Leoš Janáček: Katya Kabanova
So I wanted to die …
Author: Leoš Janáček
Libretto: Alexandr Nikolajevič Ostrovskij
Musical Preparation: Ondrej Olos
Conductor: Ondrej Olos
Director: Robert Carsen
Assistant Stage Director: Maria Lamont
Set Design: Patrick Kinmonth
Costume Design: Patrick Kinmonth
Lighting Design: Peter van Praet
Choreography: Philippe Giraudeau
Performed in the original Czech with Czech and English surtitles
A moving, poetic interpretation of Katya Kabanova by the world-famous director Robert Carsen! Starring Eva Urbanová, the Danish National Opera soloist Magnus Vigilius and Pavla Vykopalová. Carsen’s original interpretation, where the entire stage is covered with water, was first produced for the Opera Vlaanderen. It has been performed at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and at the Teatro Real in Madrid. The Janáček Opera will be the first theatre company in the Czech Republic to make this production part of its core repertoire.
When at the start of 1919 Leoš Janáček began to consider Ostrovský’s play The Storm as the subject for a new opera, he was approaching his sixty-fifth birthday. In the previous three years much had changed in his life: he had become an internationally renowned composer and he had got to know Kamila Stösslová. Janáček wrote the libretto himself for the new opera making use of the Czech translation of The Storm. However he made major changes in it – reducing the number of characters, cutting it from five to three acts, leaving out much of the text which described the political and moral marasmus of 19th century Russian society and focussing attention on the chamber drama of the heroine Káťa suffering under the tough traditions or mercantile society in Tsarist Russia. In this hypocritical society she vainly longs to find love and in the end takes her own life to escape.
