Leos Janacek was 50 when Jenufa was first performed in Brnos National Theatre on January 20, 1904. Puccini's Madama Butterfly was less than a month from its La Scala premiere and Richard Strauss' Salome was just under two years away.
The fervently nationalist Janacek had been living with
his operatic project for almost a decade, determined to create a vibrant theatre work from his Moravian culture. He listened to conversations, converting them into "speech melodies" which he claimed would breathe warmth and shine with a strange sparkle.
And so Jenufa came to be, a tale of its time and place, drawn from a popular play with a slice-of-life glimpse of life in rural Moravia.
A simple peasant girl, Jenufa, has two suitors, the boorish Steva and the upstanding Laca. She becomes pregnant by Steva, who deserts her. Jenufa's stepmother, Kostelnicka, then kills the baby and the opera resolves with Jenufa and Laca coming together.
This is very much opera-as-theatre, with realities that are not irrelevant in Auckland today. It has a rare musical immediacy too with some of Janacek's melodies so convincing they have strayed into folk-song anthologies.
A few days ago, NBR New Zealand Opera's general director Aidan Lang was talking about this production knocking people sideways, saying, "If you are even remotely serious about opera or theatre, Jenufa is unmissable.
"People were in tears after our first run and that was just with piano. Wait till the orchestra comes in!"
