Redemption Song: Jenůfa triumph signals a bright future for Hrůsa (2025)

Redemption is so integral to our understanding of narrative – it gives us happy endings – that we rarely stop to consider its power. Jenůfa, a story of ‘honour’-driven infanticide that nevertheless ends in an ecstatic expression of hope, presents us with a moral challenge so great we are forced to wonder whether redemption is something we can still truly believe in.

Redemption Song: Jenůfa triumph signals a bright future for Hrůsa (1)

Corinne Winters (Jenůfa)

© ROH | Camilla Greenwell

It is the enduring achievement of Claus Guth’s Olivier Award-winning 2021 production, returning to The Royal Opera revived by Oliver Platt this week under the baton of Music Director Designate Jakub Hrůśa, to have found a coherent and timeless visual language with which to explore the emotional contradictions in Janáček’s full-throttle score, as it lays bare the unspeakable cruelty lurking beneath a society controlled by shame. This is a Jenůfa for the ages. Hrůsa will no doubt rein the orchestra in a little in once the excitement of opening night has passed, but there are few who could begrudge him his ebullience at being let loose on this wonderful score (by a compatriot, to boot) that runs the gamut from folksy vernacular through lush romance to high octane emotional drama and beyond into transcendent ecstasy as Jenufa and Laca begin their walk to freedom. The future certainly sounds bright with Hrůsa to lead the way.

Karita Mattila (Kostelnička)

© ROH | Camilla Greenwell

Guth presents a Poe-era gothic vision of village life, where the humdrum of everyday barely conceals the stuff of nightmares. Black-clad in Gesine Völlm’s Amish-style capes and bonnets, the ever-watchful community are themselves under surveillance in Michael Levine’s indelible penitentiary interpretation of the Moravian mill. In this grim panopticon, identical scenes of domestic servitude play out under the watchful eye of Grandmother Buryjovka, whip in hand. In the second act the workhouse bed frames are stripped bare to form the prison where pillar of the community, the Kostelnička, turns to desperate acts to save three generations from public disgrace.

Meanwhile, long shadows cast by James Farncombe’s quietly revelatory lighting, reach forward, with their suggestion of overhead wires, into our own era where doubtless, even now, a young woman is facing alone the consequences of having ‘made her bed’. In a masterpiece of choral direction that lays bare the hypocrisy of Christianity’s cover story (though the same story might also be read as a kindness) Jenůfa prays fervently to the Virgin Mother as, behind her, the women in black, like trapped insects, slowly climb the walls.

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Corinne Winters (Jenůfa)

© ROH | Camilla Greenwell

Corinne Winters was phenomenal as the self-possessed Jenůfa. Diminutive on a stage that seems open to a vast and forboding night sky, Winters’ formidable presence and classical poise gave the title role its novelistic complexity and her vocal range and command were the perfect match for the demands of Janáček’s dramatically charged score. In a soprano role that makes such full use of the lower register, Winters retained her authority throughout and found a wonderful spaciousness of tone. Incarcerated by her stepmother, Winters’ Jenůfa appeared heartbreakingly young and vividly contemporary.

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Karita Mattila (Kostelnička) and Corinne Winters (Jenůfa)

© ROH | Camilla Greenwell

Any mother-daughter power struggle can be difficult to listen to, and this opera presents two soprano voices going hell for leather along with pretty much anything Janáček can find to drive the drama even harder. However, the contrasting timbres of Karita Mattila’s worldly maturity with Winters’ blameless clarity was perfectly judged. Mattila, reprising her role as the Kostelnička, passionately inhabited the contradictions of a loving mother who finds herself trapped at the apex of societal expectation. As the mood lifted at the beginning of Act 3, Winters added a subtle worldliness to Jenůfa’s amour propre: her thoroughly modern moue as she smilingly invited Steva’s clueless fiancée to take a seat at the wedding really was a picture.

Nicky Spence returned as Laca, confused by his feelings for Jenůfa and by the injustice of her attachment to his rival, Thomas Atkins' Steva. Spence’s giant of a voice gives full vent to Laca’s volatile fervour, despite an uncharacteristic physical uncertainty that was a surprise, given his experience in the role.

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Corinne Winters (Jenůfa) and Nicky Spence (Laca)

© ROH | Camilla Greenwell

When Gisele Pelicot finally emerged from court in Avignon last month she surprised the world’s media with a short statement which made no mention of her husband, his many abominable crimes to her person or the nature of his punishment. Instead, Mme Pelicot said she now had “confidence in our ability to collectively seize a future in which each woman and man can live in harmony, with respect and mutual understanding.” Such breathtaking magnanimity is what Janáček asks us to believe of Jenůfa. It’s what makes this story worth retelling as long as life fails and fails again to imitate the expected narrative arc. Life will always demand more of us than we can fully understand: only art can help us to imagine its complexity.

*****

Redemption Song: Jenůfa triumph signals a bright future for Hrůsa (2025)
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