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successors, the ‘experimental’ 56 works Osud and The Excursions of Mr Brouček. And
if Heyworth had instead heard the 1904 version of the opera, he would surely have
had even more cause to note ‘operatic superfluities’.
Jenůfa’s transitional qualities can be seen as springing from more than just its
place within the relative confines of Janáček’s operatic output, however. His work on
the opera — both its original, long drawn-out composition and the subsequent, equally
protracted series of revisions — coincided with several upheavals and shifts in his
own life and outlook: from distinctly part-time to rather more full-time composer,
from folk music collector to gatherer of speech melodies, from provincial to more
cosmopolitan aspirations. 57 But this was also a time at which Janáček was developing
his own distinctive musical language in other genres, in works such as the choral-
orchestral cantata Amarus (III/6; 1896, revised 1901 and 1906) and the cycle of piano
miniatures Po zarostlém chodníčku [On the overgrown path] (VIII/17; 1900, 1908 and
1911). Jenůfa can be seen as a similar (though ultimately even more consequential)
development in the genre which Janáček was eventually to make most decisively his
own, his struggles with both it and its two very different operatic successors
emblematic of his battle to achieve musical individuality and musico-dramatic
mastery.
56 Tyrrell’s term: CO, 250.
57 Janáček took early retirement from his main job at the Brno Teachers’ Institute in November 1903,
soon after he had handed Jenůfa over to the Brno National Theatre (see JODA, OS6, and JYL, i, 563
and 567). His work on speech melodies can be dated to the summer of 1897, during the hiatus in
composition between Acts 1 and 2 of Jenůfa (JYL, i, 479; see also Wingfield 1992b, 291–2).
Immediately after handing over the score of Jenůfa to the Brno theatre in October 1903, Janáček
declared to Camilla Urválková that the libretto for his next opera (i.e. what was to become Osud)
should be ‘modern’ (JODA, OS6 and OS 7), and Osud itself can be viewed as reflecting elements of the
Czech turn-of-the-century Decadence movement (see Chew 2003, 116–26).
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