TILL DEATH DO US PART Black Reverse Gold KATYA PRESENTS KABANOVASilver See behind-the-scenes footage, read about the cast and learn more about opera. nzopera.com KATYA KABANOVA Auckland Opera in three acts by Leoš Janáček. ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre Libretto by Leoš Janáček, adapted 16, 21, 23 September at 7.30pm from Vincenc Červinka’s translation 19 September at 6.30pm of Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The Storm. Wellington St James Theatre The first performance was at the 7, 12, 14 October at 7.30pm National Theatre (Národní divadlo 10 October at 6.30pm v Brně) in Brno on 23 November 1921. A Seattle Opera production. Performed in Czech with English surtitles. The performance lasts approximately two hours including a twenty minute interval. These performances of Kátya Kabanová by Leoš Janáček (edited by: Sir Charles Mackerras) are given by permission of Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd, exclusive agents for Universal Edition A.G of Vienna Please Note: Information is correct at the time of printing. The management reserves the right to make alterations to the cast as required due to unavoidable circumstances. Use of cameras, cellular phones and recording devices is strictly prohibited. Latecomers will not be admitted until a suitable break in the performance. 3 WE ARE PROUD TO BE SUPPORTING THE FREEMASONS NEW ZEALAND OPERA CHORUS www.freemasonsfoundation.org.nz WELCOME Stuart Maunder, General Director When I took up this post in 2014 I told all who would Director Patrick Nolan is no stranger to these shores, listen that one of the reasons I admired the work of New having created memorable New Zealand Opera Zealand Opera was its proud tradition of pushing the productions of La bohème and Eugene Onegin. His envelope when it came to programming; no complete contemporary take on Kátya Kabanová with designs by reliance on the ‘Top 10’, always a desire to reinterpret Genevieve Blanchett, who also created our evocative the great operatic canon and to mix it up with some Onegin, was first performed to rave reviews at Seattle pieces that were a bit out of left field like Boris Godunov, Opera in February this year. We are pleased to be able Xerxes, The Bartered Bride, Macbeth and Jenůfa to name to partner with Seattle Opera to bring this devastating but a few. I’m delighted to continue that tradition as we work to New Zealand audiences. present one of the great operas of the 20th Century - Leoš Janáček’s Kátya Kabanová. And who better to conduct our performance partners Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and the New Zealand In the hands of our brilliant ensemble, Janáček’s powerful Symphony Orchestra than our Director of Music, Wyn work is as devastating as it is beautiful. As the tragic Davies - a great champion of Janáček and a tremendous Kátya, we’re delighted to welcome the radiant Russian- musical force. American soprano Dina Kuznetsova, a role in which she has wowed both audiences and critics alike. Playing her After the tsunami of emotion that is Kátya Kabanová we lover Boris we present the North Island debut of a singer look forward to welcoming you to our 2018 season; who cut his operatic tenor teeth with Canterbury Opera, a season of young love in all its thrilling, maddening, returning triumphantly to sing Pinkerton in our 2016 heart-wrenching wonder. production of Madama Butterfly in Christchurch: Angus Wood. We welcome back much-loved New Zealand See you at the opera. operatic stars Margaret Medlyn and Conal Coad as two of the most morally questionable characters in all opera. Australian Hayley Sugars makes her New Zealand Opera debut as Varvara, and we also see the welcome return of some of our younger generation of Kiwi singers; Andrew Glover, James Benjamin Rodgers and Robert Tucker. 5 Carmen, New Zealand Opera (2017) Photo: Marty Melville Proud to support New Zealand Opera tosupport NewZealand Proud PROUD TO BE CREATIVE PARTNERS WITH NZ OPERA. bcg2.com leoŠ JanÁCEK Janacek and his wife, Zdenka Schulzová Kamila Stösslová Leoš Janáček 8 Leoš Janáček was one of a kind. This composer’s utterly 1910s and ’20s. Instead, he appreciated the beauty individual sound, once heard, is never forgotten. Some of the many musical modes available in Slavic folk fall in love at first hearing; others find Janáček’s music music and became obsessed with how words naturally quirky, irregular, an acquired taste. He was humble, transform into music in folk song. He developed an honest, spiritual, not to mention uncompromising, extremely personal way of setting text to music, which irascible, stubborn, and difficult to live with. He would you’ll hear in his operas. have lived his entire life in provincial obscurity had his genius not suddenly flowered in old age, inspired by his Janáček’s family life was