The opera has that advantage over the novel: in just ninety minutes it can tell of longing for love, adultery, ecstasy and suicide, while the relevant novels by Leo Tolstoy or Gustave Flaubert take many hours to read.
However, the basis for the opera "Katia Kabanova" is not a novel, but the play "The Thunderstorm" by Alexander Ostrowski, which the composer Leoš Janáček himself adapted into the libretto.
Who would know better what goes on in women than the Moravian feminist, who was a real-life dislike?
In any case, the director Tatjana Gürbaca not only shares Janáček's insight into his soul, but also pushes his dramaturgy of concentration further.
The enlightening chamber play that emerged from this can currently be experienced at the Geneva Opera House, on an abstract, central-perspective stage set by Henrik Ahr, which can be localized by the lighting design by Stefan Bollinger.
And in the direction of the characters, the focus is also on the seething emotional volcano Katia, which the girlish Corinne Winters took over in Geneva after her Salzburg debut in this role: a vocal and acting adaptation that Janáček must have dreamed of.
As soon as she is on stage, her charisma dominates everything around her, including the audience.
Gürbaca does not bother with Ostrowski's social criticism, which Janáček himself had reduced compared to the template.
Exaggerated characters
Katia's dreaded mother-in-law, Kabanicha, and the merchant and despot Dikój are grotesquely exaggerated: Elena Zhidkova as a dead poison injection, Tómas Tómasson, a giant of a man, as a rude prole.
Even less does the director fall into the fashionable victim mode, according to which the others and above all the men are always to blame.
Katia's husband Tikhon and her lover Boris, sung by Czech tenor Ales Briscein, are both weak characters, Tikhon a mother's boy, Boris an opportunist, but they are not accused.
Rather pities when Tichon, sung by the Danish tenor Magnus Vigilius, who has experienced Janáček, goes into a fit of screaming as soon as Katia makes her adultery public, and finally, mentally disturbed, freezes in the compulsion to tie his tie again.
Incidentally, he's the only one who wears a tie under his three-piece suit, actually more of a hangman's rope.
Otherwise, under the casual suits of the younger generation of men, there is a demonstrative T-shirt (costumes: Barbara Drosihn).
The key to knowledge
How exactly the director works can be seen in the literal key scene in the second act, when an inconspicuous prop becomes a symbol: a key triggers Katia's existential emotional experience of knowledge.
She has just lamented the disaster inside her when she reaches for the garden key and lets it swing on one finger for a long time, as if it were the ruler of life and death.
She still decides for life, for a meeting with Boris.
She received the key from Warwara, the foster daughter in the Kabanicha household, with whom she has a sisterly bond, as already staged in the first act: Katia Warwara describes her life before marriage, the Happiness of her youth, in tenderly dreamy, enthusiastic and explosive phrases, gradually blurring the boundaries between illusion, fairy tale and memory, until Katia is caught up in the present and perceives a split in herself.
From this moment on, Warwara becomes the real mastermind of the piece with the elf-like, swift, beautiful-voiced mezzo-soprano Ena Pongrac, hoping that Katia would soon find freedom in her dancing as she did.
Exciting love scenes
Gürbaca enhances the role of Varvara even more when she lets her move to Moscow alone, without her lover Kudryash, as intended in the play.
This would not be necessary, because Kudrjasch is the only positive male character in the opera, especially in the personification of the lovable Sam Furness.
The love scenes of the two couples Katia and Boris, Varvara and Kudrjasch are presented magnificently on the simultaneous playing surfaces of the stage, which rises far to the rear.
Tenderly and deeply devoted to each other, the lovers enjoy their happiness until even the room itself begins to rock like a cradle.
And again one marvels at the music, which takes a long general break because Boris doesn't know what to say to Katia when he meets Katia for the first time.
But then there is no holding back, the music storms into the highest notes of the tenor, trembles in tremolo, glows and transfigured.
Czech repertoire expert Tomaš Netopíl conducts the Geneva Opera House Chorus and Orchester de la Suisse Romande with nobility and great respect for the singers, who never have to strain themselves and follow the melos of the language quite naturally.
And Gürbaca reaches a final level of psychological insight in the finale, when Katia goes through a process at the end of which she chooses suicide - as the only way to find peace with herself again, and combined with the visionary hope of becoming pantheistic again Finding her way back to nature from which she came.
You can hear the birds flapping while jackets and boots are left behind at the front of the stage.
The Volga continues to flow unfathomably.