When I was just getting started as an operagoer, I went to see “The Makropulos Case,” the Czech composer Leos Janacek’s tale of a woman desperate to elongate a life that has already lasted three centuries.
It left me exhilarated, dazed and with only one thing on my mind: buying a ticket to return the next weekend.
I’m not the only one to have this reaction. “People felt they had to come back,” Yuval Sharon said recently about the audiences when he directed “The Cunning Little Vixen,” another thrilling, heart-rending Janacek opera. “It was unlike any piece they’d experienced. It just seizes you.”
That’s still my feeling about Janacek’s operas. On Sunday, when the Cleveland Orchestra finished an elegant but crushing concert version of “Jenufa,” which ends with a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation after extraordinary suffering, I would have happily sat through it again, right then and there.
For this brutal account of small-town woe, Janacek wrote earthy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths. There are obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters, as well as passages of folk-inspired sweetness.
Janacek loved to transcribe birdsong and people speaking; his vocal lines, molded to the flow of the Czech language, have uncanny naturalness even in lyrical flight and emotional extremity. His climaxes — never more soaring than at the stunned yet hopeful end of “Jenufa” — are radiant. Neither his heroes nor his villains are uncomplicated; he presents heightened, impossibly vivid situations that are also deeply nuanced.
“They’re amazing dramas,” Sharon said. “They just blast through the stage. They just go.”
Yet even many regular operagoers don’t know these pieces. They are as propulsive and viscerally affecting as Arthur Miller plays, but those who haven’t heard them often think they’re esoteric, strictly for connoisseurs. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“My experience is that the audiences that come adore the work,” said Anthony Freud, who has programmed Janacek at companies in Wales, Houston and Chicago.
But those audiences don’t tend to come en masse. “When you’re budgeting ticket sales with Janacek,” he added, “you’re going to have to cushion it with ‘Bohème’ and ‘Traviata.’”
Toward the end of the 20th century, it seemed that Janacek’s operas were becoming regular presences on major American stages, if not quite staples like “Carmen.” From 1990 to 2010, the Metropolitan Opera — where my life was changed by that “Makropulos Case” — presented 10 runs of four works. Houston Grand Opera did a Janacek cycle around that time. Conductors like Charles Mackerras, who painstakingly revealed the composer’s intentions in new editions of the scores, were crucial advocates.
But the surge stalled. While Janacek isn’t ignored entirely — Cleveland’s was my third American “Jenufa” since 2019, after full stagings in Santa Fe and Chicago — he’s rarer than I would have predicted, or hoped. The Met hasn’t performed a Janacek opera since 2016.
The reasons aren’t entirely mysterious. His works are accessible to listeners but challenging to perform, necessitating substantial, and expensive, rehearsal processes. (They’re easier to find in opera- and resource-rich Europe.) Patrick Summers, Houston Grand Opera’s longtime music and artistic director, speculated that Janacek, and other not-quite-core repertory, has been the victim of a generally praiseworthy development: the increasing success of new American opera. With most companies doing ever-fewer titles in a season, there is more competition for each slot given to less familiar work.
Summers gave the hypothetical example of a company that wanted to do both “Jenufa” and a contemporary American piece — for example, Kevin Puts’s “Silent Night,” which Houston will present next season.
“‘Jenufa’ wouldn’t replace ‘La Bohème,’” he said. “It would replace ‘Silent Night.’ So you have to choose, and these days you might well choose ‘Silent Night.’”
For the art form’s health, though, there needs to be room for both.
The son of a village schoolteacher, Janacek was born in 1854. While he was a gifted musician from childhood and a highly regarded organist and teacher, he struggled for recognition as a composer. It was “Jenufa” that truly established his reputation, though not right away. After germinating for years, it premiered in 1904, but it wasn’t until a dozen years later that a performance in Prague brought him real celebrity.
Soon after that, in the summer of 1917, he met Kamila Stosslova. Both were married, and Stosslova was nearly 40 years younger, but they developed an intimate more-than-friendship. The relationship — almost completely, and agonizingly, unconsummated — inspired a late-in-life creative flowering that bloomed until Janacek’s death, at 74, in 1928.
The fruits of this period include a pair of searching string quartets, and the stirring orchestral Sinfonietta and “Taras Bulba.” Even more remarkable was the burst of four operatic masterpieces: “Kat’a Kabanova,” about a country girl driven to suicide after a brief affair; “The Cunning Little Vixen,” in which human and animal characters collide in a warm yet entirely unsentimental allegory of nature’s transformations; “The Makropulos Case”; and “From the House of the Dead,” based on Dostoevsky’s novel set in a Siberian prison.
Bleak yet beautiful, “Jenufa” remains his best-known opera. On Sunday the Cleveland Orchestra and its music director, Franz Welser-Möst, captured Janacek’s intensity without stinting his tender lyricism. The frigid winds of the second act passed through the ensemble in frosty swirls. The cast was superb, with Latonia Moore a sumptuous and passionate Jenufa, and Nina Stemme harrowing as her stepmother, who attempts to preserve her family’s honor through a monstrous sacrifice.
As always with Janacek, the audience — about two-thirds of capacity at Severance Music Center — cheered mightily at the end. And as always, that reaction gave me hope.
There are other glimmers for Janacek lovers. Des Moines Metro Opera will present “The Cunning Little Vixen” this summer. The Met has plans to import a grim “Jenufa” directed by Claus Guth, who staged this season’s hit “Salome.” When I spoke to Yuval Sharon, he was at the airport on the way to Switzerland, where he was meeting about a production of “The Excursions of Mr. Broucek,” a rarity even by Janacek standards.
I hope as many opera houses as possible join their number. For them, and for audiences, I can only echo Anthony Freud: “There’s nothing to be scared of.”
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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