Janáček's Káťa Kabanová runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 22 March to 10 April 2027, in Richard Jones's production.
Janáček was sixty-three, unhappily married, and in love with a married woman of twenty-five when he wrote Káťa Kabanová. Kamila Stösslová never returned it and he wrote her more than seven hundred letters; the opera is dedicated to her, and every one of the late operas has her in it somewhere. He took the story from Ostrovsky’s The Storm: a young woman in a Volga town, married to a weak man, ruled by a monstrous mother-in-law, who has an affair, confesses it in public during a thunderstorm and drowns herself.
The music does not comment on her. It is built from the rhythms of Czech speech, in short phrases that break off, and it moves so fast that the whole thing takes under two hours. It was the first of the five operas he wrote after sixty, an output nobody else in music has matched at that age, and the woman in each of them is the one the composer is on the side of.
Richard Jones directs it on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Monday 22 March to Saturday 10 April 2027. It is his second production of the spring — Il trittico closes four days before this opens — and Jones is the English director most often trusted with Janáček, on the grounds that he refuses to make the cruelty picturesque.