Emotional intensity in ‘Jenufa’ at the Royal Opera

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Emotional intensity in ‘Jenufa’ at the Royal Opera

Claus Guth's production of Janacek's Jenufa, The Royal Opera ©2025 Camilla Greenwell

Infanticide, but redemption too. In her original play Gabriela Preissová was accused of unreasonable dramatic license, but her story was based on real events. A stepmother decides to kill a baby to ensure the happiness of her step-daughter, and avoid a repeat of her own history. No-one will know, and she can tell Jenufa that the baby died while she was in a fever for two days. The stepmother is the key to this story: indeed, the original play was called Her Foster Daughter.

Janácek began composing the opera when he had just turned 40 but its first performance in Prague had to wait until the composer was 62, though it had already enjoyed great success in Brno, capital of the composer’s native Moravia. Those early successes were in someone else’s orchestration, and that is how it was heard in London in 1956. The original orchestration was only heard 30 years later when Charles Mackerras championed Janácek’s music at the Royal Opera. It is now in the standard repertoire, and since this 2021 production by German director Claus Guth the opera has been produced by both the Welsh and English National Operas.

Guth takes an abstract approach, in which we see Jenufa and her stepmother trapped in a cage made of bed springs with a giant raven outside representing fate. Hemmed in by conventions, Jenufa really prefers to be a free spirit like the attractive man Steva she falls in love with. But he is a drunkard who will inherit the mill from his grandmother Buryjovka, since her sons have died. The younger son’s second wife, and Jenufa’s stepmother, is the Kostelnicka (her name refers to being warden of the village church), and Steva’s inheritance leaves his half-brother Laca (Ladislav) and cousin Jenufa to earn their own livings. Laca has always loved Jenufa, and the Kostelnicka, shocked by Steva’s behaviour, forbids him to marry her until he can stay sober for a full year. Such is the background to a very powerful story.

In this start of a new run, Karita Mattila reprised her commanding performance of the Kostelnicka. It is an opera she knows well, having also sung the title role at the Royal Opera. Nicky Spence too reprised his nuanced and well-sung Laca, with New Zealand tenor Thomas Atkins singing a stylishly attractive Steva and Hanna Schwarz, now in her eighties, lending her excellent voice and stage presence to Grandmother Buryjovka. As Jenufa herself Corinne Winters, who has already been admired in the title role elsewhere, showed a lovely clarity of tone, giving a performance of sympathy and anguish with her voice rising effortlessly above the orchestra.

The whole cast excelled, including the well-choreographed chorus, and what a treat to have the RBO’s music director designate Jakub Hrusa taking the baton and giving a performance that fully brought out the emotional intensity of Janácek’s music, gradually ratcheting up the tension and leaving the audience wrung out. Opera at its very best, this was emotionally powerful and intensely satisfying. It seems we are in very safe hands with Hrusa taking over the music at the Royal Opera in the 2025/26 season.

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