Janácek: Káta Kabanová [CD]

Kát’a Kabanová, one of Janacek's final – and finest – staged works, is based on a 19th century Russian play, "The Storm," by Alexander Ostrovsky. Masterfully compacting Ostrovsky's five-act drama into three acts lasting barely 90 minutes, Janacek perfectly captured the fate of Kát’a, a young woman who loved fully but not wisely. An innocent naif in a marriage of unrequited love to a boorish husband (Tikhon) whose mother (Kabanikha) totally dominates him – and everyone else with whom she comes in contact – Kát’a turns to Boris, the nephew of Kabanikha's sado-masochistic partner, Dikoi, for the hope of "love returned." But this is not meant to be; Boris turns out to be a spineless weakling, and fails to rescue Kát’a from her dilemma of "love confounded and unrealized by moral strictures." Kát’a ultimately turns to the only release she can find, throwing herself into the Volga River following her ultimate aria, "But death does not come..."

If this libretto synopsis comes across as all too grim, permit me to say that it is a common-enough theme in dramatic-opera libretti. And it is "rescued" – if in fact it needed rescuing – by some of Janacek's most glorious music. I can't speak for Janacek in terms of which of his mature staged works was his favorite (mine was – and continues to be – "The Cunning Little Vixen"), but it is clear that he poured his "musical heart" into this work. Every note, every strophe, every harmony, every choice of instrumentation serves the dramatic and emotional action to perfection. By the final curtain, one is both in awe of Janacek's compositional prowess and left totally limp by his realization of this moral fable expressed in dramatic and musical terms.

As Kát’a, Gabriela Benackova would seem to be hard-pressed to be bettered; she has Janacek's music (and musical vocabularly) in her blood. (More than two decades earlier, Mackerras had recorded this work with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, with the great Elisabeth Sodertrom as Kát’a, but I'm not personally familiar with that performance, and, in any event, would find it hard to believe that Soderstrom's could have been superior to Benackova's performance here.) All of the other principals seem fine, too. And the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra could hardly be improved upon when in such repertoire, particularly under the baton of Mackerras, an "honorary Czech" who studied with the great Vaclav Talich.

The recorded sound is superb as well, and the production is lavishly packaged, with separate booklets containing the cast listing and plot synopsis and the libretto. The former has an interesting essay by David Hurwitz which puts the historical placement of Kát’a Kabanová in perspective (including the fact that it was contemporaneous with Janacek's "Sinfonietta," one of his most famous orchestral works [a coincidence that is clear from listening to the opera]). Regrettably, that essay is somewhat diminshed by the presence of a rather large number of typographical errors that should have been caught by Mr. Hurwitz.

But this is a truly minor point; the main point is that this recording is a "must have" for anyone who is a lover of Janacek's music, or of 20th-century opera, of of opera of any time whatsoever. Unbearably beautiful!