‘Like the sun has set behind the mountains, so you have left me Libuše. The Golden Age is at an end’. So begins Šárka, the earliest opera by Leoš Janáček, fully staged for the first time in the UK at Garsington this summer. Those of you expecting a Janáček opera with all the trappings of claustrophobic domesticity or joyous Moravian forest life have got another thing coming with this perplexing hour-long opera. For this is Janáček in a very different vein from Jenůfa and the operas of the last decade of his life. Like Fibich’s opera of the same name (premiered 1897 in Prague) it tells the tale of the famous warrior of the Maidens’ war in ancient Bohemia, who traps the male warrior, Ctirad. She falls in love with him, only having eventually to kill him, before she throws herself Brünnhilde-like on his burning pyre. The story, central to the mythology of Central Europe, is also the basis for the third movement of Smetana’s Ma Vlást.

Janáček wrote the first version of Šárka in 1887 and sent his manuscript to Dvořák. He revised the work in the light of Dvořák’s suggestions, yet the opera was not performed in the early part of Janáček’s career. Julius Zeyer, the author of the libretto, refused to let the relatively young, unknown and inexperienced composer have the rights to the libretto, wanting Dvořák himself to write the opera. Unfortunately for Janáček his setting of the libretto was already written. It was eventually performed in Brno on 11th November 1925 as part of Janáček’s 70th birthday celebrations. The rights for the libretto were now easily obtainable as Zeyer had died in 1901 and his executors deemed the now wise and experienced Janáček a suitable composer for the text. The score had been resting in a trunk in his house only to be discovered in 1918, the year of Czechoslovakia’s independence. As Janáček himself recalled, ‘I was looking for something in the chest and I found the full score of Acts 1 and 2 of Šárka. I didn’t even know that it was finished in the full score!’. Despite Janáček’s ensuing fondness for the opera and the insistence that ‘it is so near to my recent work’ performances have been very rare, bar a few revivals at various anniversaries and a 1993 concert performance at the Edinburgh Festival. It is with this concert and the Mackerras recording on Supraphon, as well as the forthcoming score from Universal Edition (edited by Jiří Zahrádka) that the opera has again been brought ‘out of the trunk’ and into the public’s gaze.

It is little wonder however that this work has taken so long to reach a British stage. None of Janáček’s operatic works were heard in the UK until after the Second World War. For Jenůfa that first British performance took place over half a century after its world premiere. However, as Svatava Přibáňová writes in her guide The World of Janáček’s Operas (Brno 1998), ‘British theatres have lately discovered a path to Janáček which is worthy of note’. Through the sterling work of Sir Charles Mackerras both in the opera house and with Decca on record, the WNO/Scottish Opera Janáček Cycle at the end of the seventies, and the excellent series of scholarly editions and books by John Tyrrell, the present opera-going public now knows about this anti-modernist Czech letter-writer. He is an awkward character in the history of music, and thus a very interesting one. His operas still do not enjoy the number of performances they perhaps deserve. After all, despite Glyndebourne’s productions of the seminal ‘female’ operas Jenůfa, Kát’a Kabanová and The Makropoulos Case, or the Royal Opera’s Jenůfa, Kát’a and Cunning Little Vixen (though still only in English) we still await a house performing From the House of the Dead and The Cunning Little Vixen in their original language. The precedent of Richard Armstrong and David Pountney with WNO/Scottish Opera was strongly commendable, but this challenging composer is in Britain still a moderately peripheral figure. Garsington is indeed setting a marvellous example (as they did with their Strauss series) in performing both Šárka and Osud (both in their original Czech) this summer.

Although esoterically local in story, Šárka was written at a time in Czechoslovakia’s history that was dominated by all things Germanic, and much of this flavours the work. Šárka is, at first listening, almost unrecognisable as a Janáček opera. In his book Janáček’s unknown operas Vladimír Helfert is quite clear about this:

Indeed, to those of us who know the harsh brass, chattering string writing and batteries of percussion of the later works, this quasi-Straussian score will be utterly bewildering. It is, all things considered, not surprising that Dvořák was Zeyer’s first choice as composer, and Janáček’s style in this work certainly comes from the Dvořák school. The principal difference from some of Dvořák’s work (and some of the later work of Janáček) is the lack of anything resembling folksong. The first version of the opera was written before Janáček’s pioneering work with František Bartoš on Moravian, Slovak and Czech folksongs, which so permeate his later style. The orchestration for the opera (Act Three was completed by his student Osvald Chlubna) is rich and full, heavily reminiscent of early Strauss, Dvořák and Smetana. None of the brittle timbre of the operas from Jenůfa to From the House of the Dead can be found in this thick string and horn dominated sound world. Listening to the accomplished expansive score of Šárka makes one quickly realise that the orchestral raggedness and fragility of the later operas is in no way a shortcoming in orchestration on Janáček’s part, but an integral part of the skills he acquired for their composition. Really Karel Kovařovic’s 1916 Prague revision of Jenůfa (until the new production last Autumn, the version previously heard at Covent Garden) is a reclaiming of the orchestral style we hear in Šárka, sapping the starkness out of the score and replacing it with a lushness we more readily associate with Janáček’s Austro-German counterparts. Those of us who love the later works should, I dare say, be thankful for Šárka’s initial lack of success; had it been readily performed at the beginning of his career Janáček might have continued to use this same Germanic musical language.

