Opera Background

Jenufa: Clarifying the Characters' Family Relationships

Backround information on Jenufa

Dramatist Gabriela Preissova was born in Bohemia in 1862. It was only after marrying an official of a sugar refinery in Hodonin that she assimilated herself into the Moravian way of life. In less than a year's time she had miraculously acquired a working knowledge of local dialect and culture as it is portrayed in her play Jeji pastorkyna (Her Step-Daughter, the play on which Jenufa is based.) Preissova said she based her play on two actual events she heard about during a stay in Moravian Slovakia. One was the story of a jealous peasant who deliberately slashed the face of his brother's fiancee, with whom he was in love. The other was a report of a woman who helped her step-daughter kill her illegitimate baby. Preissova kept the first story intact, but changed the second in order to create two contrasting female characters. The Jenufa of the play is too gentle to commit a murder, therefore it is the deed of the step-mother alone.

Janácek made minimal but significant changes to Preissova's play. He kept the libretto in prose text, and his main changes concerned the heightening or diminishing of certain characters. The biggest of these changes was the shifting of focus from the Kostelnicka to Jenufa. After all, Preissova called her play Her Step-Daughter, emphasizing the Kostelnicka and her plight. The Kostelnicka of the libretto is a much less sympathetic character than the one Preissova envisioned; she does not have the duality of compassion and austerity afforded her in the play. Instead she is seen as a hard and forbidding woman. Janácek's version of the scene between the Kostelnicka and Laca, which immediately preceeds the murder of the baby, differs significantly from the play. In the drama, after the Kostelnicka tells Laca that the child is dead she goes on to invent details. She tells him that she placed the baby in a little coffin, sprinkled him with holy water, and buried him in the cemetery at night. As an afterthought she adds that she christened him herself. In the libretto she simply states several times that the child is dead. This is much more effective even if there is a loss in realistic detail, and Preissova adopted Janácek's cuts in her later version. In addition, Janácek altered the role of the Mayor from a freeloader to that of a respectable man, and he reduced the roles of the Mayor's Wife and Jano, the shepherd boy. The composer also added song, using pre-existing folk texts but creating his own music. Preissova, unlike other Czech playwrights, did not use folk music to any great extent. Janácek includes songs and dances for Steva, the Recruits, and the wedding gathering in the Kostelnicka's cottage.

Jenufa was first performed in Brno on January 21, 1904. While the opera was a huge success in Brno, it took some time before it was performed in Prague. During World War I, the politically subjugated Czechs had to fight for Austria--even though in many instances their sympathies were with the opposite side. Janácek's correspondence with Russian friends and a leading Croatian politician classified him as "politically suspicious" by the Austrian police, delaying the opera's Prague premiere. Animosity between Janácek and the Prague opera house's chief conductor, Karel Kovariv, also helped keep Jenufa in obscurity.

After years of opposition, Jenufa was finally performed in Prague in 1916, where it was staged by the National Theatre. The premiere proved to be a tremendous success. While in Prague, Janácek met writer and editor Max Brod, who wrote an enthusiastic article about Jenufa for a German literary magazine. Janácek entrusted Brod with the task of translating Jenufa into German. It was a difficult assignment, as Janácek's "speech melodies" -the derivation of musical themes, rhythms, and melodies from the pattern of the Czech language, with its unusual accents, highs, and lows-are extremely hard to capture in any language other than Czech. The Viennese premiere came in 1918. Six years later Jenufa was translated into ten languages, and to date the opera has been produced over 600 times around the world.

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