Kát'a Kabanová by Janáček, De (2016/2016), Dirigido por Robert Carsen, Regente Ondrej Olos, Janáčkovo divadlo, Brno, Tchéquia

This impressive production is the work of the renowned director Robert Carsen and was originally created for the Flemish Opera. Its premiere will provide the ceremonial opening to the festival Janáček Brno 2016. 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.