Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 4 - Jenufa

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 28 dear mother. There’s already been enough humiliation and torment.” Like the Prodigal Son’s father, she simply leaves the moral work to her: “We should not curse her, and we should not condemn her: give her time to atone.” The love of Jen ˚ufa and Laca is emotionally convincing and deep because it is founded on a shared view of unconditional love. Jen ˚ufa has noticed “the generous way in which you behaved to me while I was kept in hiding”—not condescending, not assuming superiority— and right away, her love acknowledging his own unconditional love, she sees that he is the man for her. (Thus Janáˇcek is able to eliminate a long scene in Preissová’s play in which Laca convinces Jen ˚ufa of his love.) At the end of Act II, seeing already that he is willing to take her with all her sorrow and hardship, she says, “Then I’ll gladly share the good as well as the ill that may befall us.” And when they are left alone, at the end of Act III, saying, “You were always the best and finest man of all,” she gives him one last chance to leave her, and Laca passes the test, saying: “What does the world matter, if we are together.” Joined in a love as radical as it is rare, they transcend society’s conceptions of sin and forgiveness. The libretto gives us all this, but what words cannot convey is the depth of Janáˇcek’s music, as he finds daring musical expression for ideas of surging love, unconditionality, and the transcendence of mere social forms. Among comparable composers only Mahler (who, invited by Janáˇcek in 1904 to attend a performance of Jen ˚ufa, replied asking for a German-language vocal score, but never got a response, since no such score was available) has a similar musical affinity for these ideas, and he never wrote an opera. Only Janáˇcek, then, has been able to embody a radically unconventional religious vision in vibrant individual lives. So, as the final music swells upward, with Jen ˚ufa’s “Oh Laca, dearest Laca! Oh come! Come!,” they go forth into the new universe of inner freedom that their love has created. Martha C. Nussbaum is a Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Chicago. She is the author, among other books, of Anger and Forgiveness (2016). Asmik Grigorian as Jenu˚fa and April Koyejo-Audiger as Barena in the Royal Opera House production. Tristram Kenton/Royal Opera House