Káťa Kabanová

Kátya is young, passionate and living in quiet despair. Neglected by her husband and bullied by her overbearing mother-in-law, she craves love like the parched ground of the steppe thirsts for rain. While the young lovers Varvara and Váňa prepare to elope, Kátya throws herself into an illicit romance, but in this small town in rural Russia nothing goes unnoticed. As a summer storm gathers over the isolated community, emotions reach boiling point, with consequences that leave no one untouched. Janáček wrote more popular operas than Kátya Kabanová, but he never composed anything more heartfelt—pouring out his sympathy for his lonely, lovelorn heroine in music that’s both raw and tender; utterly unsentimental, yet pulsing with urgent, passionate emotion. Based on the play The Storm by the Russian writer Alexander Ostrovsky, and premiered in Janáček’s hometown of Brno in 1921, it was an instant success. In many ways, its tragic love story and vivid nature-painting (evoking both the oppressive heat of the Russian summer, and the elemental power of the climactic storm) make it an opera in the Romantic tradition. But there’s something uncompromisingly real and recognisably modern about the sheer intensity and precision of the emotions that Janáček evokes—making a great performance one of the most harrowing (yet cathartic) experiences that 20th-century opera has to offer.