troubled. A bit of a workaholic, passionate platonic love for a young married woman. he married a young piano student; but they were never This unexpected love affair freed his spirit, and old particularly happy together, and after both their children Janáček composed a series of brilliantly original operas died, their relationship disintegrated. (Janáček’s powerful that have travelled from his small Eastern European opera Jenůfa, written in 1903 as his 20-year-old village to every corner of the world. daughter was dying, explores the catastrophic loss of a child; but it wasn’t performed at the important theatre in When Janáček was born in 1854, Czech music was Prague for a dozen years because Janáček had managed coming out of the long shadow cast by the powerful to insult the theatre director.) The composer and his wife musical tradition in nearby Austria and Germany. In discussed divorce but chose instead to live separate lives operas such as Smetana’s Bartered Bride (1866) and in the same house. When he was 63, Janáček fell madly Dvořák’s Rusalka (1901), Czech composers finally began in love with Kamila Stösslová, a 25-year-old married creating operas with a distinctly Czech sound which woman with two sons. Although she never requited his could thrill audiences at any theatre in the world. These obsessive passion, they became close friends, much appealing, tuneful works rely on folk culture and draw on to the annoyance of Janáček’s wife (Kamila’s husband the spirit of Czech folk music. didn’t mind). Janáček’s love for Kamila inspired three remarkable characters in his late operas: Kátya But Janáček wanted to go beyond a vague Romantic Kabanová, in an opera also inspired by his love for all ideal of nationalistic folk culture. He considered himself things Russian; the Vixen, in The Cunning Little Vixen, also not Czech, but specifically Moravian, and spent much of inspired by his deeply spiritual love of nature; and Emilia his adult musical life (when he wasn’t playing the organ Marty, in The Makropulos Case. He died in 1928, Kamila or teaching music in Brno) researching and transcribing by his side, of pneumonia which developed from a chill traditional Moravian music. His own distinctive sound he caught looking for Kamila’s son in the forests near his developed from what he learned - not from German village of Hukvaldy. teachers in Leipzig and Vienna, where he wasted several years as an unteachably anti-authoritarian student - but Sections of this article were originally published by Seattle Opera © 2017 from his findings in the Moravian countryside. Western classical music was dominated by major and minor, two of seven possible modes available to Western instruments. Janáček was uninterested in limiting himself to major and minor, and also uninterested in atonality, an alternative that started to become fashionable in the 9 SMALL TOWN, BIG MUSIC Somewhere water laps the shores of a seemingly idyllic contemporary issues in his social drama. Janáček, small town. Some can’t get enough of the dazzling view, however, saw the universal possibilities, the human the peace and possibility; others have a very different journey at the core of Ostrovsky’s story. What’s more, experience. One woman is feeling trapped, tired of a he knew that music would inevitably transform realistic marriage that isn’t working, frustrated by a community local detail into something almost mythic. The composer that asks little and offers less. Like any prisoner, she will refashioned a Czech translation of the play into the exact seek escape. libretto he needed to write one of twentieth-century opera’s most compelling tragedies. Kátya Kabanová could indeed happen anywhere. Brokeback Mountain set a similar story in the western In adapting Ostrovsky’s play, Janáček tightened the focus US, Far From Heaven in the east. Czech composer Leoš on Kátya, only one of many intriguing characters in The Janáček based his opera on a play with a very specific Storm. He deleted much and re-ordered the scenes, so cultural context: The Storm by Alexander Ostrovsky, set that Kátya’s experience of love and sex is framed by the in the small Russian town of Kalinov, along the mighty casual affair of Varvara and Kudrjas, on the one hand, Volga, in the mid-nineteenth century. From his urban, and the grotesque liaison of Kabanicha and Dikój, on the intellectual life in Moscow, Ostrovsky had traveled the other. Kátya, her husband, and her lover are neither as entire length of the river and was responding to specific simple as the former, nor as ridiculous as the latter. 10 In Kabanicha and Dikój, Ostrovsky was satirizing tell the story (rather than Kuligin). Not only does the specifically Russian types: the autocratic matriarch and orchestra feel everything Kátya feels at each moment of the samodur or unpredictable petty tyrant.