Jej� pastorkyňa (or Jenůfa as it has become known outside Czech lands) is Leo� Jan�ček�s most widely performed opera, and the piece which established him on the international stage. But that success was a long time coming and the journey from his Moravian origins into the heart of the repertoire was a difficult one. Both his self-doubts and devoted love of his country kept him somewhat on the cultural fringe but he was visionary nonetheless. Quite apart from the German musical life of their rulers in Brno, Jan�ček had encouraged the growth of Czech music and he was a pioneer for folk music during the great Nationalist revival of the late 1800s. He was also an ambitious man with his own career, and though Jenůfa has been compared to his forerunner, Smetana�s Bartered Bride as a likewise purely nationalistic work, his first operatic masterpiece was an emotionally complex piece on a grand scale. Scored for a traditional orchestra but complete with a stage-band and taxing central roles, it is clear that Jan�ček intended his new work for a large opera-house (such as in Prague or Vienna) and not for the small theatre in provincial Brno where it was first performed. Jenůfa did eventually get to Prague and Vienna and it is a poignant success story for a man who was always eager for his music to spread.

When Jan�ček completed Jenůfa in 1903 he wrote to the National Theatre in Prague asking them to consider performing the opera. Composer Karel Kovařovic was the music director at the time and both he and the administrative director Gustav Schmoranz told Jan�ček that the work was unsuitable. There may have been a little spite in Kovařovic�s reasoning, as Jan�ček had previously written a scathing review of one of his operas when it was performed in Brno. Whatever the rationale, Jan�ček had to make do with Jenůfa being presented for the first time in his home town. The premiere on 21 January 1904 at Brno�s small Czech Provisional Theatre, which had previously been a dance hall, was a local triumph. Yet the opera was an elaborate work for such a theatre and performances soon began to drop in quality with an undersized and undernourished orchestra. Jan�ček told his friends that he didn�t �want to hear [his] own work in such a broken-down state�. Despite these shortcomings, overnight the composer became the darling of Brno�s Czech citizens.

As with his approaches to Prague, Jan�ček was also seeking approval for his opera in Vienna as early as 1904. He wrote to the Chief Conductor of the Hofoper, Gustav Mahler (himself originally Bohemian), and invited him to Brno to see Jenůfa. Unfortunately Mahler could not leave Vienna at the time and there was neither a published score nor a German translation available. Back in Prague the National Theatre refused the opera again, but it continued to be performed elsewhere in Bohemia and Moravia. However Jan�ček was not content. Desperate to find ways in which Jenůfa would be accepted by Prague he revised the opera. In 1908 a vocal score of those revisions was published in Brno. It wasn�t until 1915 however, when the composer�s friend Marie Vesel� (the first K�t�a Kabanov�) started to pull strings with her friends on the board of the National Theatre that anything progressed. Vesel� sang parts of the score to Schmoranz and after further deliberations Kovařovic asked to see the full score. Finally, 12 years after Jan�ček had first approached him, Kovařovic agreed to perform Jenůfa in Prague. There was one proviso; that he rearrange the opera �to achieve momentum and flow, and gain in dramatic impact�. The music director had been known to intervene with other composer�s work, and his version of Dvoř�k�s opera Dimitrij is still performed today. Due to his eagerness to hear Jenůfa performed in Prague, Jan�ček accepted the changes. Kovařovic made the opera fuller, more romantic and what Prague audiences were used to, far-removed from its original Moravian idiosyncrasies. But in spite of the opera�s success there Jan�ček wasn�t really content with the changes and after Kovařovic�s death he attempted to reinstate his original score. Nevertheless it was the Prague version of Jenůfa that became known and published. Jan�ček�s orchestration of the opera�s finale was first revived by Břetislav Bakala on Brno radio in 1941, but the restoration of the entirety of Jan�ček�s original is largely due to Sir Charles Mackerras. His first attempt at a reconstruction of a �Brno� version was performed in Paris in 1981, recorded the following year and first used in a UK stage production by WNO in 1984. After additional investigation, Mackerras and John Tyrrell produced their �1908 Brno Version�. It was published in 1996 and is the version used in tonight�s performance. Despite having to swallow his pride the 1916 Prague premiere was a hit and Jan�ček was widely praised. The effect of the success must have been enormous.

However, as his 1904 letter to Mahler indicated, it wasn�t just conquering Prague that was his objective (although an obvious goal for a fervent nationalist such as Jan�ček). He was resolute on conquering any centre outside Brno. Some people have chosen the Prague premiere of Jenůfa as being the ultimate point in Jan�ček�s career when he became firmly established on the international stage, but perhaps the biggest challenge was yet to come; not up the railway line to Prague but down the line to Vienna, the musical capital of the world. Since Prague there had been interest from the Hofoper and whilst staying in the Czech capital, Emil Hertzka (Director of the Viennese music publisher Universal Edition) and Hugo Reichenberger (Conductor at the Vienna Hofoper) stumbled across a performance of Jenůfa. Their delight with the work secured both a permanent publisher for Jan�ček and its Viennese premiere. In order to cross the border into Austria, the opera had to be translated.

