Claus Guth’s Jenůfa, revived with an outstanding cast © RBO/Camilla Greenwell
Royal Opera / Jakub Hrůša
Royal Opera House, 18 January 2025
Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa never fails to shock, even more than 120 years after its first performance and a further 14 years on from the premier of the play that inspired it, Gabriela Preissova’s Her Stepdaughter. Knitting two real events, Her Stepdaughter, which was well received by audiences but condemned by critics, closed in Prague after five performances. Janáček, an admirer of Pressova, saw it, and its operatic potential, in Brno. Twentieth-century music specialist Nigel Simeone tells the whole story compellingly in the programme for Claus Guth’s production, at the Royal Opera House.
First staged in 2021, Guth’s Jenůfa is revived by Oliver Platt, a reliable pair of hands at Covent Garden, who has also done years of sterling work at Opera Holland Park. He appears to have softened some of the unforgiving hard edges of this complex piece, with its challenged central characters. But Michael Levine’s set remains chillingly hostile, with its grim cradles, fierce bedsteads and comfortless mattresses, sternly lit by James Farncombe.
Corinne Winters in the title role of Jenůfa © RBO/Camilla Greenwell
It falls to the chinks of light in Janáček’s many-faceted score, to the briefly uplifting dances (choreography by Teresa Rotemberg) and to individual performances, to inject humanity into this forbidding townscape. The emptiness of the stage speaks of a hollow society, but gives the singers little support.
We do not see the mill that churns in the opening bars, the only water rinsing peeled potatoes as the townswomen carry out their charmless childcare and drab, repetitive work. Later they will lurk outside Jenůfa’s home, faceless, their handmaids’ bonnets (costume designer Gesine Völlm) now the recognised symbol of oppressed womanhood.
In the demanding title role is American soprano Corinne Winters. She made her Covent Garden debut in Così Fan Tutte in 2016, as a vivacious Fiordiligi. Nearly a decade on she scales the heights of Janáček’s searing music with ease, her slight figure and quicksilver movement making her an especially vulnerable victim. With her former lover, her suitor and her stepmother towering over her, she is distraught at the murder of her child, born out of wedlock.
Karita Mattila as the Kostelnička © RBO/Camilla Greenwell
Finnish soprano Karita Mattila’s protective but misguided Kostelnička is not the shrill harridan of some productions, but a more nuanced figure, whose beauty, bearing and betrayal are equal partners in her struggle to protect pregnant, then abandoned, Jenůfa from prospects as damaged as her own once were.
What a touching figure tenor Nicky Spence cuts, reprising the role of Laca, besotted follower of Jenůfa; she favours his half-brother, the fetching and feckless Števa. When frustrated Laca destroys the good looks that are Jenůfa’s prime attraction in superficial Števa’s eyes, his remorse and undiminished love power a transformation from awkward booby to scrubbed-up, reliable rock. The opera ends not with despair but with a hopeful flowering, as a new relationship blooms out of Janáček’s redemptive music.
Nicky Spence as Laca and Corinne Winters as Jenůfa © RBO/Camilla Greenwell
Thomas Atkins as flippant Števa turns in another notable performance, after his breezy end-of-year success at English National Opera in Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love.
It has been 15 months coming, but conductor Jakub Hrůša’s first appearance at the Royal Opera House since being named successor as music director to Antonio Pappano proved worth the wait. Not fully in post until September, he gave a glimpse here of what lies ahead, in terms of colour and dynamism. Czech-born, Hrůša has Janáček in his blood. That cultural confidence, coupled with an extremely generous welcome from the audience, helped power electrifying musicianship all round, with frosty solos and crushing ice floes of sound from the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House.
Jenůfa is sung in Czech with surtitles in English. Further performances are on 23, 27, 30 January and 1 February 2025