“Katja Kabanova” in Salzburg: Among people
Salzburg Festival: Barrie Kosky manages a simple, big hit with “Katja Kabanova”.
Among people it can be thoughtful and empty at the same time. People can be alone and still not leave people alone. That ultimately there is no love among them and the love that IS there must not be is the greatest catastrophe before greater catastrophes occur. In the end Katja will take her own life, that had its logic in 1859 in Alexander Ostrowski’s Russian drama “Gewitter”, it has its logic in 1921 in Leoš Janácek’s Czech opera “Káta Kabanová”, “Katja Kabanowa”, and the logic has ended to this day , even if Katja didn’t have to admit her adultery back then, even if she could leave her overwhelmed husband Tikhon today. Katja is the woman who can’t stand the fact that things are the way they are: the lack of love, the unfriendliness, the lies.
That’s another reason why it takes several love affairs on stage. Katja’s sister-in-law Varvara is just waiting in the most sympathetic way for the opportunity to move around the houses with her lover Kudrjaš. Her mother-in-law Kabanicha is just waiting in the most unsympathetic way for the opportunity to let her lover Dikoi into her home, which does not prevent her from humiliating Katya and torpedoing their marriage under the guise of morality and integrity.
When Katja can no longer see any reason to resist the enamored Boris, she throws herself unreservedly and uprightly in her love for him. No one on stage sees their nobility and desperation, but Janácek lets us hear them and Barrie Kosky lets us see them. In the Felsenreitschule, for the last opera premiere of the Salzburg Festival, he prepared one of those taut, actually quite simple staging miracles that even he doesn’t always succeed, but obviously come easily from the hand.
The eternally wide stage is the Felsenreitschule itself, Steinhart. Corinne Winters runs into it with full force and hits the cliff to the orchestra pit. Lots of space but tight. In the back a huge crowd with their backs to us, hundreds. At first one thinks of a spectacular Salzburg mass performance of extras, but in fact Rufus Didwiszus has designed an impressively real-looking crowd of puppets that can be grouped again and again when the curtain is closed: more concentrated on the side, framing a narrower stage section. And of course: no group of people could hold on like this.
No more props are needed, the rest is Kosky’s fabulous character guidance, which sets everyone in motion in their own way. And even if, as far as I’m concerned, people roll sideways across the floor several times, it seems calculated. Victoria Behr has dressed the ensemble in similarly muted tones as the crowd – strangely enough, for Katja there is something new in every scene, perhaps it should make it clear that time is passing. The singers break away from the crowd or emerge from the narrow passages that open up between them. Only Katja never belongs, is too lively, too agile, already runs across the stage for the audition, is unhappy in the way that passionate people are unhappy.
The American Salzburg debutante Corinne Winters, who can be heard in Frankfurt last season as Iolanta (in the Tchaikovsky opera) and next season as Madame Butterfly, is the perfect embodiment of the extremely tense and then exploding towards love feelings. This leads to the operatic paradox that a singer triumphs while a character perishes.
Kosky finds one strong image after the other, Winters can show them all: open her face like a book in which joie de vivre and mortal distress become blank and only visible, jump into the arms of her hapless husband Tikhon in the last attempt to save his love and break away from him carried around like a little child. Or disappear completely behind her lover Boris in the embrace, while we only see (Kosky-style) her bare arms and hands feeling his back like little animals in their own right. Her soprano, youthful and at the same time shockingly mature, blazes in brilliantly balanced vibrato and in large, seemingly effortless arches.
Winters’ rather dark timbre snuggles up nicely to the mezzo of Jarmila Balážová, an uncomplicated Varvara, greedy for life to the point of friendly ruthlessness. The sharp contrast to this: The great Evelyn Herlitzius as a bad mother-in-law and also in the deep part with a voice that is still light. She struts along stiffly with her cane, completely detached only in the loveless sex game with Dikoj, the bass Jens Larsen, who, like all the men here, has to be content with a supporting role. Boris, David Butt Philip, is his small heir – economic dependencies lie darkly over the mental struggles – with a great tenor in an evening of tenor colors: Jaroslav Brezina is the timid, Matte Tichon, Benjamin Hulett is the cheeky and correspondingly cheeky and with sharp singing Kudrjaš (The one with the adorable waiting song).
You certainly don’t have to come from the same town as Janácek to conduct Katja Kabanowa, but the fact that Jakub Hruša is also from Brno has its appeal. With the Vienna Philharmonic he finds a melancholic, relatively gentle “Katja” sound, the unexalted suits this title heroine. The Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor (under Huw Rhys James) sings from the off, on stage it is a group of extras who occasionally reflect their inner excitement to the outside world.
There is no way out for Katya until she briefly and very unpretentiously takes a tile from the stage floor and lets herself fall into it (into the Volga). After all the excitement, the rest of the staff rejoins the crowd as if nothing had happened. So little does a hard, grand finale of an opera need.
Salzburg Festival , Felsenreitschule: August 11, 14, 21, 26, 29. On TV on August 20, 8:15 p.m. in 3sat. www.salzburgerfestspiele.at