Dr. Kolenatý

Dr. Kolenatý is the one sane head in the room, and that is exactly his function. He represents the Gregors in a probate suit that has crawled through the courts for nearly a hundred years — Gregor versus Prus, a missing will, a dead baron — and he treats it as files, dates, precedent. Then a singer who should know nothing tells him where the will is hidden, and his careful century of law becomes the thread to a three-hundred-year secret.

The voice has to stay grounded, dry, professional — a man who deals in evidence, not wonder. The drama is in the resistance: Kolenatý disbelieves, objects, goes to look anyway. He is the floor the strangeness needs to stand on.

Janáček writes him in clipped speech-melody, the line shaped to the rhythms of spoken Czech rather than to song. There is no aria to hide behind. You sing the way a man argues — short, exact, propelled — and let the orchestra carry the unease he refuses to feel.