Czech tragedy

Almost everything about Katya Kabanova, Janacek’s first almost perfect opera, is extraordinary, except its heroine, who is a kind of distilled version of what many opera composers most love: a woman who has such appalling things inflicted on her that she is provoked into doing everything with her voice which it’s possible to do, to express her sufferings.

The reason why Callas is, and will remain, the prima donna assoluta del mondo is that her voice and the way she used it combined to give pain an expression which ranks with creative, and not only interpretative, artistic achievement. But Katya does none of the things with her voice that other operatic victims do: Janacek’s innovation was to get her, and his other characters in the mature operas, to go in for a kind of heightened speech while the orchestra lives and voices their agony. He is the operatic composer who is least imaginable as a writer of arias, whereas other composers who abstain from them, in principle or practice, sometimes come very close to them, or sound as if they could do.

Perhaps one main reason why Janacek’s operas are so immediate and often excruciating in their impact is that the characters’ utterances lack all artifice, so that we feel as if we are encountering people who don’t even have the consolation of sounding beautiful, while the orchestra, with its jagged eloquence and ferociously lovely motifs, leaves us no more choice about how to feel than we would if we were witnessing the scenes in real life.

Faced with such a masterpiece of originality as Katya, I feel mean saying that it’s almost perfect: but the fact is that Janacek creates hateful people, when he does — and it’s against his fundamental ethic to — by denying them any kind of orchestral support.