The natural colors of Janacek's opera Katya Kabanova are varying shades of gray, possibly relieved by a patch or two of dark brown, deepening to black. Shortly before attending the Glyndebourne opera Festival I happened to see just such a production--quite a good one--staged by the Opera North Company in Manchester. Mood, costumes, décor, and message all conformed to the old Gershwin line about the clouds of gray that any Russian play can guarantee.
Indeed, Janacek took his libretto from just such a drama: The Storm, by the mid-nineteenth-century playwright Aleksandr Ostrovsky. It is the funereal tale of a young housewife in provincial Russia whose longing for love and joy clashes with the suffocating customs of village society, personified by a ruthless and dominating mother-in-law. The poor girl has no help from her weak husband and no outlet for the powerful longings that torment her. After a brief doomed affair with a local young man, she drowns herself. It is the archetypal tragedy of hot, rebellious youth buried and destroyed by an oppressive and cruel society. Only the exquisite score, leavening Russian gloom with the delicate and rich chiaroscuro of Czech sensibility, saves the work from that Siberian ponderousness that used to be the subject of so many "mad Russian" jokes in the twenties and thirties.
At Glyndebourne the somber setting is transformed, exchanging the dark hues of a naturalist dream for the vivid, saturated colors of an Expressionistic nightmare. Director Nikolaus Lehnhoff and his Frankfurt-born designer Tobias Hoheisel open up the small stage with a spare, harsh tableau: against the bare sky a black steeple looms up behind a bright yellowish orange hill, framed on one side by the angular black outline of a wall.
It is clear from the first moments that the stress of this production will be microcosmic, focusing on the individual Katya and her ordeal. She first appears, not in the muffing costume of the period but in a shift, facing the brightly lit scene with arms outstretched, silent, passionate, the orchestra speaking for her. Then she is gone and the action proper begins.
She reappears coming from church with her husband Tichon, his mother (Kabanicha), and her foster-sister Varvara. They pass her future lover Boris, who stands with his father's clerk to watch and confide that he has fallen in love with this married woman. Katya and Kababicha clash, and through succeeding scenes the conflict worsens, against an interior of bright red patterned walls enclosing only a table and chairs.
The young wife can do nothing to satisfy the old woman, who humiliates her son and scorns his wife for showing him affection. While he is away on business, Katya, with Varvara's complicity, has a rendezvous with Boris. When her husband returns she defiantly admits to the affair and runs out into a storm. After a last short meeting with Boris, whose father is sending him away, she throws herself into the Volga. When her body is recovered, Kabanicha condemns Tichon for mourning her. The villagers disperse, and the implacable old woman is left standing over Katya's body, singing a last line of thanks to the villagers for their "kindness."
Curious Interpretation
The production's spare Expressionistic
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