery. The plot is standard rom-com hokum (Jarek loves Katuška, obstacles arise and are overcome, happy ending). Some of the obstacles are standard (Katuška’s father Michálek wants to marry her off to his and Jarek’s boss Lord Vok), others are not (Jarek has made a rash oath not to marry before Vok, who is unlikely to marry because the love of his life rejected him, many years ago). More unusual is the inclusion of a stand-off between the not-as-saintly-as-you-think hermit Beneš and the Devil, here called Rarach, who sows confusion in everyone by appearing disguised as Beneš.

Smetana’s music shows us a composer who has reached complete mastery of his own nationalistic style, but has also absorbed a lot of Wagner. So we get sumptuous string-heavy Romantic passages invoking the Czech countryside and we get Bartered Bride-style folk dance interludes, all with an overlay of brass-laden medieval bombast. Marek Šedivý and the orchestra had something of a rocky start, but once they had settled down, they started to produce that enveloping Czech string sound that we love. The energy never flagged and they delivered the dance interludes and the big storm sequences with gusto.

Bearing in mind that this isn’t a major metropolitan opera company, the overall quality of singing surpassed all possible expectations. Jiří Brückler sung Lord Vok in a clean, mellifluous baritone, projecting true earnestness when explaining his back story to his nephew Záviš (a mezzo trouser role which is relatively minor but still allowed Anna Nitrová to shine). Both sopranos were exceptional. As Katuška, Veronika Kaiserová showed one of those voices that make you sit up and take notice from the very first note she sang, sweet and strong. As Hedvika, the orphaned daughter of Vok’s lost love who marries him in the end (don’t ask), Veronika Rovná was even stronger, delivering us a proper medieval heroine. I haven’t space to mention everyone, but there wasn’t a weak link in the singing cast: there were sublime ensemble numbers, and plaudits must go to some glorious chorus singing.

Unfortunately, the libretto is a train wreck. Librettist Eliška Krásnohorská fell out with Smetana half-way through proceedings and the composer made substantial revisions against her wishes. By the time the opera was complete, the two were not on speaking terms, and it shows. The piece can’t work out whether it’s a light-hearted rom-com or a legend-based drama and ends up accomplishing neither: it lacks the upbeat breeziness of a rom-com, while any drama is impossible to take seriously. And the setting of Czech speech rhythms comes nowhere close to the quality that Janáček would later achieve, leading many of the singers to struggle to get words out cleanly whenever passages speeded up.

The courtyard of Litomyšl Castle, the festival’s usual venue, is currently under renovation, so the performance took place in the temporary “Festival Hall”, converted from the municipal ice hockey stadium. It’s a miracle that it works acoustically, but it does, albeit with inevitable limitations on how much can be done in the way of scenery. David Bazika’s scenery is therefore on the basic side, with abstract geometrically varied concrete-textured panels and hardly any props. One suspects budgetary constraints in Marta Roszkopfová’s costumes because of the sheer lack of consistency: we had one medieval knight, one Napoleonic soldier, one elegant Victorian lady, plenty of villagers in Czech traditional dress, various elements somewhere out of science fiction... I could continue. Jiří Nekvasil’s staging felt terribly simplistic, both in the general quality of stage movement and in things like the bright red lighting which appeared whenever the Devil shows up. Were Rarach’s red lightsaber or the ballet of demonic sheep (the Devil is impersonating the hermit leading his flock) intended to be genuinely dramatic, or was Nekvasil being ironic?

While this staging may not have been the strongest, I suspect that the libretto of The Devil’s Wall is irredeemable. This is an opera to see for its music, not for its drama, and in that respect, the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre did the composer’s memory proud.

David’s stay in Litomyšl was funded by the Czech Philharmonic