Leoš Janáček: Jenufa, her Stepdaughter

With his third opera Jenufa Leoš Janácek succeeded in making his breakthrough as an operatic composer. Since the premiere of this moving story about the fate of the sexton and her stepdaughter Jen?fa at the Brno National Theatre in 1904, it has become one of the composer’s most frequently performed works. Janácek was the first to succeed in transforming everyday speech directly into music. His method of using speech-melodic motives is clearly distinctive. It is known that the composer preserved everyday conversations in the form of little musical sketches: ‘Jotting down genuine speech melody is, as it were, music’s life class,’ he said.