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and effort, both physical and emotional, must have been offset by a well-founded
sense of trepidation. For the music director in Prague was none other than the
conductor, composer and sometime harpist Karel Kovařovic (1862–1920), whose own
opera Ženichové [The bridegrooms, 1882; first performed Prague 1884] had been sent
up by Janáček in a satirical review (XV/70) in the journal Hudební listy in January
1887. 31 Sure enough, at the end of April the scores of Jenůfa were returned to Janáček
with a curt rejection from the National Theatre’s administrative director. 32 Janáček’s
wife Zdenka then persuaded him, at first with difficulty, to allow the Brno National
Theatre — a much smaller and less august institution than its Prague counterpart,
based in a converted dance hall and with only a tiny chorus and orchestra — to stage
the work. Well aware of the limitations of the Brno theatre, the composer
nevertheless eventually agreed.
A letter Janáček wrote on 3 October 1903 to Camilla Urválková 33 gives the
first surviving indication of any pre-première revisions to Jenůfa:
31 Hudební listy, iii (1886–7), 54; reprinted in Štědroň 1946, 111–12 and LD I/1 -1 , 122; Eng. trans. in
JODA, JP12. The attack on Ženichové must have seemed all the more personal given that Hudební listy
was, in effect, Janáček’s ‘own’ journal, founded and edited by him; see JYL i, 287–96. Seven years
later, when Janáček submitted Jenůfa to the Prague National Theatre, Kovařovic might well have
reflected that Janáček’s earlier sarcastic suggestion of stage action more suitable for the music of
Ženichové — ‘full of horrible gloom, desperate screams, bodies stabbed by daggers’ — pretty well
summed up aspects of the action in Jenůfa.
32 Gustav Schmoranz to Janáček, 28 April 1903, JA vii, 17; Eng. trans. JODA, JP15.
33 Janáček had met Mrs Camilla Urválková (1875–1956) whilst holidaying at the Moravian spa of
Luhačovice in August 1903; she was to provide the inspiration (together with Luhačovice itself) for his
next opera, Osud [Fate] (I/5). See JODA, 109 and 366.
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