Recently, one of my colleagues, a director, addressed me - Greetings child of happiness! - I did not understand. And he says - Well, you are lucky to stage such a beautiful opera! (He meant the opera Her Shepherdess.)
The author of this amazing opera is the most famous Moravian opera composer Leoš Janáček (*3 July 1854 Hukvaldy, † 12 August 1928 Ostrava). Music composer, pedagogue, theorist, folklorist, writer, choirmaster, conductor Leoš Janáček belongs to the most important creative personalities of the 20th century. He attended public school in his birthplace, completed further studies in Brno and later in Leipzig. Generationally, he belongs to A. Dvořák, Z. Fibich, also to the verist G.
Puccini, but his distinctive, progressive work also touches on the style of 20th century composers A. Schönberg and I. Stravinsky.
Among the best-known works of L. Janáček are the operas Káťa Kabanová - based on Ostrovsky's novel The Storm, The Adventures of the Little Vixen - based on the novel by R. Těsnohlídka, Vec Makropulos - based on the drama by K. Čapek, and the opera From the Dead House - based on the novel by Dostoyevsky was published posthumously.
Furthermore, the piano cycle After the Overgrown Footpath , love songs The Notebook of the Disappeared , the String Quartet Letters of Confidentiality , Glagolitic Mass , etc.
The opera Její pastorkyňa was performed for the first time in Brno in 1904. The libretto, written in prose, enhances the original - a realistic drama by G. Preissová, performed at the National Theater in Prague without success. The opera Jenůfa (under this name it is performed abroad) only reached Prague after the adaptations by K. Kovařovice. Max Brod is credited with introducing the opera in Vienna. Currently, this opera is one of the most performed world operas in the world and is presented in the original, in the Czech language.
Gabriela Preissová (1862–1946), writer, dramaturg of the National Theater in Prague, belongs to the classics of Czech prose and drama, and her work has been and is the subject of literary and theatrical analyses. Even today, the realistic dramas The Landlady's Slave and Her Nanny provoke theater artists to stage them. The drama Její pastorkyňa is based on two real events. Two brothers love a girl and one of them cuts her face out of jealousy, and the mother and stepdaughter kill the illegitimate newborn. The author connected these stories, left the murder of the child only to the stepmother, and created a captivating drama about different forms of love, pride, human relationships and characters, society's pressure on individuals, strange morals, etc.
Janáček ingeniously underlined the psychological processes of the acting characters and emphasized their truthfulness with the help of hints he obtained by writing down human speech. The brevity and succinctness of musical ideas, their montage and layering created an original style of musical language, which Janáček mixed with contemporary trends in musical development – verism, impressionism, expressionism, etc.
