Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 4 - Jenufa

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 22 I’ve always had a slight hesitation about staging Janáˇcek, most of all because of the unfamiliar language, but also because of the considerable density of the text that operas from this cultural sphere tend to have. As a director, when coming to grips with an opera and how to stage it, I’m very strongly influenced by the music. And over the years I’ve become increasingly enthralled by Janáˇcek’s musical language, primarily because of its blend of extreme emotional intensity and formal rigor. Janáˇcek’s style is minimalistic in that it articulates only what is necessary to produce the maximum emotion. This strikes me as very modern, very contemporary. What also fascinates me are the distinctly unoperatic features of his style. There are many passages where other composers would have composed an entire aria out of Janáˇcek’s few bars of music, whereas he prefers to break off and start developing a new idea. I am also hugely interested in Janáˇcek’s extensive use—in his setting of the text as well as in the music itself—of insistence and repetition, forever ratcheting up the tension. That completely subverts the cliché that his works are purely naturalistic representations. I heartily contradict the notion that this work is set merely in a (historical) village context and functions exclusively within that realistic framework. During the rehearsal process, again and again we noticed that singers as well as members of the production team came up against themes they recognized from their own lives—a particularly striking example being the kind of repetitive impulse that’s seen in certain family histories. Once a problem or a failing has manifested itself, it seems inescapable that the same problem will be passed on from generation to generation, like a family curse. It’s as though all the force and frenzy we apply to blocking it actually summons it into being. It’s an interesting notion, and one that’s deeply rooted in this opera. On the other hand, the opera describes very precisely the narrowness of this world, from which there is hardly any escape. Only through an extreme experience such as that which befalls Jen ˚ufa does a possibility for a different life open up at the end, despite all the horror that this entails. So while telling a very clear and realistic story, the opera also functions as a parable, looking outside and beyond itself. That is the core of our interpretation. While appreciating the mood and music of the opera, we also want audiences to realize the universality of the story. Director’s note Tristram Kenton/Royal Opera House A scene from the Royal Opera House’s production of Jenu˚fa. Innovative director Claus Guth illuminates the contemporary aspects of Jen˚ufa .