Symbolism versus realism: which would you prefer for Janáček’s Jenůfa? The Royal Opera House 2021 production went for the former; ENO’s Jenůfa is very much the latter, social realism in fact. Or even socialist realism, as it has an obligatory last minute happy ending. Will Jenůfa and Laca live happily ever after? I somehow doubt it, but poetic licence and all that.
Janáček’s Moravian village life at the turn of the last century, its religious prejudice and small town hypocrisy, its male privilege, is taken from Gabriela Preissová’s 1890 play Její pastorkyňa (Her Stepdaughter), yet photographs in the programme are from Another Russia: Through the Eyes of the New Soviet Photographers published 1986 but from much earlier by the look of them.
Director David Alden’s intense production on designer Charles Edwards’s bleak set of a forlorn Soviet socialist era landscape—drab factory, corrugated iron wall, drab bare flat with broken windows and cardboard shutters, drab clothes, grey colourscape and large black shadows overshadowing the small figures struggling up that steep rake on the Coliseum’s wide stage (singing over vast empty space)—ravages the heart. And makes me think of his stunning Peter Grimes production, another tale of prejudice.
The music, the orchestra under Keri-Lynn Wilson’s (founding conductor and music director of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra) sympathetic conducting, and superb singing that takes the breath away, do the uplifting. Last seen at the London Coliseum in 2016, Alden’s 2006 production has been much lauded. Reviving it now could be seen as timely, though it's a raw tale as old as the hills.
Caught between love for good-time boy Steva, who doesn't really return it, and the love of his half brother Laca, which she doesn't return, Jenůfa (lyric soprano Jennifer Davis brilliant in her role debut) is secretly carrying Steva’s child. Laca, out of jealousy and too much emotion, slashes her face, her rosy apple cheeks, which now revolt Steva (tenor John Findon who was also in Peter Grimes). He’s found himself another girl, the daughter of the local mayor, a step up perhaps.
Kostelnička, her strict stepmother and widow of the village sacristan, a very religious and superstitious woman, locks her away to hide the shame and stigma of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, pretending she’s gone away. It gets worse. When the baby boy is born, the god-fearing Kostelnička (Susan Bullock) decides to play god, on impulse. Now that Steva won’t help or acknowledge his child, she decides on the volatile, gauche Laca (tenor Richard Trey Smagur in ENO debut) for Jenůfa, but there has to be no baby, so she kills it and hides it under the ice by the mill.
Poor Jenůfa, drugged and confused, learns her baby has died only eight days after birth, falls apart, but then it gets even worse. The baby’s body is found under the melting ice on the day of her wedding to Laca. Naturally, the villagers, axes in hand, presume she’s killed the baby.
The tormented Kostelnička owns up, and a marriage, which seemed one of convenience, turns to forgiveness and love. A tragedy of such depth redeemed in true religious fashion by love… A statue of the Virgin Mary presides over acts two and three.
A woman traduced figures in many tales over the centuries. It seems there was not much happiness for the widowed women, either for Kostelnička or for Grandmother Buryja (ENO regular mezzo Fiona Kimm), in the family—a past of abusive men is suggested—the norm in patriarchal societies. Both Steva and Laca are brutish figures of limited intellectual or emotional development.
Janáček took nearly a decade to compose his opera, during which time a tragedy befell him—his adult daughter died. He dedicated the opera to her. That emotion flows through his music, through the folk melodies and songs, through the anguished cries, in the violin’s compassion and the rumble of the woodwind and brass.
What I miss in any English language production, though, is its Czech ‘speech-melody’ cadences. Janáček wrote music that reflected the inflections of everyday speech—quite a task for translators Otakar Kraus and Edward Downes to match the sounds of the one to the other.
Three acts with an interval after the first, Jenůfa is two hours forty minutes long, a drama that seems to speed along on Steva’s motorbike. He’s an Elvis figure in hair quiff and leathers, whilst Laca is in dirty factory overalls. Grandmother, a minor official or accountant at the factory, is in a grey suit; Kostelnička is in black; and Jenůfa sheds her first act blue dress for black.
First staged in Brno in 1904, in Prague in 1916, in London in 1961, is Jenůfa in mourning for humanity? Tormented solos and duets trouble the air, but it also holds out hope with its joyful folk melodies (Novych Zamku). Janáček was a Russian speaker and lover of Russian literature—his 1921 Káťa Kabanová is based on Ostrovsky’s mid-nineteenth century play The Storm—Alden’s production brings that period’s Russian mix of cruelty and sentimentality to the table.