Jenůfa at the ROH review – no ordinary run of the mill performance

Back with a bang! Royal Opera’s Jenůfa blew the audience away at last Saturday’s matinee. The sense of freedom from lockdown was palpable. Onstage and off. From the quaffing of champagne in the Floral Hall to the mesmerising, no holds barred intensity of soprano, Asmik Gregorian – Jenůfa – who gripped the audience intensely from curtain up, then, in the final scene, ripped our hearts out, skewered them on the blade of her last plangent aria and sent us home, reeling, into a soggy, early twilit Covent Garden evening.

My neighbours in the stalls, the lady a former Canadian MP and now a distinguished author on Florence Nightingale, the gentleman a history lecturer at The University of Glasgow, shouting “bravos” and “bravas” were ecstatic. I was delirious. And I had only travelled from Wandsworth on an 87 bus.

This surely was what composer Leoš Janácek intended his Jenůfa, based on a play by Bohemian writer Gabriela Preissová, to be. Composed in sessions over twenty years, the work progressed in lock step with his never going anywhere relationship with Kamila Stösslová, a muse thirty-eight years his junior. Age gaps may work in reverse if you are the President of France, but chaste kisses and tortured correspondence seem to be as far as Leoš ever got with Kamila.

So, he poured his heart into Jenůfa, which he finished in 1903, just before his beloved daughter, Olga, died of typhoid fever. The work, steeped in the Moravian folk tradition the composer had brought to the fore for years, was conceived in frustration and concluded in tragedy. The score was played through to Olga on her deathbed. “It’s beautiful. What a pity I won’t see it”, she is reported as saying.

Beautiful is right, especially when the production is given the room to breathe that Director, Claus Guth, has allowed in this production. Most other Jenůfas I have seen over the years set the opera firmly in chocolate-boxy rural Moravia. 

Guth alludes to folk traditions, but the temptation to kit the chorus out in flowery Morris Dancing outfits and dance idyllically is resisted. The spinning mill around which much of the action revolves is a gritty reminder of the soullessness of repetitive labour. 

Society is harsh, and Jenůfa’s dilemma is probably not uncommon. She is the broken cog that causes the social machine to creak and fail. The characters all come from a tightly knit village community, but at Covent Garden, we are experiencing “life” in the round rather than intruding on a local tragedy. No comfortable boundaries here.  

That tragedy is the failed love affair of Jenůfa and Števa. He is the lightweight, drunken, good for only a night out with posy-throwing local girls, orphaned grandson of mill-owner, Grandmother Burya. She has brought up another orphaned grandson, Laca. 

Laca is in love with Jenůfa – from a distance. Jenůfa is pregnant by Števa, the suitor favoured by Granny Burya. Števa’s commitment is put to the test when he is not conscripted to the army, is thus free to marry Jenůfa, but is clearly keen to dodge that bullet as well as the enemy’s.

Števa’s commitment to Jenůfa is slight. He likes her rosy cheeks. Laca, resentfully whittling away on a stick with a sharp knife confronts Jenůfa, criticising Števa’s superficiality. Amid the brouhaha, the knife accidentally cuts Jenůfa’s cheek, so conveniently despoiling the very part of her admired by Laca. The Foreman shouts out that Laca has done it on purpose.

Laca, sung by Nicky Spence, a Scottish tenor, plays the role sensitively. He has a wonderfully fluent voice which comes to the fore in the high drama last scene (spoiler alert) with Jenůfa. He is played as serious-minded throughout. More often, he starts out as loutish, but this treatment is singularly convincing. 

He will stand by his beloved Jenůfa through thick and thin. Laca is a veritable Moravian Don Ottavio, (Mozart’s Don Giovanni), prepared to trail in his Donna Anna’s wake while she lusts for someone else. Big difference. Laca wins!

When Jenůfa gives birth her mother, Kostlenićka, an overbearing, self-obsessed, “whatever will my friends think,” scold, terrifyingly portrayed by Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, pretends Jenůfa has gone to Vienna, locks her in her room and eventually decides to “make the problem go away”. 

She drowns the baby in a freezing stream and tells the distraught Jenůfa her son died while she was laid low by fever. It was, in truth, a sleeping draught. The child is the barrier that will prevent Laca from asking Jenůfa to marry him. Come springtime the corpse will have rotted. 

