On Saturday night, the Washington National Opera opened its best production of the season, with David Alden’s modernized staging of Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa. Washington is the last of the three cities co-producing this version to see it on the stage, after a well-received 2004 premiere at Houston Grand Opera and an overwhelming critical success last fall at English National Opera, where it won the Laurence Olivier Award for best new opera production.
Janáček adapted the libretto himself, from a play by Gabriela Preissová called Její pastorkyňa (Her stepdaughter), the title by which the opera is known in Czech. The story centers on Jenůfa, a beautiful girl in a Moravian village and her relationship with the young owner of the local mill, Števa, who has gotten her pregnant. Števa’s thoughtless, drunken behavior irritates Jenůfa’s domineering stepmother, whom everyone calls the Kostelnička, or the sacristan’s wife (an important position in the village church). A distant relative, Laca, is also in love with Jenůfa and out of jealousy threatens the girl and slices her face with a knife at the end of Act I. Jenůfa gives birth to a baby son while hidden away by her stepmother, but the scar on her face and the baby drive Števa to get engaged to the mayor’s daughter instead. The Kostelnička knows that Laca still wants to marry Jenůfa, but something has to be done about Števa’s baby.
The cast acts and sings to excellent effect, across the board. The lovely, smooth-voiced Patricia Racette captures both Jenůfa’s innocent sweetness and her unmeasurable sorrow. Her voice has roundness and power in all registers and ranges from delectable simplicity, as in the heart-breaking setting of the Salve Regina, with quiet harp and glockenspiel, in Act II (shown in the photo above), to banshee’s keen. She was matched in intensity, perhaps exceeded, by the other star of the evening, Catherine Malfitano, who reprised her lauded performance as the Kostelnička. In a severe black dress (costumes by Jon Morrell), she is a terrifying figure, making her unraveling at the end of Act II, where she has a guilt-ridden vision of “death staring me in the face,” one of the most dramatic moments of the evening. It was Malfitano’s name and star power that led Houston Grand Opera to undertake three productions of Janáček operas for her to star in, Kát’a Kabanová, The Makropoulos Affair, and this one. Sadly, Jenůfa is the only one to make it to Washington so far.
Photo of Patricia Racette as Jenůfa by Karin Cooper, Washington National Opera
