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This radical pre-première revision also has a wider significance, inasmuch as it can also
be seen as the beginning of a process of textural and motivic ‘distillation’ by which many
passages featuring continuous orchestral textures were pared down to bare essentials,
another feature that is typical of Janáček’s later revisions (see below, §3.3.2).
(One of the few contrary examples, i.e. of silence being ‘filled out’, is the
transition between Scenes 5 and 6 in Act 1. Here, the end of the ensemble ‘Každý
párek’ as originally copied by Štross had died away to leave Jenůfa’s four-bar
recitative at the beginning of Scene 6 — ‘Števo, Števo, já vím, žes to urobil z té
radosti dnes!’ [Števa, I know you were only behaving like that today out of high
spirits] (fig. 87) — unaccompanied. By October 1903 Janáček had added the
xylophone semiquavers (quavers in the 1908 version) to fill this void. For further
details, and on the possible wider significance of the xylophone in Act 1 of Jenůfa, see
APPENDIX VI.)
Another notable change at this stage came in the last scene of the opera, where
Laca’s final words, ‘na útěchu’, were originally sung three times. Janáček pasted over
the two sequential repetitions (shown in small notes in Ex. 3.7), thus turning what then
became Laca’s last note in the work, eb' (asterisked), into an unresolved passing note.
The removal of these repetitions before the première is confirmed by LB.
Ex. 3.7
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