sources - Nottingham eTheses - The University of Nottingham

Preface and acknowledgements
The roots of the present study go back to the mid-1980s. In April 1982 Sir Charles
Mackerras made a groundbreaking recording of Janáček’s opera Jenůfa, which for the
first time attempted a thoroughgoing restoration of the composer’s own orchestration
of the work in place of the revisions made — originally with Janáček’s consent — by
the Prague conductor, Karel Kovařovic. Universal Edition (Vienna), the publishers of
most of Janáček’s operas, were keen to produce an edition of the restored score, and
approached Sir Charles and the Janáček expert John Tyrrell to undertake the task. As
in-house editor and copyist at Universal Edition (London) at the time, I was to make
the necessary alterations to the full score (a task which, in those days, was done with
pen, ink, glue and plenty of Tipp-Ex ® ). Liaising with John, I would feed him any
queries that arose (there were many), and he would then check these on his frequent
trips to Brno against the main manuscript sources used for the edition, particularly the
orchestral parts kept in the Janáček Archive in Brno. During the course of this very
detailed work, it became apparent that these parts contained in addition earlier
material, much of it retrievable, which dated from the 1904 première of the opera.
The task of reconstructing the 1904 première version of Jenůfa has long been
regarded by Janáček specialists as an impossible one. Yet, as work on the Mackerras-
Tyrrell edition of the ‘1908’ version progressed (the edition was first performed in
prototype form at Glyndebourne in 1989 and eventually published in study score
format in 1996), the prospect seemed increasingly and tantalisingly possible. When in
1994 John suggested that I might apply for a place at the University of Nottingham as
a teaching assistant, the thesis subject came down to a choice between a compositional
process study of Harrison Birtwistle’s Secret Theatre (another work with which I had
been closely involved at Universal Edition) or attempting to reconstruct the 1904
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