Beyond mere orchestration, Janáček’s approach to the musical and tonal organisation of the opera is strongly within the 19th century Germanic tradition. The Maidens clearly occupy the sharp keys in the score and the male Warriors the flat keys. It is only in the lovers’ scenes that we see a bending of these simple divisions. More neutral keys in these scenes and the blazingly neutral C major at the close of the opera represent a musical underlining of the unity between the two factions. Although an over simplistic view, it is revealing nonetheless when considering that tension and reconciliation in Janáček’s later scores relies so little on definable key centres. Indeed one of the main analytical criticisms of his work is his lack of any Wagnerian or late-Verdian tonal schemes (Joseph Kerman, for example, would have been readily proud of Janáček’s first opera, despite his, doubtless, dismay at the later masterpieces). The work shows, if nothing else, Janáček’s marvellous apprenticeship in this style and the genre as a whole. But, I hear you cry, is it a beautiful and interesting score? Without a doubt it has some marvellous moments, not least the writing for Šárka and Ctirad in the central act. Where Wagner takes 80 minutes for the central love scene in Tristan und Isolde, the young Janáček takes 20 minutes. Šárka (lasting approximately 55 minutes) shares with its sisters Makropolous, Kát’a and the Vixen remarkable brevity.

The composer beautifully draws the rather traditional and frankly bland historical characters. Šárka herself is a stunning dramatic soprano role, in the mould of a Wagnerian Valkyrie. Ctirad is very much the Heldentenor of the piece, and Přemysl is blessed with rich and idiomatic writing for the baritone voice. Nevertheless the importance of the chorus in the opera cannot be over-emphasised, and much of the music for it is largely very accomplished (something certainly continued in Jenůfa). The writing for the Maidens is, however, poor, and none of their severity comes through in the music (sounding very much like weak Borodin at times). This shortcoming with the characterisation of the ruthlessness of the female warriors is surprising considering the immense power with which he draws the Kabanicha in Kát’a and the Kostelnička in Jenůfa (his most severe ladies). The opera, notwithstanding its short length, lacks the dramatic pacing of Janáček’s later operas, and the third act is a case in point: musically beautiful but dramatically dull. The drama is at its highest in Act Two, and very little is left for musico-dramatic creation in the final act. Act Three has been compared to a tombeau or oratorio, indicating something of its static nature. Musical criticisms aside, the main problem with the opera is the weak and frequently bathetic libretto by Zeyer. The man who impeded Janáček’s operatic progress by denying him the rights to the libretto indeed impedes the overall polish of the opera through his poor poetry! It is only in the second act with the lovers (Janáček of course perennially deals well with the love interest of his operas) that music, libretto and pace are at their peak.

Despite its many qualities, Šárka is a weaker and less appealing work than those that followed it. So why should Garsington be performing it this summer? The opera is being shown simply because of the large present interest in the composer, and since there is an enormous wealth of beautiful and warm music within the score. These performances, however, represent something more than this. Performances of rarities and juvenilia (take the Royal Opera’s performances of Britten’s Paul Bunyan) are one of the final stages in the acceptance of a composer into the repertory. All of Janáček’s operatic works (except Počátek Románu) have been professionally performed in the United Kingdom. Recordings are widely disseminated and academic interest is feverish. These first fully staged performances of Šárka represent an extension of that interest.

Problems nonetheless arise in performing the opera. As has been made clear here, Šárka is representative of much of the operatic style that preceded it. Yet British audiences have little knowledge of this earlier Czech repertoire. I have tried to make comparison to Janáček’s own later operas due to their familiarity, but this can be misleading. Fibich’s own opera of the same name is, for example, a much more accomplished work than Janáček’s. Composed at the end of his career (with a markedly more competent libretto by Anežka Schulzová) the opera is a stream of melodic sweet tenderness and, according to John Tyrrell, ‘wonderfully paced declamation’. Yet still we are unfamiliar with that work and comparable works of the age. Despite performances of Rusalka at ENO, and next year at Covent Garden, as well as The Two Widows (again at ENO) and The Bartered Bride (ROH), most Central European operas of this period are completely unknown in the UK. Indeed the performances of the obscure rarities of a composer such as Janáček can and do overshadow their more important works and those of their contemporaries. I look forward to a time when British audiences can (if only infrequently) enjoy Armida (Dvořák), Dalibor (Smetana) and Fibich’s own Šárka performed. Then we will be able to see Janáček’s works in a more contextual light, rather than representing the work of a lone figure – a role in which he is frequently cast.

However, instead of being churlish about the lack of Central European repertoire in British houses (after all, if Magdalena Kožena has anything to do with it we will be hearing a lot more of the music), but rather we should be thankful that a British company is embracing the peripheral works of Janáček and of the period. It represents to those who know his works well, together with the wider opera-going public, the apprenticeship in the operatic genre of a man who was to go on to create some of the most profound humanitarian operas of the 20th century. And as an opera in its own right it reveals much of the tradition from which Janáček came. As Přemysl sings at the opening, ‘the Golden Age is at an end’, and admittedly the wealth of music from Dvořák, Smetana, Fibich and the other great composers of the Czech 19th century was at an end. Perhaps for the start of the operatic career of Leoš Janáček (and with Jenůfa only around the corner) the mythological Czech prince should sing that the Golden Age is still yet to come.

The following article was written for Opera Magazine for their Festivals Issue 2002, which previewed the first fully-staged performance of Šárka in Great Britain.