Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 4 - Jenufa

27 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Trollope, in Doctor Thorne (1858), put in a plea for acceptance, and Wilkie Collins, in No Name (1862), issued an eloquent call for reform of punitive inheritance laws. This is the intellectual and artistic context for Janáˇcek’s opera. Jen ˚ufa is set in a Moravian town whose Protestant faith is enforced by severe social codes not unlike those of Victorian Britain. Had Jen ˚ufa kept her child, she might possibly have been socially forgiven if Števa had married her. But once that possibility is off the table, the life that looms ahead is extremely bleak, both for her and for the little child. The Kostelniˇcka (whose name means The Church-Wardeness, from her prior marriage) knows this well, and she loves her stepdaughter. She finds out that for Laca, who loves Jen ˚ufa very deeply, the presence of his brother’s child is disqualifying for marriage. With the baby, then, there will be no marriage and no happy future. Nor will Jen ˚ufa herself entertain the thought of infanticide—and if she did she would be punished, probably with death. On the far side of infanticide the Kostelniˇcka can see a happy future for Jen ˚ufa—and of course she sees rightly, as the opera’s hopeful ending shows. But for this future to exist the infanticide must be done, and done by her alone, with Jen ˚ufa utterly ignorant. In short, she must sacrifice her own moral purity to save her beloved step-daughter. (She notes that the infant has been baptized and thus will not be outside God’s salvation.) The Kostelniˇcka knows that she will be committing a terrible crime, and yet if she does not commit it she will be ensuring lifelong misery for the person she loves most. Her dilemma is tragic—the clash of “right with right” characteristic of Greek tragedy (to which the opera has usefully been compared). She is truly in Kant’s “state of nature,” where the usual boundaries of law and morality fail to fit the situation. Her choice is both rational and horrible, and it is dictated above all by love. It is an altruistic sacrifice of her own future life. She becomes deranged by guilt not because she is a moral monster, but because, having made a choice for the sake of love, she must bear the moral weight of the choice she has made, rather like Orestes pursued by the Furies, as Janáˇcek shows us with devastating dramatic and musical clarity. If she were not a highly moral woman she would not suffer as she does. The opera’s compelling and original twist to Goethe’s well-known Marguerite scenario thus lies in the presence of a third party who chooses to bear the weight of guilt in order to spare another. Now to forgiveness. The opera is always described as a story of forgiveness, and this is not wrong. But because interpreters do not examine different accounts of forgiveness known to religion and philosophy, they do not clarify the radical nature of Jen ˚ufa’s and Laca’s moral achievement. Christian forgiveness comes in several varieties, and the most usual type, which I shall call “transactional forgiveness,” is not a pure good, but, very often, an ally of punitive attitudes of humiliation and domination. As defined for centuries by the Church, it is a practice involving the waiving of angry attitudes—but only if the sinner confesses, abases him or herself before the wronged party, and vows to be different in the future. It may ultimately be before an imagined angry God that the penitent must plead for forgiveness, but agents of the Church or of social authority are all too eager to assume this role. The practices of confession and contrition are suffused with shame and humiliation, as the penitent grovels in fear. The Gospels contain some examples of transactional forgiveness, but Jesus more often commends two other attitudes: unconditional forgiveness, and unconditional love. Unconditional forgiveness looks a lot more morally attractive, in its respect for the sinner’s autonomy, but the organized Church, not surprisingly, had little use for it because the Church lacked a central role in the process. Furthermore, even unconditional forgiveness is at times suspect. St. Paul, for example, urges people to forgive an enemy, “for in so doing you will heap coals of fire upon his head” ( Romans 12:20). This gloating attitude of superiority is all too common in social life, where people seek to demonstrate their own superiority by behavior that is “holier than thou.” From the very beginning, Jen ˚ufa’s version of Christianity is utterly different. In her Act II prayer to the Virgin Mary, she addresses Mary and Jesus as loving and merciful patrons of all exiles and sinners. No groveling is required here: God is a source of pure unconditional love. This attitude too is found in the Gospels, in Christ’s simple injunction to “love your enemies,” and especially in the parable of the Prodigal Son, in which the father runs out to receive his son without any demand of confession or abasement, motivated solely by intense love. But such generosity tends to get short shrift in organized religion and in hierarchical societies. Jen ˚ufa models her own conduct on this idea of a radical unconditional love. Thus, she never asks Laca to beg forgiveness for his earlier act of aggression. She dismisses the very idea: “I forgave you long ago.” (We might call this true unconditional forgiveness, purified of its assumption of moral superiority.) And she refuses her stepmother’s attempt to kneel and beg forgiveness: “Do not kneel, “ ... what words cannot convey is the depth of Janáˇcek’s music, as he finds daring musical expression for ideas of surging love....”