Janáček's Káťa Kabanová, written in the decade of his life's most productive output, returns to Covent Garden in Richard Jones's production.
Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová, the first of five operas he wrote after sixty, returns to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on Monday 22 March 2027. Richard Jones directs his own production, which runs to Saturday 10 April.
Janáček was sixty-three, unhappily married and in love with Kamila Stösslová, a married woman of twenty-five, when he wrote it. She never returned his feelings. He wrote her more than 700 letters and dedicated the opera to her.
He took the story from Ostrovsky’s play The Storm. A young woman in a Volga town, married to a weak man and ruled by a monstrous mother-in-law, has an affair, confesses it in a thunderstorm and drowns herself. The opera had its first performance at the National Theatre Brno in November 1921.
The music is built from the rhythms of Czech speech, in short phrases that break off. It does not comment on Káťa, and in each of these late operas the composer takes the side of the woman at the centre.
This is Jones’s second production of the spring after Il trittico. He is a director often trusted with Janáček, because he refuses to make the cruelty picturesque.