�This will last out a night in Russia
When nights are longest there.�

Measure for Measure,
William Shakespeare


Like many composers, Leo� Jan�ček�s biography makes for a salacious tale, but his journey from complete obscurity in the backwater of the Habsburg Empire to the centre of the contemporary musical scene is a story of triumph. However many have sought justification for the odd, mysterious and perplexing music he wrote through the story of his life. This isn�t entirely unfair. On many occasions Jan�ček himself admitted that certain events had forced him to reconsider pieces or even inspired him to start them in the first place. The critical illness and eventual death of his daughter Olga in 1903 made Jan�ček return to his third opera Jej� pastorkyňa (or Jenůfa as it is now known) in 1901, which he had left unfinished on his desk since 1897. A chance meeting with a socialite woman in the spa-town of Luhačovice in the summer of 1903 provoked his fourth opera Osud, which is almost entirely autobiographical.

The most celebrated and widely-reported event in Jan�ček�s life is his meeting with Kamila St�sslov� in Luhačovice in 1917. She was the wife of an antiques dealer from P�sek. It has been stated that she greatly influenced the composer�s last period of productivity and a offered welcome escape from his own loveless marriage. Jan�ček was twice her age yet became utterly infatuated with her. Although their relationship remained unconsummated, it is detailed extensively in their correspondence of more than 700 letters. Many of St�sslov�s letters were burnt by Jan�ček, but the large majority of his to her survived. Until recently this exchange of letters was kept from public view in the Jan�ček archive. In 1990 the Brno-based Jan�ček scholar Svatava Přib�ňov� produced a Czech edition of the letters, which was translated by John Tyrrell into English and published as Intimate Letters: Leo� Jan�ček to Kamila St�sslov�. The impact of this woman on his life is in no dispute, but the links between her and his work are more tenuous than perhaps has been stated before. In the letters, many details of the composer�s works are described in intimate detail, and all too frequently Jan�ček�s infatuation for Kamila flowed over into his composition. Although K�ťa Kabanov�, Jan�ček�s sixth opera, seems like the composer�s greatest romantic outpouring, the original play on which the opera is based had a more complex message. Perhaps even the impetuous Jan�ček could create some distance between his compositions and his love for Kamila St�sslov�.

When Jan�ček met St�sslov� in 1917 he was at a very successful point in his career, though that success had been a long time coming. Since its premiere in Brno in 1904 Jan�ček had found it hard to find another home for Jenůfa. The board of the National Theatre in Prague did not take well to the opera and it wasn�t until 1916 that Jenůfa was performed in the Czech capital. Its popularity began to grow, and with the support of Max Brod (his eventual translator for the operas into German, a life-long friend and his first biographer) and the Viennese publishing firm Universal Edition, a premiere was also secured for winter 1918 at the Wiener Hofoper (now the Staatsoper). Despite some disapproving critical reactions along the way, Jenůfa was a huge success story for the composer; it had been taken from its first measly production in a converted Brno dance hall (which was the �preliminary� home of the Czech National Theatre) and placed in the grand surroundings of the Hofoper. His career was on a high, and he quickly turned to revising previous operatic flops (his first opera ��rka) and completing the second �excursion� for his comic opera V�lety p�ně Broučkovy (The Excursions of Mr Brouček) to keep his momentum going. Surprisingly however, Jan�ček was without a subject for a new opera.

At the time he wrote the song cycle Z�pisn�k zmizel�ho (The Diary of One Who Disappeared) � composed 1917-19 � which was the first work in which Jan�ček admitted his indebtedness to the influence of Kamila St�sslov�, and saying that it held much of the mood of their meeting in Luhačovice, and that the �black Gypsy girl in my Diary � that was especially you�. He often referred to St�sslov� in terms of a Gypsy woman, who did and still do figure as exotic temptresses in the Czech psyche. The text of the songs was taken from the same source as for Př�hody li�ky Bystrou�ky (The Cunning Little Vixen), the popular Brno newspaper Lidov� noviny. In May 1916 anonymous poems appeared telling the story of a young farm boy who became infatuated with a Gypsy girl and left his family for them. Although called a �song cycle�, the piece has been treated as a dramatic entity since its first performance in Brno in 1921, since receiving many staged performances. John Tyrrell describes that Z�pisn�k zmizel�ho as �bursting with dramatic life, the work can be seen as an op�ra manqu�. Indeed Jan�ček�s own instructions say that the performance should take place on a �half-darkened stage�, furthermore detailing when the alto soloist (the Gypsy girl) should enter and exit, and that the other three female voices should be situated off-stage. Although not intended in any sense as �pure� opera, the work has many parallels with Jan�ček�s operatic oeuvre, and most fundamentally with K�ťa Kabanov�.

