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and social preoccupations of the early twentieth century. The 1904 version helps to
fill a real gap in our knowledge of Janáček’s musico-dramatic development at this
formative time, a gap that exists between his apprenticeship operas on the one hand,
and the later versions of Jenůfa together with its two ‘experimental’ operatic
successors, on the other. In so doing, it reveals more clearly not only the range and
extent — and at times the sheer scale — of the revisions themselves, but also just how
far Janáček had already travelled between the established Czech ‘village comedy’ type
of Počátek románu and the earliest versions of Jenůfa, notwithstanding their shared
provenance (both authorial and geographic). For just as striking as the many changes
to the opera — from whichever perspective they are viewed — are the numerous
passages that Janáček essentially (that is, with no more than relatively minor
alterations) ‘got right first time’: the powerful solo scenes for the Kostelnička and
Jenůfa in Act 2, the chilling close of the same Act, and the gloriously affirmative final
scene of the work.
Against this background, the greater clarity brought to our understanding of
the wider revision process serves in turn as a window onto Janáček’s creative
workshop, illuminating both his developing vision of the opera itself and also many of
the precise technical means by which this vision was achieved even as it changed,
with different considerations coming to the fore at the various stages in the process,
as he confronted different problems of structure and expression, and of how to find the
most appropriate and effective notational form, at different junctures. Furthermore,
the changes which the 1904 version of Jenůfa helps us to bring more sharply into
focus highlight not simply Janáček’s own musical emergence as a fully integrated
compositional voice of astonishing force and originality, but also his response to and
knowledge of the wider operatic repertoire, and the expressive possibilities which the
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