Maybe I would like the cautious option, but I never choose it.” Jakub Hrůša learned to trust his instincts at the Royal Opera House back in 2022 when he conducted his first ever Wagner opera – Lohengrin – there, describing the experience as “one of the absolute highlights of my life”. Now he’s a year into his role as the house’s music director and about to conduct his first Parsifal, staged by Evgeny Titov. And next season there’ll be yet more Wagner firsts when he conducts complete cycles of the Ring as staged by Barrie Kosky.
For most conductors, this would be a gradual process, adding the four Ring operas to their repertoire one by one, but not for Hrůša: he’ll be conducting his first Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung all in the space of a week. I find it wonderful!” he says. Each of Kosky’s Ring’s three instalments so far has been led by Antonio Pappano, with the fourth, Götterdämmerung, scheduled for January, also with Pappano.
His 22-year tenure as music director was the longest and most stable in the Royal Opera House’s history, so those are big shoes to fill, both in the Ring and in the role more generally. But the longer the tenure has gone on in this way, the more necessary it is to consider the change positively. So there’s no contradiction between gratitude and love for Tony [Pappano] and eagerness to have a change.
The only thing I’ve heard in the house, before I started and after, is: ‘We want you to do it in your own way.’” We’re talking at the Royal Opera House after Hrůša has spent the afternoon rehearsing Parsifal. The story mingles Arthurian legend with ideas from Christianity and, less explicitly, Buddhism; Titov’s production, described as dystopian and advertised with the line “What if the light is a lie?”, promises to be uncompromising and potentially iconoclastic. For all his experience of conducting norm-challenging productions – think of Kosky’s deconstruction of Carmen or Katie Mitchell’s feminist Makropulos Case here last season – Hrůša doesn’t give the impression of being one who seeks controversy.
He speaks with genuine enthusiasm about the “totally accessible, really open-arms” spirit he found at the house regarding new audiences, and proudly gives figures to back this up, including the fact that nearly half of tickets sold by the Royal Ballet and Opera last season went to newcomers. The post of music director comes with the expectation that he will conduct three or four productions a year – last season it was Puccini, Janáček and Britten; this season Wagner, Janáček and Verdi. As he is a Czech conductor, it’s not surprising that Hrůša has an affiliation with Janáček: “He is a romantic soul speaking through modern musical language and modern topics, and I always say with astonishment that he was born before Mahler, Strauss, Puccini, Debussy!” Going forward, he says, there will not necessarily be more Czech repertoire at the house, but it might appear “with more regularity”.
Janáček might have seemed a more obvious choice than Britten’s Peter Grimes, which Hrůša conducted with enormous impact earlier this year, but he credits Glyndebourne productions of The Turn of the Screw and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for building his confidence with the British composer. He feels his role to be collaborative rather than dictatorial. I think already the collaboration with the stage director needs to create space for another point of view, and I always try to turn it into enrichment of my own vision rather than fighting.
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