Missing spark

Katya Kabanova
ENO, in rep until 27 March

Katya Kabanova is Janacek’s grimmest opera, perhaps the grimmest opera ever written, but it is flooded with radiant music, which is decisively stamped out in the last few moments. With Katya having drowned herself, and the happy young lovers Kudrjas and Varvara having taken their most unChekhovian leave for Moscow, what hope is there for this community, whose senior figure, the Kabanicha, sees Katya’s suicide as the vindication of her moral stance? Her son Tikhon is a pathetic wretch, Katya’s lover Boris feels he had better leave her to her fate and clears off, and his uncle Dikoy is a superstitious lout whose only pleasure seems to be confessing his sins to Kabanicha and — at least in this production — receiving welcome chastisement for them. All Janacek’s other great operas end with passionately upbeat music, even if much of the situation onstage is largely bleak, as in From the House of the Dead, or the central character has just died, as in The Cunning Little Vixen and The Makropoulos Case. Katya should leave you feeling that all the beauty in the world has been obliterated, and in that way it is Janacek’s cruellest work.

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Arthur Roffey

Douglas Murray has been blacklisted in Berlin

I emerged from ENO’s new production of Katya somewhat moved by the last ten minutes — Katya’s leap into the river is marvellously managed, so that she seems to ascend before disappearing, as if that dream of hers about being a bird had been realised; and the subsequent rushing of the tiny collection of townspeople on to the stage, and Kabanicha’s chilling thanks to them for their kindness, as Katya’s body lies before her, is quite dreadful. But most of what had gone before it in the preceding hour and three quarters — all possible praise to ENO for performing the work straight through without an interval — was, by the extremely high standards set by every Katya I have seen for years, above all by Opera Holland Park’s production last August, tepid.