Riveting new ROH production of ‘Jenufa’ brings clarity to a complex drama
Asmik Grigorian as Jenufa: ROH 2021 (Monika Rittershaus)
Can it ever be right to kill a baby? No, this is not a question about abortion rights, but a living healthy baby. In Leoš Janáček’s opera Jenufa, it is the heroine’s baby and she loves it, but her stepmother — the Kostelnička (church sacristan), the most respected person in the village —thinks it is the right thing to do, even if it leads to her eternal damnation.
She has asked the baby’s father (Števa) to visit, but he won’t look at his son and offers only money. When his half-brother Laca, who adores Jenufa, arrives, she is desperate to arrange his marriage to her stepdaughter and tells him of the baby, born while Jenufa was supposedly on a trip to Vienna. He asks if he’s expected to take it on, and now she is on the horns of a dilemma. Rather than allow him to make his own decision, she tells him it died. Then the Kostelnička takes the baby out while Jenufa continues to sleep and buries him in an icy lake.
When Jenufa wakes she tells the girl that the baby has died while she was in bed with a fever for two days. The poor girl misses her little baby, but comforts herself that he is surely in heaven with the angels. All is now well. Until the day of her wedding to Laca, when a dead baby is discovered. Jenufa recognises its clothes and the whole village condemns her, until in a great mea culpa the Kostelnička tells everything. The couple are united and Števa is disgraced.
It’s a harrowing story, emphasised by the increasing tension of Janáček’s music, superbly performed under the baton of the Hungarian conductor Henrik Nánási. The Covent Garden audience roared their applause, particularly for the commanding performance of the Kostelnička by Karita Mattila. When the Royal Opera last performed Jenufa twenty years ago, she sang the title role.
This new production by the German director Claus Guth, whose abstract approach takes the story away from the village setting, gives each act a different atmosphere. The strict regimentation of life in Act One is replaced by a world of dreams and unconscious urges in Act Two with hooded women dressed in black and a giant raven, symbol of death and portent of tragedy. This is where the Kostelnička makes her fateful decision to kill the baby, wracked by her own experiences earlier in life and her strong desire to spare her stepdaughter, which only compounds the problem. The psychodrama of Act Two contrasts strongly with Act Three, where we see beautiful peasant dresses, and even professional dancers, for the wedding celebration. When the dead baby is revealed, Jenufa shows great moral determination, forgiving those who have wronged her, including Laca, who at the end of Act One jealously scarred her face with a knife. As Jenufa, the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian rose splendidly to the occasion.
The Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu sang a stylishly attractive Števa, Nicky Spence a bold Laca, and in other roles David Stout gave an excellent account of the foreman at the mill, with Elena Zilio as the grandmother and retired mill owner. The mill itself represents endless repetition and unchanging uniformity, strongly represented in Act One, but as stasis gives way to drama, Jenufa becomes the cog that will not fit in the machine, as Guth’s direction makes clear. By the end the audience was riveted by the aesthetic and ethical clarity of this production.
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