This earthy opera is a real sob story
Cellists in the orchestra weep as they play and stagehands wipe their eyes on a sleeve
This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
One opera always makes me cry. Knowing what is to come, I have a handkerchief in hand and manage to keep it dry until the interval. But when the curtain rises on the second act of Jenůfa, as the foster mother decides to kill her daughter’s hidden baby, I am undone.
Nothing in opera surpasses that single scenic blow to the seat of emotions. The effect is so visceral that I have seen cellists in the orchestra weep as they play and stagehands wipe their eyes on a sleeve.
Not even the most perverse stage director (we’ll come to them) can disrupt the power of this opera, drawn from the darkest reaches of the soul.
Years ago, tramping the Carpathian foothills to trace the roots of Jenůfa, I stopped in a small town called Pribor, birthplace of Sigmund Freud. It did not take long to figure out that the composer Leos Janáček in Hukvaldy and the founder of psychoanalysis were born just three miles and three years apart.
I am not sure which of them delved deeper. Freu
d analysed words. Janáček musicalised them, hearing tonal fragments in everyday chatter. Freud sought catharsis — the relief of pain by the release of suppressed emotion. Janáček achieved exactly that in Jenůfa.
It helps to know there was a gap of seven years between the first act of Jenůfa and the second. Frustrated by professional obscurity, Janáček spent much of the 1890s fussing over folk songs and speech rhythms. He resumed Jenůfa in 1902 when his daughter Olga caught typhoid in Russia and came home mortally ill.
Composing at her deathbed, singing as he composed, Janáček gave his own voice to the foster mother — a parent whose boundless love was not enough to save the life of a child. Every action in Jenůfa is existential and inevitable.
After a 1904 triumph in Brno, Janácek got a rejection letter from Prague, where the chief conductor Karel Kovařovic was a sworn enemy, and a shrug from Gustav Mahler in Vienna, insisting on a German text. Friends clubbed together to publish the score, but the opera world, then as now, gave no credence to a provincial nonentity in his fifties.
I have seen seven different productions of Jenůfa and I never fail to be overcome
A dozen years passed before Kovařovic finally accepted Jenůfa — on condition it was performed with his own revisions. There is ambivalence in Janáček’s reaction. Kovařovic was, after all, the most experienced exponent of Czech opera, the one who decided which Dvořak opera was worth putting on.
Kovařovic, setting personal grudges aside, put his reputation on the line to stage Jenůfa. Janáček, in his 60s and far from home, had a wild fling with a soprano, Gabriela Horvátová. He may have been pleasurably distracted from Jenůfa.
In the 1980s, I met two senior Janáček scholars — Professors Sip and Seda — in an apartment overlooking Wenceslas Square. One of them (I forget which) asserted that Janáček preferred Kovařovic’s version of Jenůfa to his own. I asked for proof. The professor pulled open a drawer in his desk and produced a handwritten, unpublished letter of praise by Janáček.
On the last night of 
the 1916 Prague run, Kafka’s friend Max Brod went to see Jenůfa. He wrote a rave review in a German newspaper which prompted the opera’s uptake abroad and a late rush of works from the composer.
Jenůfa reached Britain in 1956, conducted by Rafael Kubelik at Covent Garden. The work quickly joined the canon. A full cycle of Janáček operas, the first outside Brno, was begun by David Pountney in the 1970s.
I often wonder why the British took to Jenůfa when the French and Americans ghosted it. One reason, I believe, is because it is everything opera was not meant to be. Verdi wrote about historical figures and the upper classes, Wagner about gods and gold. Mozart gave entertainment, Tchaikovsky dances and duels, the rest took up classical themes.
Janáček depicted real life in real time, in the raw, a village in the middle of anywhere with ordinary men and women who could be our cousins or neighbours. Jenůfa is the first opera to present family life, the lost baby nobody mentions, the auntie who went to jail.
Nothing is softened or contrived. Jenůfa is life, and death, as we know it. The next opera to come close, in 1945, was Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, one tormented boy-killer against a howling village mob. It’s no surprise the British took Jenůfa to heart.
I have seen seven different productions of Jenůfa and I never fail to be overcome, no matter how meddlesome the director. The latest, at Covent Garden, has huge black crows on the roof and a gym-like back wall which villagers clamber up and down. If these metaphors are puerile, the worst contrivance is a see-through cell in which the two women vent their contradictory wishes — Jenůfa to care for her newborn baby and the foster mother to murder it. Something of Janáček’s choking enclosure is sadly lost.
Jenůfa, though, transcends interference. So long as the singers are strong and the orchestra stays close to the score, nothing short of a bomb scare can break our concentration from start to close.
At Covent Garden, using the longer Brno edition, Jenůfa was sung by the American Corinne Winters, the foster mother by Karita Mattila and the hapless fiancé Laca by Nicky Spence. The entire performing cast was exemplary, none more so than the Czech music director, Jakub HrůŠa, who drew a fluttering of orchestral sounds so earthy and authentic that my second handkerchief was called into play. Whatever else is happening your life, make sure you never miss a Jenůfa.
