Jenůfa's Original Home

This modest theatre, formerly a dance hall, was the site of one of the most important operatic premieres of the first decade of the 20th century. It was an event which was sadly overlooked for many years. This is, or rather was, the Divadlo na Veveří in Brno, where Janáček's opera Jenůfa – which I'm teaching at the moment at City Lit – first saw the light of day in 1904. Until now I'd only seen an exterior shot of the converted dance hall where Janáček's first theatrical masterpiece received its somewhat shoddily performed but nonetheless well-received premiere.

Having experienced the opera exclusively through later versions – first the romanticised Prague re-orchestration by Karel Kovařovic, after Janáček had fought for over a decade to get the work performed in the Czech capital, and John Tyrrell and Charles Mackerras's painstaking reconstruction of the '1908 Brno' version, based on research into Janáček's own revisions to the score – Universal Edition has recently published Mark Audus's version of the original 1904 score:

It is of much more than purely musicological interest. It allows audiences once again to experience the thrill of the new, the rawness of emotion that places this work much more closely in the context of turn-of-the-century verismo. And it permits us a glimpse, for the first time, of the youthful face of a much-loved friend.  

And as well as these musical insights, we have images of the theatre in which this extraordinary new work was first heard. Click here to see more pictures of the Divadlo na Veveří.

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