Whilst completing the many revisions that took place during the composition of Z�pisn�k zmizel�ho (adjusting the notoriously strenuous tenor part), Jan�ček began the search for another subject on which to write a new opera proper. He asked V�clav Jiřikovsk� (the administrative director of the Brno Theatre) to suggest suitable projects, of which Alexander Ostrovksky�s (1823-1886) play The Thunderstorm was one. Throughout his career Jan�ček displayed a fondness for all things Russian. His two children had Russian names, Vladim�r and Olga, and many of his compositions have their basis in Russian folklore and literature. Apart from his operatic version of Ostrovsky�s play, he composed Taras Bulba, a rhapsody for orchestra, after a novel by Nikolay Gogol and his final opera Z mrtv�ho domu (From the House of the Dead) is based on Dostoevsky�s memories of a Siberian prison camp. His first string quartet The Kreutzer Sonata was inspired by Tolstoy�s story, and his many planned or lost works include operas based on Tolstoy�s Anna Karenina and The Living Corpse. It is little wonder Jan�ček was drawn to Ostrovsky�s masterpiece. Among other composer�s who had already been drawn to the subject was Tchaikovsky, who planned to write an opera, but eventually composed a concert overture on the subject. Ostrovsky started his theatre career at the age of 14 with The Bankrupt (known as A Family Affair), a bitter portrayal of the Merchant Classes in Moscow. The play so clearly demonstrated his resentment towards the Russian archaic class system that it was kept off the stage. Ostrovsky devoted himself to the theatre, through which he became known as the founding �realist� of contemporary Russian drama. He was a controversial figure, whose objection to the rule of Russia and social injustice pervaded each of his works. Unlike Turgenev (whose A Month in the Country is still widely performed) and Chekhov, Ostrovsky�s plays are scarcely performed today. His great masterpiece, The Storm, first performed in 1860, is the only work among his oeuvre still in the international repertoire. As with A Family Affair, The Storm is strongly critical of the patriarchal petty-official classes, but this time set away from Moscow in the Volga basin. The lone female figure, Katěrina Kabanov� (or K�ťa, as she is known), is a vehicle for personal injustice. As with the great female characters of Russian literature; the Prozorov Sisters in Three Sisters, Anna Karenina herself or even the old wizened characters of Arkadina (The Seagull) or Ranyevskaya (The Cherry Orchard), Katěrina is the focus of the family�s woes, and as such the modus operandi for the underlying social critique of the play.

It is odd that at the height of his powers that Jan�ček should choose such a tragic subject. The composer himself tried to explain his choice. In his first correspondence with St�sslov� after he started the opera in January 1920 he described the principal character in great detail.

Jan�ček became obsessed with the central character as his fixation for Kamila St�sslov� grew. This was coupled with the influence of Puccini�s opera Madama Butterfly. Jan�ček first saw his Italian contemporary�s opera in Prague in 1908, but saw it again in Brno in December 1919. Soon after revisiting the opera Jan�ček started to compose K�ťa Kabanov�.

Or indeed as unhappy as K�ťa Kabanov�. Although Jan�ček lavished care on the creation of Katěrina, to begin with he did not directly associate Kamila with her. But then in October 1921, Jan�ček made his most frank admittance of the influence of St�sslov� on his work.

After the premiere and the publication of the opera, Jan�ček finally admitted the influence of Kamila in his version of Ostrovsky�s play, and he dedicated the published score to her.

