Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 4 - Jenufa

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 26 his life. Like the other two, he took great interest in folk songs and their expression of national identity. But his primary interest was always in individual people and the dilemmas they faced in rigid societies. Three of his greatest operas ( Jen ˚ufa, Kát’a Kabanova (1921), and The Makropulos Affair (1926)) all focus on the plights of women. Janáˇcek was unique in his focus on the music of everyday speech; he notated “speech melodies” wherever he was. Even while sitting by his daughter’s sickbed, he notated her sighs as she was breathing her last—not out of hard-heartedness, but in the belief that the music of speech was at the heart of a person’s humanity. He therefore disliked poetic libretti, and is probably the first composer of opera to use prose. In place of poetry, he often uses repetition of short phrases, and Jen ˚ufa is full of many such repetitions. Above all, Janáˇcek’s interest is in the individual trying to achieve ethical freedom and a meaningful life in a world in which many choices are taken from her by social constraints. In Jen ˚ufa he grapples with two weighty ethical issues: infanticide and the nature of forgiveness. On both issues the opera offers subtle and original insights, focusing, always, on the individual and her freedom, or lack of freedom. The Kostelniˇcka’s decision to kill Jen ˚ufa’s infant is often seen as simply monstrous, a sign that she has lost her sanity. Critics, however, rarely consider her choice as that of a real person in a concrete historical and social context, and we must now do so. Infanticide is forbidden by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (though it was a respectable practice among the ancient Greeks, where “exposure” of an infant was a common practice). In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Christian cultures of Europe treated both the unwed mother and her illegitimate child with immense harshness, even when the mother could show that she was seduced by false promises, or even raped, often by a man of greater wealth or higher social station. A lot of infanticide was probably covered up by the fact that stillbirths did not have to be registered. But when infanticide could be proven, much sympathy was shown—not by society as a whole, but by a whole chorus of eminent writers, who treated the act as wrong but urged sympathy on account of the untenable social situation of the unwed mother in a rigidly moralistic society. The most famous such case in literature is Marguerite in Goethe’s Faust, who kills her baby and is sentenced to die, but whose penitent soul ascends to heaven with the help of an army of angelic intercessors. Goethe’s earlier Urfaust ended with a harsh judgment: Sie ist gerichtet ( “She is judged.”). But by the time he published Faust Part One in 1808, he had altered this to Sie ist gerettet —“She is saved.” Even the highly moralistic George Eliot, in Adam Bede (1859, based on a real legal case), allows Hetty Sorrel (who abandons her illegitimate child to die of exposure, and is initially sentenced to death) to be transported, instead, to Australia, where she can begin a new life. Here Eliot, well-read in philosophy, echoes the view of none other than the most rigid defender of capital punishment in the history of philosophy, Immanuel Kant. For even Kant—a prime contender otherwise for first place in philosophy’s misogyny sweepstakes— insists in his Doctrine of Right (1797) that indulgence should be shown to the woman who commits infanticide in harsh social circumstances. It is the one case where, in his view, capital punishment for murder is not required. Penal law “finds itself in a quandary,” so that law must be “either cruel or indulgent.” The act is bad and should be punished, and yet the unwed mother is a victim of social circumstances that put her outside legal justice in a “state of nature.” The passage is so unlike Kant that commentators have found it surprising, but it is clear that he treats the woman as not a monster but a rational agent choosing a bad act out of lack of alternatives. Literature also shows us clearly that society bore down harshly upon the woman who chose to keep the baby, and on her illegitimate offspring. The heroine of Mrs. Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), seduced by an aristocrat with false promises of marriage, is urged by a sympathetic dissenting cleric to move elsewhere and pass herself off as a widow. She does so successfully for many years, and is about to get married when her seducer turns up in town and the truth is somehow revealed. Ruth loses her employment, her fiancé, and even the love of her righteous now-adult son (who repents only at her graveside). As for illegitimate children, they did better in some places than in others. Pierre, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867) even inherits his father’s estate. In the more puritanical Britain, illegitimacy was freighted with severe social and financial disadvantages—although Anthony Saimir Pirgu as Števa and Asmik Grigorian as Jenu˚fa in the Royal Opera House production. Tristram Kenton/Royal Opera House