sources - Nottingham eTheses - The University of Nottingham

Jenůfa can also be viewed as part of a much wider transitional phase,
straddling as it does two centuries in more than just the obvious chronological sense, a
period of great turbulence and change in operatic, musical and cultural history. This is
most evident in the debts it clearly owes to late nineteenth-century literary Naturalism
(in the shape of Preissová’s play) and to the verismo movement which was at the time
Naturalism’s most high-profile (and certainly most popular) operatic counterpart.
Both of these movements can themselves be seen as transitional: Naturalism as a post-
Darwinian, anti-Romantic form of cultural (initially literary) positivism, verismo
(more culturally specific to Italian literature and opera, particularly the Italian giovane
scuola, of the 1890s) as a short-lived but significant and widely popular operatic sub-
genre. Both, too, can be seen as pre-modernist in their rejection of late Romantic
values, particularly through their aspirations to an objective view of the world. At the
same time — partly because of this affected objectivity, which soon began to assume
restrictive conventions of its own — they nevertheless lacked the more radical and
defamiliarising qualities of modernism itself, which alone were able to bring about the
kinds of long-term expressive renewal foreseen, but not fully achieved, by these
precursors. Taken together, these cultural and artistic tendencies offer potentially
fruitful and productive contexts against which to view Janáček’s revisions to Jenůfa.
Perhaps most obvious is the shift in emphasis away from a musically
ostentatious folksiness and towards a greater declamatory realism and freedom for the
voices. 58 Janáček may well have felt that the opera’s specifically Moravian nature
58 This shift anticipates by more than half a century a trend in productions (internationally, if not in the
Czech lands) away from faithfully folksy productions (of the sort which Janáček himself envisaged)
towards rather freer, less naturalistic (in the colloquial and often pejorative sense) portrayals of the
opera’s locale. In a memorable phrase used by John Tyrrell at a Jenůfa symposium in Nottingham
(March 2000), the opera only truly caught on internationally ‘when Jenůfa got out of her boots’.
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