Jan�ček�s own words seem to overlook the great tragedy at the heart of Ostrovsky�s masterpiece. The story is certainly about a �great measureless love� but the moral of Ostrovsky�s play was centred on the hypocritical nature of the bourgeoisie in Tsarist Russia, not merely Katěrina�s transgression of social mores. Although he may have at first perceived some great paean to St�sslov� in this new opera, Jan�ček�s final piece shows an opera far removed from the courtly (and not necessarily reciprocated) love he was himself experiencing. Jan�ček was entirely aware of the social nature of the original play and kept much of the milieu present in his own rendition, but he fashioned a more condensed personal narrative than Ostrovsky�s original. Although the original play has Katěrina (or K�ťa as she is affectionately called) at the centre of the drama, Jan�ček�s renaming of the play certainly seeks to underline this. Jan�ček�s drama (as with Jenůfa) dispenses with extraneous detail, focusing on the plight of the central characters, that of K�ťa and Boris (and to some extent Tichon), Varvara and Kudrj�, all under the control of their elders, Kabanicha and Dikoj.

When the play was first performed in Russia in 1860, the critic N.A. Dobrolyubov wrote that Ostrovsky�s creative world was a �kingdom of darkness�. In The Thunderstorm he found a glimmer of hope in the figure of Katěrina, who in her suicidal defiance tries to overcome the bleak world of provincial Russia, dominated by repression, superstition and domestic tyranny. Dobrolyubov wrote that,

Yet Jan�ček�s K�ťa is not afforded the privilege of heroism. K�ťa in the opera is in fact not the character of strength of the story, but its central weakness. In Act Three of the opera we can hear her literally overwhelmed by the storm, which coincides exactly with her confession of her adulterous relationship with Boris Grigorjevič. The off-stage chorus (frequently named �the voices of the Volga�) offer an eerie insight into the unknowing, unseeing world of K�ťa in her final living moments. Their basis was in Jan�ček�s previous work Z�pisn�k zmizel�ho (The Diary of One Who Disappeared), where they highlighted a peculiar point of crisis in the tale of the young farm hand. K�ťa�s final moments on stage are equally ghostlike. She imagines birds visiting her grave and colourful flowers blooming (rather like Ophelia�s final words in Hamlet), and deliriously she approaches the banks of the Volga. The thudding of the timpani (first heard in the overture) creates a constant sense of impending doom. Her final monologue shows no defiance, merely a longing for death; she has finally come to the realisation that her measureless love is hopeless. Her honesty about her affair was too much for the community to take and now the pressure wastes away at her soul. The sounds of the orchestra and K�ťa�s own mindless questions all amalgamate in a seemingly directionless monologue of what David Pountney describes as �a swirling pattern of ebb and flow in the background, which instantly creates a sense of emotional stress�. The apparent purposelessness of this unfortunately only underlines the inevitability of Katěrina�s final act.

Her actual death is also treated with a strange unreality, in which Jan�ček abandons all sense of a time scale. Although she has been alone on stage for nearly 15 minutes (apart from Boris�s appearance to bid farewell), Gla�a, Kuligin and a passer-by all manage to see her jumping into the river. A matter of 30 seconds later and K�ťa�s lifeless body is lying in front of the weeping Tichon. Surely the great river Volga would have been incredibly swollen and fast flowing after the terrific storm? Surely just the elderly Dikoj couldn�t have pulled her out only a matter of less than half a minute after she threw herself in the river? These questions are left unanswered in the cinematographic whirl of the closing moments of the opera, where Jan�ček makes his most important tragic statement. In the play the final words of the play are given to Tichon, who morns soulfully over his dead wife�s corpse. In the opera it is the Kabanicha, the controlling, unbending �moral� force of the town, whose words of thanks to the community are the ultimate message in her search for self-righteousness. K�ťa has not even been granted the escape she sought by throwing herself into the swollen river, she has been caught and brought back to be mourned over by those who showed her no compassion or love in her own life. Jan�ček affords no member of his cast a lyrical outpouring on K�ťa�s behalf (as there is, for example, over the heroines in Puccini�s La boh�me or Madama Butterfly). Kabanicha�s words offer no glib moralising. The brutal music with which Jan�ček finishes K�ťï¿½a Kabanov� denies the audience the chance to grieve for K�ťa. Sadly and rather horrifically the mess has been made and no morals can be drawn.

