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In de media. (Kát’a Kabanová eerder.)

Leoš Janáček: Kát’a Kabanová. Opera in three acts. (Composed 1919-21. Premiered: Brno, 23/11/1921.) De Nederlandse Opera, première 3 maart 2008.

Wikipedia:

“Káťa Kabanová is an opera in three acts, with music by Leoš Janáček to a libretto by Vincenc Cervinka, based on The Storm, a play by Alexander Ostrovsky. The opera was also largely inspired by Janáček’s love for Kamila Stösslová. This is often considered his first “mature” opera, despite the fact that he was 67 when it was premiered. Káťa Kabanová is a clear response to Janáček’s feelings for Kamila, and the work is dedicated to her. The first performance was in Brno on 23 November 1921.”

leosjanacek.com:

“Although Kát’a Kabanová marks the beginning of Janáček’s final decade of mature operatic compositions, it equally shows a return to a more traditional ‘operatic’ territory and that of his predecessors (particularly Tchaikovsky). Its downtrodden heroine, the storm and confession scenes (as with Jenůfa) all take us away from the experimental style found in Osud and Brouček. Unlike Jenůfa and his predecessors’ work, Kát’a Kabanová has a more brutally direct style, which is more emotionally pungent and realistic. The opera marks the first opera written after the greatest affection of Janáček’s own life, Kamila Stösslová.”

Max Brod:

“The libretto is based on Ostrovsky’s drama The Thunderstorm - a Russian Madame Bovary. As in Flaubert’s masterpiece, the entire plot hinges on the adultery of a romantically inclined woman no longer able to bear the pressures of a repugnant and constricting environment.

Several characteristic differences emerge between the French and the Russian versions of this theme, tempting us to trace them back to differences in national character, or between East and West. Madame Bovary’s vein of romanticism is primarily poetic and hedonistic, Kát’a Kabanová’s more religious and introspective - which is not to deny Emma Bovary’s very real religious traits. The winning quality of both figures is an artless nobility. By their very existence they protest against the narrowness of their surroundings, against provincialism and small-mindedness. In Madame Bovary’s case these surroundings are marked by boredom, philistinism and imposture. Kát’a bears the greater burden, for she is enslaved - what is worse, enslaved to her own family. Her husband is a weak man, whose mother, the sinister Kabanicha, is the true driving force behind the drama. She rules with the conventions of so-called ‘good breeding’ - in reality nothing more than traditional mores. Her absolute tyranny within her family mirrors in miniature the ruthless power wielded by the tsars to keep the whole of Russia in bondage. From above came oppression by government, officialdom, a superstitious clergy; at home an entire household stood in thrall to the eldest family member. The aged Kabanicha is more than that time-honoured harridan, the ‘wicked mother-in-law’; she stands symbolically for tsarist Russia, with its morality of blind obedience to arbitrary command.”

Opnames van Janáček Káta: Amazon (Sir Charles Mackerras, 1998) en iTunes Store (Sir Charles Mackerras, 1977).

De Nederlandse Opera: Lucia di Lammermoor, Gaetano Donizetti.