Harašta

Harašta is no villain. He is a poultry-dealer with a gun over his shoulder, whistling on a forest road, courting a wife — a man entirely at home in the world. When his shot kills Bystrouška near the end, there is no malice in it. He fires the way a season turns. That is precisely what makes the moment unbearable, and unbearably right: nature closing its own account through an ordinary hand.

I sing him without weight, without warning. The danger of the part is the temptation to telegraph the death — to darken the colour, to slow the step. Janáček asks the opposite. Harašta must stay light, almost comic, a man minding his own business, so that the gunshot lands as the forest hears it: sudden, unremarkable, final.

Vocally it is rough lyric Czech declamation — speech-melody set close to the breath, every consonant carrying the dialect's pulse. The line is conversational, never aria; the craft is to make plain talk sing without lifting it out of the earth it grows from.