Lost in translation | 3 December 2015

About 15 minutes into act one of Jenufa, the student in the next seat leaned over to her companions and whispered, ‘They’re singing in English!’ And so they were, in Otakar Kraus and Edward Downes’s translation. Janacek was obsessed with the shapes and intonations of speech; for a non-Czech speaker, a first-rate singing translation is really the only way to make Jenufa strike home with anything like the immediacy and realism he intended. But even with surtitles, the effort is useless if — as was the case throughout much of act one of this performance by Opera North — the singers are almost inaudible.

It might have sounded clearer in the circle. From the front stalls, however, the situation was impossible. There was no shortage of glory from the orchestra: big surges of string tone, lacerating violin and viola solos and a brass section whose lips must have been close to bleeding by the end. Magnificent, but it’s not opera. How much of the problem was down to Aleksandar Markovic’s supercharged conducting, and how much to director/designer Tom Cairns’s tilted set, was hard to say — the noticeable improvement in acts two and three suggested the latter.

What emerged in those acts, though, was as harrowing a Jenufa as its composer could have wished. Well, we call it Jenufa; Janacek called it Jeji pastorkyna, usually translated as Her Stepdaughter. Once again, as Jenufa’s stepmother the Kostelnicka, Susan Bickley proved how much is lost in that particular translation. From her first Valkyrie-like intervention to the broken woman, hunched and seemingly almost paralysed with guilt, of act three, Bickley lives this role with uncompromising emotional honesty, her steel-plated pride allowing only glimpses of tenderness. ‘Shame and dishonour!’ sings the Kostelnicka as she begins to realise that she can save Jenufa at the cost of her own soul.