The people see and feel nothing. Hardly can. Because it turned away. Because it overlooks the closed three rows of arcades of the Salzburg Felsenreitschule, which have been given back to the mountain with imitation rock slabs. And because it has also covered their heads, faceless and stiff.
This people is a social sculpture, a breathing wall. Sometimes stretched out, at least 200 people strong and staggered across the entire wide-wall stage, sometimes pushed together in a U, leaving little space, sometimes lined up on the right-hand side like backstage aisles for the soloists’ performances.
A lonely woman quickly stands alone in front of this mass, short pants, bare legs, without shoes, girlish, helpless, in need of protection. She crouches on the ground, she walks like a bird in a caged room.
She sings of unfulfilled dreams, vain promises. She turns against the narrow bourgeois morality of her family and the people in the small town on the Volga. She conjures up the utopia of an impossible togetherness with a man other than her miserable husband.
The director Barrie Kosky and his stage designer Rufus Didwiszus confront Salzburg’s most iconic opera space with radical emptiness to show “Ká?a Kabanová”, Leos Janácek’s so unspectacularly logical, gripping music theater about an unfulfilled woman. A woman who longs for real life, but which she will never find even in her hesitant lover, pleads guilty publicly and drowns in the Volga.
Apart from the crowd of extras dressed in bland functional clothing by Victoria Behr, there is nothing on the scene, no props apart from the cane as an instrument of power and an ambivalent dominatrix addition. Ká?a’s mother-in-law Kabanicha uses it to dominate her family and her lover Dikoj, consumed by jealousy for dominance in the house. In the end, Ká?a disposes of herself in a floor hatch, from which all you have to do is pull her dripping blouse. And Kabanicha coolly sends the people home with thanks.
Romeo Castellucci recently covered the Felsenreitschule in black for his damp, gray and tired Bartók-Orff double as the first Salzburg music theater premiere of the summer, completely refusing to enter the room. Barrie Koksy accepts it, although it is actually unsuitable for this intimate three-act play, which is just 105 minutes long and is played through here. But it is precisely from this contrast that his unfussy, logical, completely minimalist staging draws its tension.
In 1998, Janácek’s tragedy, which premiered in 1921 and was based on the 1859 play by Alexander Ostrowski, Das Gewitter, came to Salzburg for the first time. The triumph became a breakthrough for opera director Christoph Marthaler and for soprano Angela Denoke. At that time, the Volga was only present as a mural in the living room in the real socialist Czech prefabricated building.
This time it is a curtain separating the scene from the audience. With a lot of imagination, their black-grey spots and streaks can also be seen as an impressionistic, flowing river landscape with trees. It structures the three acts, before which birds sing in the silence, then bells ring, finally thunder rumbles, and also some instrumental sections in between.
Otherwise there are only the few protagonists, concentrated, reduced to their sparse gestures. The touchingly tender Ká?a, above all by Corinne Winter, who, with her less individual, radiant voice, reaches her limits in the huge expanse of space. Nevertheless, it triumphs with the audience, thanks to its fragile intensity, which sings glowingly against the desolation.
The tough mother-in-law in boots is once again Evelyn Herlitzius, who characterizes with the sharpness of her glass-cutting voice. Their young foster daughter Varvara (fine: Jarmila Balazova) is responsible for female warmth and affection, who is casually having fun with her boyfriend Kudrias (noble tenor: Benjamin Hulett). Jens Larsen morosely gives the bleating Dikoj, who pulls down his trousers in front of the Kabanicha. Jaroslav Brezina moans about Ká?a’s lousy husband Tichon, David Butt Philip sounds with a great tenor and little courage Ká?a’s lover Boris.
The Vienna State Opera Choir as a vocal accompaniment to the people can only be heard from afar, everything here is geared towards the characters. And to their rousingly beautiful, floating musical animation by the Vienna Philharmonic, which sweeps us along like the Volga waves. Feat: Jakub Hr?ša, currently the best Czech conductor, will conduct his first Salzburg opera premiere.
This finely crafted score, rich in motifs, sways tenderly, its desolation resonating in the fine cello tone, in the magically floating flutes. Hr?ša celebrates and at the same time enlivens this filigree, nervously fluttering, condensing and discharging music. This is massive and yet has a utopian tone. At least for a few moments, it opens a sound window from this desolate narrowness in the masterfully controlled expanse of the Felsenreitschule.