Many celebrated figures came to the Prague performances (Richard Strauss for one), but it was Max Brod, a writer based in the city, whose translations of Jan�ček�s operas proved most decisive in finding the composer a foreign audience. He met Jan�ček soon after the premiere and was so moved by the opera and the composer�s charming naivety that he set to work on the German text immediately. His translation changed the title of the opera from Jej� pastorkyňa [Her Stepdaughter], as it had abstractly been known in the Czech performances, to the more mainstream Jenůfa. It joined a heritage of other operas named after their �central� character, Fidelio, Lohengrin, Parsifal and Tosca, and perhaps heightened Jenůfa�s �respectability� outside Czech lands. However reputable it made the opera seem, the new title did neglect that the Kostlenička is in truth the centre of the story.

Plans went ahead for the Vienna premiere, which by all accounts was to be an even more glamorous event than either the openings in Brno or Prague. The high-profile casting included Maria Jeritza (later both the first American Jenůfa and Turandot) although the composer was also in touch with Czech diva Emmy Destinn. The performance of a Czech opera on the Austrian stage caused much political intrigue in war-time Vienna. Since the death of Franz Josef I, the new young Emperor Karl had tried to please the minorities within his realms, but the Austrian nationalists were not happy and instead mollifying the Czechs they wanted to assert their Germanic links. With the all these problems amounting, the pressures of the run-up to the Viennese premiere began to take their toll on Jan�ček�s wife, who later explained her emotions during that time in her memoirs.

But any of these complaints were finally quashed when the Emperor himself supported Jenůfa, and the first performance on 16 February 1918 was issued �by supreme command�. At the last minute the royals did not show due to the Empress�s pregnancy and the potential unsuitability of an opera about infanticide. Even so the premiere was a success, as the composer declared to his friend Gabriela Horv�tov�.

Although the Brno premiere was a local triumph and the Prague performances had marked a victory at the home of Czech Opera, the composer now found his music performed in the city where the likes of Mozart and Beethoven had flourished, and like them Jan�ček was an outsider, a man from the provinces. Jenůfa even managed to start a precedent for staging contemporary work at the conservative Vienna Staatsoper (as it became known after the war), including works by Pfitzner, Schreker, Puccini, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Richard Strauss and Walter Braunfels. The composer was completely overwhelmed by the experience of the opening and on returning from the Hofoper to his hotel he fainted.

It was in Vienna that he became an established figure, and it is perhaps from there rather than Prague that his career began to swell. Coupled with the new found hope of an independent Czechoslovakia and a new passion in the figure of a young Jewess Kamila St�sslov� (who he had met the previous summer), Jan�ček�s final period of limitless creativity was born. It is ironic that when, at the age of 60, his career finally burst onto the international scene it was with a provincial village drama. But as well as being incongruous, it was characteristic of a man who never abandoned his native roots, whatever his success.

With the performances in Prague and Vienna, Jan�ček had broken away and achieved his ambition of being staged outside Brno. Although the composer, his opera and the city from which he came were all fascinatingly original to an outsider (Jenůfa was performed for a while as an �exotic� opera, with all its folk trappings), they did, on some level, simulate more conventional models; the established composers of Prague and Vienna, their operas and even perhaps the cities themselves. Michael Beckerman describes the pull from province to city in a recent unpublished article.

Even the look of Brno�s railway station and the construction of a Ringstrasse clearly echo their Viennese counterparts just over the border. Provincial places like Brno and perhaps too the �educated inhabitants� they produce look longingly towards the big city, the bright lights and the cultural precedents. Occasionally and rather thankfully, some trends and some people (like Jan�ček himself) are too deeply seated in their own styles and insecurities to become fully part of another place�s methods and traditions. Jenůfa is no, and I hope you�ll excuse the pun, �run of the mill� opera, despite a few nods to the mainstream. It is rough-hewn and brutal, and the composer�s subsequent operas, Osud and The Excursions of Mr Brouček, show him to break even further away from convention. Despite some disapproving critical reactions along the way, Jenůfa was a huge success story for the composer. Jenůfa had been taken from its first measly production in a converted Brno dance hall and placed in the grand surroundings of the Vienna Hofoper. After years of struggling with politics and bureaucracy in Prague, Jan�ček and his first masterpiece had finally triumphed.



This article was first published in the Jenůfa programme book (ed. Simon Rees) for Welsh National Opera performances during March and April 2003.