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development of twentieth-century opera. Whilst such transitional qualities are by no
means always reflected in or dependent on a work’s genesis, Jenůfa provides one of
the most striking cases of convergence: a transitional opera, itself in the process of
transition.
Although one can reasonably speak of four ‘versions’ of Jenůfa — original, 1904,
1908 and 1916 — there are good grounds, as suggested in CHAPTER 2, for regarding
the process of revision as somewhat more fluid than even the establishment of a
discrete series of layers might suggest (see TABLE 2.1). Inevitably, recognised
‘versions’ proposed by musicologists tend to coalesce around verifiable dates, as
transmitted through manuscripts, publications, other documents and performances.
There are usually good reasons for this state of affairs: composers’ revisions are
themselves normally (although by no means invariably) prompted by the immediate
prospects of performance or publication, whether realised or not, and thus tend to be
concentrated around such events. Often, however, the versions established as a result
— or at least, the labels by which they become known — can be misleading. Thus,
for instance, the ‘1908 version’ of Jenůfa, as embodied in the KPU published vocal
score, appears already to have been subjected to minor revisions by the time it was
first performed in January 1911, and it was further altered up until the time of the pre-
Prague revisions of 1915. It is this ‘final revision’ of the ‘1908 version’ that is
presented in the Mackerras-Tyrrell edition (UE 1996 / UE 2000). 1 The need to allow
for a certain latitude in labelling versions recognises not only the need for simplicity
as well as transparency in such matters, but also the fact that the reality of the revision
process will usually lie somewhere between the extremes of a series of ‘fixed’,
1 See Tyrrell 1996, vii, xii and xv / Tyrrell 2000, iv and vii.
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