It was not until his third opera Jenufa that Leos Janacek succeeded to affirm himself as one of the leading opera composers of the 20th century. After the opening night in Brno in 1904, this powerful music drama about a female churchwarden and her stepdaughter became his most performed work. From a musical aspect, Jenufa is a fascinating connecting element between the romanticism of B. Smetana and a very modern idiom, spiced with Janacek’s love for folk tradition. The opera’s libretto was written by the composer after a contemporary drama of Gabriele Preiss (1890) who was an immense advocate of social realism. In the model for Jenufa, he dealt with the problems of the position of women in a conservative society of rural Moravia. The Zagreb audience had the opportunity to acquaint itself with this opera far back in 1920. Its last staging in the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb took place in 1946.