Opera in three acts by Leoš Janáčeks
Libretto by Leoš Janáčeks after a drama by Gabriela Preissová

Strictures and bigotry, tradition and control… rural life in a Moravian village smouldering under a burning glass. We follow the fortunes of the characters through the changing of the seasons, are witness to a sweltering summer followed by a brutal winter. In early spring we are presented with a happy occasion that is soon soured. The tragic wedding ends in a confession of guilt and reveals Leos Janácek as a humanist. Violence and scandal, infanticide, guilt and atonement: these are the aspects of the human condition that the composer Janáček - he of the volatile temperament, who had fallen out of favour in the eyes his compatriots for belittling the achievements of Smetana - is keen to lay bare to his audiences.

With JENŮFA he is risking musical and stylistic isolation. Which composer has ever clung so tenaciously to arias and repetitive move­ments, as if Wagner had never existed? Who was able to marry them so naturally with the emerging veristic forms? Unusual, too, was Janáček’s basing of his opera on a work of prose – Gabriela Preissová’s Její pastorkyna [Her protégée] – always with the intention of uncovering the core characteristics of his figures, of de­pict­ing their personalities, their individual ways of speaking, in exaggerated detail. For Janáček, to capture the lilt and timbres of his Moravian homeland was to make a »life drawing in musical form«.

Michaela Kaune, Jenůfa
Jennifer Larmore, Kostelnicka
Hanna Schwarz, Grandmother Buryia
Will Hartmann, Laca Klemen
Ladislav Elgr, Steva Buryia
Simon Pauly, Mill Foreman
Stephen Bronk, Mayor
Nadine Secunde, The Mayor’s Wife
Martina Welschenbach, Karolka

Christof Loy, director
Chor der Deutschen Oper Berlin
Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin
Donald Runnicles, conductor