Opera North’s new production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova is the most moving I have seen, though it is not the best produced, best sung or most consistently cast. There are two things that make it indispensable to a lover of this wonderful work: the first is the brilliant, perceptive and thought-provoking essays in the programme by Stuart Leeks and, especially, David Nice. The second is the overpoweringly penetrating conducting of Richard Farnes, who shows with every opera he conducts that he is as versatile and deep a conductor as any alive today.
What Farnes realises about Katya is that it is the opera in which the two poles of Janacek’s vision, pitiless bleakness at one extreme and consuming warmth at the other, are juxtaposed in the starkest terms, that no compromise between them is reached or possible, and that bleakness has the last word. The fundamental paradox of all this composer’s art is that passages of manic exultation and desperate lyricism leave us with a feeling of affirmation, but that he knows that that feeling is one maintained in spite of…everything. He wasn’t such a fool as to think that life or people are fundamentally good or decent; but he knew that though the world gives every reason for despair, that state itself is so profitless and pointless that the pride of living and maintaining a core of joyfulness is the one thing that makes existence tolerable. That is shown in each of the great quartet of operas, Katya, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropoulos Case and From the House of the Dead.
But it’s Katya which is the most moving, because the heroine is adorable, knows that there must be more to life than a wretched marriage dominated by her unloved husband’s loathsome mother Kabanicha, finds out what more there is, in the form of a passionate and extremely brief affair with Boris, the son of the gruesome and grotesque merchant Dikoy, and therefore has to kill herself, since Kabanicha and Dikoy set the tone of society.
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