Meantime, ghastly Števa has gone off rosy cheeks and wants to marry the Mayor’s flibbertigibbet daughter, Karolka. Faithful Laca repledges his love for Jenůfa despite the dead, illegitimate baby and, still dazed from the loss of her son, she agrees to the marriage, then collapses.

In the final Act, the community is gathered to celebrate the wedding. Dramaturg, Yvonne Gebaur, manages to create a febrile atmosphere. Števa and Karolka have been invited to the wedding. Reconciliation all around is on the cards until a cry goes up that the body of a baby has been found in the Spring meltwaters. Once identified by its red cap as Jenůfa’s son, the mother is accused of murder.

But Kostelnićka, overcome by remorse and a sense of responsibility, fesses up, offers herself to the authorities with outstretched hands awaiting cuffs. The wedding guests, suspecting the reception may now be a bit of a bummer, disperse. Leaving Laca and Jenůfa alone.

This last scene, when the finally united couple pledges themselves to each other, was carried off magically. Conventionally, they clasp hands, look into each other’s eyes and statically sing their final aria. Claus Guth took a different approach. This was the moment when all hearts were skewered. Jenůfa and Laca took a stance mid stage, faced the audience and processed slowly in golden light to front stage, in time to the music.

They sang directly to us. There was no fourth wall of separation. We were part of that solemn pledge, drawn into their new lives. The stage went dark. A second of total silence, then mayhem.

I was experiencing one of those golden moments when opera delivers tension, emotion and triumph in a way no other medium can. Like comets, such events are rare and unpredictable, but the fallout is immense when they crash to earth. 

Set Designer, Canadian, Michael Levine, has been involved in opera for 38 years. His “mill set” is a brilliant concept as it adds a serious element that other Moravian Maypole productions I have seen lack. But, why the metal bedsteads? There are lots of them. Scrap-iron heaps of them. No one lies down. Then, in the second act, they were stacked up to form Jenůfa’s bedroom.

I get the point that this was a bedroom/prison, with the poor girl left peeking out through the springs, but the effect was of an IKEA bedroom department rearranged by a Meccano freak with ADT. And, who bought the Raven suit? 

Gratuitously, in Act Two, an enormous Hitchcock shiny blackbird slunk back and forth. Purpose had it none. Save to loom and give the impression it had been left in the wings from another show. It climbed up one of the beds and cast an impressive shadow.

So, too, the bloodied child who entered stage left, aimlessly processed and exited stage right. Foreboding figments of Jenůfa’s fracturing mind? A bit Rocky Horror? The Raven even took a bow at curtain call. A nice man in a beard with a whopping Raven head under his arm. The bloodied child had gone home for tea. 

Because Janáček took so long to compose the work, each Act, while depicting the changing of the seasons – from summer to winter ice concealing the murdered child, on to the Spring melt revelation – has its own musical language. Guth exploits that, creating a different atmosphere for each. The working millwheel of life in Act One; Jenůfa’s bedstead prison in Act Two, a pastoral wedding scene in Act Three. 

The Kostelnička’s role is on a par of importance with Jenůfa’s. Act Two is her hunting ground. In an almost casual reply to Laca about the existence of the child, she pronounces it as dead when it is sleeping peacefully in a cot next door. This is the turning point of the opera. The audience knows a death sentence has been passed. 

Karrita Mattilla, a scary Finnish soprano, delivers in spades. Her status in the community is threatened by scandal, the lyrical passages in which she carries on her internal dialogue about killing the baby end with a climactic icy resolve. Her dignity in the closing scene when Jenůfa forgives her is remarkable. Heaven will judge her. That will be after the local beak has slammed her up behind the bedsteads for life without the alternative. 

Leoš Janáček is one of the great opera composers of the 20th century. He wrote nine works, six of which are still in regular performance; The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Affair, Kát’a Kabanová, From the House of the Dead and the zany The Excursions of Mr Brouček to the Moon and to the 15th Century.

All his varied works delve into visceral emotions and motives. Not much buffo when Leoš comes to town. Staged and sung well, these operas are masterpieces, and this ROH production is precisely that. Welcome back. 

Jenůfa is on at the ROH until the 12 October, book tickets now.