How to sing infanticide: Karita Mattila on Jenůfa’s Kostelnička

As an opera singer, you’re not normally asked to take on the part of a child murderer and persuade the audience to sympathise with you. But then, Leoš Janáček wasn’t an ordinary composer, Jenůfa isn’t an ordinary opera and Karita Mattila certainly isn’t an ordinary singer. Audiences have been electrified by her performances of the role of the Kostelnička; their next chance is at Prague National Theatre in September.

It’s close to a title role: the Czech title Její pastorkyňa translates as “her stepdaughter” and the word Kostelnička is a job title rather than a name, meaning a church sacristan. She is an unlikely murderer of babies, a true pillar of the Moravian village community in which the opera is set. It’s that very propriety which causes her downfall, combined with genuine love for her stepdaughter Jenůfa: so certain is she of the disaster that having an illegitimate baby will visit on Jenůfa that she is willing to sacrifice everything – including her own devout Christian soul – to prevent it.

“It’s a complicated character,” Mattila admits. “The bottom line with this kind of character is to remember that she, like everybody else in Janáček’s operas, are actually human beings. There aren’t any heroes, there are mostly survivors, and it’s clearly seen in this opera. It’s like Katya Kabanová: the men are not in their typical heroic roles, they are survivors and most of them are cowards. But in a package, they’re just human beings.”

Mattila bemoans the number of “lazy directors” who treat the characters superficially and merely lean on the sensation-seeking effects (“Oh, she’s a baby killer. She’s a horrible woman.”). She favours a lighter, less black-and-white approach. “I have been lucky to do this in good productions so far. Claus Guth’s approach, in London, where I will return in the coming season, was a good example of a good, deep production.”

When she was learning the role, Mattila was reading daily newspapers. Either in Europe or at her current home in America, not a week would go by without some story of parents who had murdered their child or children. “Are they bad people? Evil people, good people? No. I don’t believe it. I’ve never believed in it. And what is so rewarding about Janáček’s operas is that these characters are really flesh-and-blood human beings. I think the music says it all: she has such beautiful music; she has agonising music; she has dramatic music; she has really high dramatic outbursts. It’s all in the music to describe her character. It’s a very rewarding part for somebody experienced both on stage and in repertoire.”

Mattila sang the title role in many of the world’s great opera houses before switching to the Kostelnička, with the help of the stage director Oliver Tambosi (whom she describes as brilliant, a delight, always well prepared and “bringing humour into these very tragic stories”). Surprisingly, even to herself, experience in the title role was less useful than you might expect. “It caused me to be in a little bit of a panic when I started preparing Kostelnička. It’s a totally different style, totally different kind of music and phrasing, which is so fascinating and makes this piece a genius piece and Janáček a genius. These roles complement each other because you see the youthfulness and inexperience of Jenůfa and the life experience of Kostelnička and also in which state she is. When I started learning it, I underestimated how much work it would cost.”

Mattila’s most recent Kostelnička has been a performance of Act 2 of Jenůfa at a gala concert given by Prague National Theatre Opera in July, at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in her native Finland. She will be joining the company to sing the role on stage at Prague’s Národní divadlo next month, with the same conductor (Robert Jindra) and the same Laca (Aleš Briscein): Jiří Nekvasil’s staging, however, will be a new experience.

The 2021 Royal Opera Jenůfa was special in a number of ways, she relates, not least the fact that it happened at all after cancellations during the Covid pandemic. Mattila is full of praise for the cooperation between Guth and conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, and adored co-starring with Asmik Grigorian (“she is like a younger sister to me”). In addition, the costumes, designed by Gesine Völlm and hand-made in London, were exceptional. “They’re just fabulous. They are so simple, everything is in black, yet it’s just so natural; you almost feel that Kostelnička made them herself with these tiny details.”

She gets even more animated about the pairing of Pappano with another director: Christof Loy in this year’s Covent Garden Elektra. The crucial thing about both Tambosi and Loy, she says, is that “they appreciate their singers. They have faith in them, they trust them and they give everything. Of course, they are also very demanding, but you feel inspired to be their tool. They are so generous themselves that it becomes mutual. And combined with Tony Pappano’s conducting and his presence: these two guys are so good together, it was like heaven.” In contrast, she has little patience with the sort of director who has such rigid concepts that contributions from the singers are unwelcome. 

Every cloud – even Covid – has a silver lining, and for Mattila fans, it was Covid fan tutte, a hilarious parody of Finnish life during the pandemic knocked together in no time flat (as a replacement for Finnish National Opera’s cancelled Die Walküre), by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Finnish actor/director Jussi Nikkilä, which Mattila confirms was as much fun to take part in as it looked on screen. Two years ago, Nikkilä directed a whole evening focused on Mattila (called “Koko Karita” or “Total Karita”), which contrasted Poulenc’s devastatingly sad La Voix humaine with a second half of light musical classics. “I was fortunate to do it. It was a huge, crazy production that felt like a sports achievement. I will never, ever do anything like that again, but I did it and the audience loved it. I even got to do background films with two very famous Finnish actors.”

Our interview reveals one dark note. We have been discussing languages and the vast difference between the Czech language and Mattila’s native Finnish, requiring a lot of hard work and top class language coaching, when the subject turns to Russian. “I’m boycotting all the Russian roles. I don’t want to sing in Russian, I don’t want to sing Russian parts. It would be too much for me to be in any contact, no matter when this music was written. For me now, it’s a terrorist state and I don’t even want to talk about it.” 

Mattila has also sung (just once, at Staatsoper Berlin) the other big Janáček evil woman role: Kabanicha in Katya Kabanová. It’s a less complex character and not one with which the audience can readily be made to empathise, but she approaches the role in the same way, by trying to understand the person’s humanity. “I hate to use the word ‘evil’, because I always think that if somebody is considered an evil person, they must be so stiff emotionally, which makes them act in a certain way. Kabanicha is a frozen character who causes a lot of bad things, but she is still a human being, she is an extremely suffering, sad creature, which is where that deep freeze comes from, which is the starting point of trying to own the part.” The difference between the professionals and the amateurs, she says, lies in their willingness to analyse and research a role, to approach it with curiosity rather than judgmentally or according to one’s personal likes and dislikes.

And indeed, her current list of roles reads like a catalogue of dark characters: as well as the Janáček, there’s the Aunt Princess in Suor Angelica, the Foreign Princess in Rusalka. The most recent has been the deceitful Ortrud in Lohengrin at Savonlinna Opera Festival, which delighted her – “Please give me more Ortruds!” she exclaims. Those dark characters are now her fate, she says. “I changed my repertoire because I wanted to continue singing, and luckily, my instrument was up to it. So maybe it was my fate that it’s gone towards all these dark characters and disruptors and troublemakers. So yes, I’ve been enjoying myself and extremely grateful that I can still do it and that I’m in demand. Not every 63-year old has that kind of opportunity!”

Karita Mattila performs Kostelnička in Jenůfa at Prague National Theatre on 11th and 16th September 2024. Ticket prices are from CZK 550-1990 (around £20-70).

This interview was sponsored by Prague State Opera