It is said that Janáček sat by her deathbed, transcribing her dying words and turning them into music, some of which may appear in the opera. He and his wife had already lost an infant son to illness, and now their 20-year-old daughter Olga lay dying as the opera neared completion.

Jenůfa is Janáček’s first great opera, written over a number of years (around 1895 to 1903) in a difficult period of his life.

The more I work with great singers and conductors on these operas the more I adore them. Now, fifty years later (!) I have had the joy of directing these works all over the world. I began to seek out recordings of Janáček operas in those days one had to search for the obscure and difficult-to-find Czech label Supraphon – where, often without translated libretti and in rather harshly recorded sound, I first heard Kát’a Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, and the other incredible works which gripped me and never let go.

Up to my standing-room place in the Family Circle wafted amazingly vivid sounds clearly influenced by folk music but rethought in a tough 20th-century idiom.Īnd later came gorgeous, soaring music for sopranos, reminiscent of Richard Strauss but edgier and angrier and somehow possessing more backbone and urgency (my apologies here to the late, great creator of the Santa Fe Opera, John Crosby, who was a Strauss fanatic…). In 1967 the Hamburg State Opera visited Lincoln Center and, among other works they presented which were virtually unknown to the New York audience, they performed Jenůfa. I remember vividly my first awakening to the magnificent music and intense drama of Janáček. Though they were once perilously close to being consigned to that sad family of quirky, out-of-the-way works forgotten by history, pioneering conductors like Rafael Kubelik and especially Charles Mackerras have fought since the mid-1950s to bring them to Western audiences, and companies like the Royal Opera House, English National Opera and Welsh National Opera have shown that Janáček is worthy to stand next to Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, and the other Masters. We who love opera are lucky to be living now! Not only have the great works of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Handel, Rameau and other masters of the 17th and 18th centuries been rediscovered and now bring joy and passion to our modern stages, but the operas of Leoš Janáček have finally established themselves internationally as great, timeless masterpieces.

Royal opera house jenufa