A new production of Jenfa opens at Welsh National Opera on 5th March, with the terrific soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn in the title role. A warning: Leoš Janáek’s first masterpiece is not an easy watch under any circumstances, but it’s close to unbearable if you are pregnant. I discovered this first-hand recently while trying to present the piece for Radio 3. As the curtain went down and the mic light went green after the second act—in which Jenfa wakes to find her baby gone—I forced my mouth open but couldn’t make a sound. Not ideal for the job at hand. As usual, Janáek had delivered a sucker punch.
In the depths of 19th-century Moravian winter, a woman steals a baby boy and throws him into a freezing river. She’s desperate to hide the shame of her stepdaughter Jenfa, who has given birth out of wedlock. It’s one of the most horrifying acts committed to a newborn in any opera—some achievement given the genre’s appetite for gore and infanticide. Anyway, her strategy doesn’t work. When the river thaws in the spring, the wretched child’s body is washed up and the stepmother is dragged away for trial in front of the scathing villagers.
Janáek’s dramas are earthy, sometimes supernatural, sometimes engulfingly bleak. The Czech composer was 40 when he began work on Jenfa in 1894. He struggled through the first act and put the project aside before coming back to it eight years later, by which time his objectives for this opera—and for opera in general—had evolved significantly. Now he was armed with a new kind of musical language. He incorporated the patterns of ordinary speech and the jagged angles of Czech folk music. He tapped the rhythms of village life, the daily grit and grind and social claustrophobia. The result is the tough, flinty realism of all his late operas: Kát’a Kabanová and The Makropulos Case, From the House of the Dead and even The Cunning Little Vixen, a fantastical woodland fable of violence and renewal.
But none is more emotionally pulverising than Jenfa, which presents the bleary tenderness of pregnancy and early motherhood against a backdrop of serious cruelty. I’m put in mind of Andrea Arnold’s 2003 short film Wasp, another starkly unsentimental portrait of maternal instinct and vulnerability. In Arnold’s film, a near-broken young mother abandons her family outside a pub while she goes on a date with a bloke whom she assumes will leave if he finds out about the kids. After a harrowing incident involving a wasp and a baby’s open mouth, the mother’s love for her children wins out. In this opera love wins too—Jenfa forgives her stepmother’s actions while the orchestra plays a pulsating E-flat major. The musicologists Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker have called the moment “a wall of sheer musical sound that moves nowhere and, like the characters onstage, celebrates sheer survival.”
Jenfa strikes me as extraordinarily modern in its attitude to motherhood. Was Janáek a pioneering feminist? Not if his personal life was much to go by: he made his wife Zdenka bitterly unhappy with his mawkish affairs and an unrequited infatuation with a woman called Kamila nearly four decades his junior. On stage, though, he shows rare empathy for his women, writing vocal lines and orchestral commentaries that summon devastating emotional truths.
A lot of the credit is also down to Její pastorkya (Her Stepdaughter), the play Janáek chose to base his work on. Written by the stern and courageous Gabriela Preissová (1862-1946), who penned desolate dramas about village life in the Slovácko region of Moravia, Její pastorkya was banned after its first night in Prague in 1890. Critics and authorities felt Preissová had taken “realism” too far—she based the text on several real-life case studies. Preissová fought back, arguing her corner in letters to the newspapers. She knew the Moravian public would recognise the religious orthodoxy and misogyny that might push a woman to commit unspeakable crimes. And if it’s tempting to think these extreme actions only happened in the past, alas. Just a couple of months ago, a baby was found in a freezer in Doncaster. Arrested on suspicion of murder were a 17-year-old girl and a 45-year-old woman.
I think again about the play’s slightly contorted original title—Her Stepdaughter. The emphasis is no accident. Preissová is forcing a whole web of relationships into view. She stresses this story is not the tragedy of a single troubled individual, but the complex moral bind of two women. Of an entire society.
