No Way Out

In recent years, few artists have set the opera world on fire quite like Asmik Grigorian, the incandescent Lithuanian soprano with a powerful dramatic instinct. On November 16, she returns to the Met to headline her first new production with the company, taking on the title role of the young woman constrained by small-town hypocrisy in a blistering staging of Janáček’s Jenůfa conceived by the masterful director Claus Guth. By Christopher Browner

From its first notes, Jenůfa surges forward. An insistent beat on the xylophone combines with churning strings to depict the endless turn of the millwheel, the lifeblood of the opera’s rural Moravian community. For Claus Guth, who directs this season’s new production, the simple musical motif holds extraordinary significance. “What hit me from the very beginning was this persistent sound of the mill—not just literally but as a metaphor for the endless repetition and inescapable uniformity of everyday life,” he says. “There’s this very strong feeling that history is repeating, that the more these characters try to escape, to break this family curse, the more they find themselves suddenly back in the middle of it all.”

Guth returns to the Met following his much-heralded 2025 company debut with a psychologically probing take on Strauss’s Salome, and with the director’s long track record of engrossing stagings, Janáček’s tale of hardship, hypocrisy, and, ultimately, resilience in a remote village would seem a natural fit. But he says he initially hesitated when tapped to tackle the work. “I was afraid that there was too much text and not enough space in the music for my ideas to fly free,” Guth says. “But I quickly learned what a master Janáček is of precision. He articulates only what is absolutely necessary to produce the maximum emotion.” And it didn’t hurt that, in the title role, he would have one of his closest artistic collaborators by his side. “Asmik Grigorian is a miracle,” he says of the fearless soprano who sang Jenůfa when his production initially premiered at London’s Royal Opera House in 2021 and who will reprise her celebrated portrayal at the Met this fall. “She has an amazing power to go deep into a role without doing too much. I give a few ideas, she chooses one, and then she brings it out so clearly that it’s like a power station.”

Written at the turn of the 20th century, Jenůfa emerged during a particularly fertile period in the history of theater, as artists and audiences alike craved heightened realism. In Italy, this impulse gave rise to the hotblooded verismo melodramas, but where Puccini and his contemporaries filled the staged with outsized passions and full-throated vocal displays, Janáček took the opposite tack, developing a melodic system closely wedded to the rhythms and pitches of his mother tongue. This “speech melody” approach, as the composer called it, proliferates in Jenůfa—the first Czech opera set to a prose libretto—lending the drama an intimacy and immediacy seldom rivaled on the operatic stage.

The composer himself adapted the text from Gabriela Preissová’s groundbreaking play Její Pastorkyňa (Her Stepdaughter). Inspired by true events the author encountered while traveling in the Moravian countryside, it centers on the imperious Kostelnička (or “Sextoness,” derived from the Czech word “kostel” for “church”) and her stepdaughter, Jenůfa. Good-natured yet naïve, the girl hopes to marry the carefree drunk Števa—by whom she has become pregnant—but when his coarse half-brother, Laca, accidentally slashes Jenůfa’s face in an act of rash jealously, her beloved abandons her and their illegitimate child. Desperate to save her stepdaughter from the scorn of their closeminded community, the Kostelnička resorts to the unthinkable and drowns the infant in a river. With its frank depiction of the harshness of peasant life, the play ran afoul of conservative critics, who found it excessively brutal, but the younger avantgarde championed it as the vanguard of a new dramaturgical verisimilitude.

A mother herself, Grigorian feels a certain kinship with Jenůfa. “I think every woman, even if she doesn’t have children, can understand Jenůfa’s pain. But for me, I can’t help but project this story onto my own kids,” she says. “No matter the character, I play one woman: myself. I can only put myself in the situation and think how I would react. Being on stage is like going to confession—I cannot lie.” Alongside her as the Kostelnička, legendary dramatic soprano Nina Stemme takes on a role that recently won her plaudits when she appeared in Guth’s production at Lyric Opera of Chicago—“[She] has no shortage of vocal heft and interpretative nuance, potently conveying the stepmother’s anguish and moral conflict,” raved the Chicago Sun-Times. As Laca and Števa, tenors Allan Clayton and Sean Panikkar complete a principal cast that Guth declares “is like a dream,” with Czech maestro Tomáš Hanus making his Met debut on the podium.

“So many of the characters in this opera are trying to get out,” the director says. “Jenůfa is dreaming of another world. Laca is constantly talking about going somewhere else. The Kostelnička tries to save her stepdaughter from making the same mistakes she herself made, only to commit an act of indescribable cruelty.” This sense of being trapped in the monotony of daily life finds its visual analogue in set designer Michael Levine’s scenery, with imposing, rough-hewn wooden walls hemming in the action on all sides. “You can imagine there is a world somewhere outside, but it’s impossible to get there. It’s not just a physical wall, it’s a psychological wall as well,” Guth explains.

Composed over the course of more than a decade, Jenůfa represents an important transition point in Janáček’s career—one that Guth feels is evident in the score. “Each act has its own musical language, so we decided to create a distinct atmosphere for each scene,” he says. Musically, Act I is the most straightforward, and the director uses it to establish the rigidity of the community. When the curtain rises, rows of identical utilitarian furniture fill the stage, “as if you’re looking into 40 houses at the same time and see that everyone is doing the exact same thing,” the director says. Costume designer Gesine Völlm, too, evokes the repressive conformity of this society, clothing the characters in dark, austere garments that both suggest traditional Czech folk attire and lend a timeless quality to the story.

By contrast, in the second act—as Jenůfa and the Kostelnička have decamped to a mountain cabin to hide the pregnancy—the opera becomes a surrealist nightmare. The once orderly furniture is thrown into chaos, with mattresses strewn about to conjure an abstract frozen landscape and the iron bedframes rearranged to literally imprison the heroine. Haunting apparitions— including a larger-than-life raven, the harbinger of death—drift across the scene, while angular lighting designed by James Farncombe and video projections by rocafilm and Roland Horvath take the audience deep into the characters’ fraught inner worlds. Even the third act’s brief respite from the tragedy—as the village prepares for Jenůfa and Laca’s hastily arranged wedding—rings hollow for Guth, who sees the bright springtime blossoms blanketing the floor and colorful folk costumes as little more than a grotesque mask for the horrors seething just out of sight. It is only a matter of time before the Kostelnička’s crime is revealed— signaling her downfall but also pushing Jenůfa to finally break the vicious cycle ensnaring them all.

“It’s easy to think that this is a story taking place in some far-away village a long time ago, but for me it’s completely contemporary. It’s a parable with a universal message,” Guth says. “Jenůfa shows us that it is actually possible to forgive. And in doing so, she emerges out of the darkness, out of this impossible situation, and finally finds her way to another world.” Grigorian concurs, adding, “It’s a very, very difficult story, but it’s so beautifully written. Even in the end, of course it’s not an easy happy ending, but it offers such a powerful message about forgiveness and that, as human beings, we are made to survive.”

Christopher Browner is the Met’s Senior Editor.