Although the play originated from the 1860s, Jan�ček came to it after the appearance of Chekhov�s and Maxim Gorky�s dramatic masterpieces and after the fall of Tsarist Russia and the establishment of the Communist rule. Where in Ostrovsky�s world Katěrina�s suicide would have been an act of defiance, fifty years on it is merely the last desperate, selfish solution. Defiance in the world of Jan�ček�s Bolshevik contemporaries should have been an act of public, communal devotion, as Strelnikov says in Boris Pasternak�s Doctor Zhivago, �the personal life is dead�. When the life of K�ťa Kabanov� is put in the context of the time Jan�ček�s opera was written, the meaning behind her death is even more confusing, the personal tragedy greater because the public significance is less. As Yakov Shalimov, a faded writer says at the end of Gorky�s autumnal 1904 drama Summerfolk, �don�t look for significance in it. There isn�t any. It�s not important at all�. Jan�ček�s music underlines this lack of significance in K�ťa�s death. The themes of the overture return (the thudding timpani, the brooding tonic key of Bb minor) to demonstrate that rather horrifically K�ťa�s death has made little or no difference and that life will continue as it did at the start.

But as with searching for significance or meaning in Katěrina�s death, we find it difficult to discover meaning in Jan�ček creating such a bleak work. Although it is clear that Kamila St�sslov� and the other melancholic heroines Jan�ček wished to associate with her influenced the creation of the character of Katěrina, in general the work was written in isolation. As with any magnum opus, if Jan�ček had slavishly mimicked his own life, he would simply have created the same sort of autobiographical work as Osud, which now stands on the periphery of Jan�ček�s oeuvre as an interesting yet flawed work. Kamila St�sslov� proved a great distraction for the composer and fed his lust for addled trag�die larmoyante heroines. However her unequivocal position as muse to Jan�ček surely needs to be questioned. Although she was obviously his dedicatee for many of the later operas and other works, he had found the strength (through the success of Jenůfa) to create apart from his own life. In Diane Paige�s recent study of Jan�ček�s relationship with St�sslov�, �Jan�ček and the Captured Muse�, in Jan�ček and His World, edited by Michael Beckerman (Princeton University Press, 2003), she writes that

Paige�s study however assumes without caution that Jan�ček willingly turned to St�sslov� as muse for everything connected with his composition. My and others �dismissal� is merely an obvious caution. As Svatava Přib�ňov� writes in her preface to the Czech edition of Jan�ček�s letters to St�sslov�,

Although Jan�ček�s sycophancy helped him associate her with many of his heroines (including unflattering comparisons to the urinating, sly heroine of The Cunning Little Vixen or the 335-year-old Emilia Marty in Věc Makropulos), prudence is based on the fact that even Jan�ček had the strength to distance himself from his own life to seek inspiration. As well as the stream of his four great operas, Jan�ček�s greatest �abstract� works also date from his last decade. The Sinfonietta or the �Glagolitic� Mass are not linked to St�sslov�. After all, Jan�ček wrote Jenůfa without her �influence�, and Jan�ček found no trouble in creating vibrant central female characters in that opera. It is appealing, and indeed reasonably well founded to see St�sslov� as a kind of Eurydice to Jan�ček�s Orpheus, but biography should be tempered with the understanding that Jan�ček was able to compose both in and out of the context of the emotions of his daily life.

Kat�a Kabanov� is Jan�ček�s darkest opera, but one which was created at the most successful point of his career. Even in his final harrowing opera Z mrtv�ho domu (From the House of the Dead) set in a Siberian prison, Jan�ček�s warmth wins out. This hope is created through lucid character vignettes and images of freedom; the release of a bird and the celebration of Easter, so as to create an uplifting cathartic whole. In K�ťa Kabanov� Jan�ček created similar images of freedom (K�ťa�s ecstatic monologue in Act I, Varvara and Kudrjáš’s escape to Moscow, or the imagined birds at K�ťa�s graveside), but their warmth and optimism can not pervade the darkness of the lives of the inhabitants of the small hypocritical town of Kalinov. The futility of Kat�a Kabanov� betrays some of the feelings of hopelessness in Jan�ček�s world (his loveless marriage for one), and although we seek some solace in the fact that this �great love� of Katěrina�s was based in part on his devotion to the hapless muse of Kamila St�sslov�, Jan�ček�s placing of her on a pedestal should not unquestionably continue to invade our perception of his greatest and most tragic music drama.


This article was first published in the K�ťa Kabanov� programme book (ed. Alain Perroux) for performances at le Grand Th��tre de Gen�ve during November 2003.