Kate Molleson

Jenufa was Leos Janacek's first masterpiece: his first major venture into a kind of dramatic naturalism that presents people, situations and speech as they are. Written between 1894 and 1904 when the Czech composer was in his 40s, the music follows the contours of real conversation - the rhythms and melodies of dialect, the subtle inflections that happen subconsciously depending on who is speaking to whom and the unspoken innuendo of their relationship. The stripped-back emotional honesty is gripping, and can be discomfiting close to the bone.

The story of Jenufa is downright galling. Janacek based the opera on a play called Jeji pastorkyna (Her Stepdaughter) by the Czech writer Gabriela Preissova, and what's striking here is that Preissova's original work explicitly presents Jenufa through the lens of her stepmother, the Kostelnicka. The relationship between these two women is one of the most fraught, complex and commonly misrepresented in the operatic repertoire, too often oversimplified as an evil stepmother and a saintly young beauty. Annilese Miskimmon - director of a new production that opens at Scottish Opera next week - says she is determined to investigate the many tangled dimensions of this relationship, and to offer these intricate characters the nuanced reading they deserve.

The drama is set in a rural community: originally Moravia in the Czech Republic, relocated in Miskimmon's production to small-town Ireland. Jenufa has become pregnant by a man to whom she is not married - a local mill owner called Steva who doesn't stick around for long. Steva's half-brother Laca loves Jenufa in turn, but has a violently jealous streak that results in him slashing her cheek. Meanwhile the Kostelnicka fears for the shame that the baby will bring on Jenufa and attempts to save her prospects by hiding and subsequently killing the child.

The opera deals in the kind of suffocating social codes that make people do the wrong things for the right reasons. Musically it is magnificent - a taught amalgam of speech snippets and cyclical motifs conveying the constant whirl of the village mill. Incidentally, this fragmented technique was a major break from Wagner's operatic methods of slow, long-form musical development, and it took time for the world to catch up with Janacek: not until the the 1930s did Jenufa become regular repertoire in European houses, and it took the advocacy of Sir Charles Mackerras many decades later to fully establish this music in the UK.

Through happenstance, perhaps, Miskimmon has found herself becoming something of a Janacek champion herself. An eloquent, fresh-thinking director in her early 40s - originally from Belfast, now Artistic Director and General Manager of Danish National Opera (which co-produces Jenufa; the production travels to Aarhus in August) - she describes arriving in Denmark in 2012 and discovering that the country had never seen a professional production of Janacek's later opera Katya Kabanova. She made Katya the first work she programmed and directed in her new role, and the impetus to stage Jenufa has resulted from the success of that production.

"There's an emotional purity in Janacek's work," Miskimmon tells me during a rehearsal break at Glasgow's Theatre Royal. "He himself had lost a child and was writing through such pain. He wanted to describe something musically that cannot be described in words." She explains her decision to set the production in Ireland as an effort to bring the drama closer to home - "sometimes it's important to release these pieces from their history," she says. "For me, opera is about reminding us how similar we all are. The small-town issues of Jenufa apply universally and the reason we honour this story is that this kind of thing has happened to our mothers, to our sisters and our daughters way back though time. I didn't want to distance us from the drama by setting it in Eastern Europe. We can too easily make a freak show out of the religion and the culture difference." It could have equally been set, she acknowledges, in a crofting community in rural Scotland.

The rehearsal period has been emotional, she says. "In a joyous and a sad way. The amount of family stories we've talked about - scenarios involving children, babies, death, the actions of mothers and grandmothers. Add to that the fact that our Jenufa" - the Scottish soprano Lee Bisset - "is currently pregnant, and it's been a little bit like group therapy some days..."

When he announced this production, Scottish Opera's general director Alex Reedijk stressed that he was keen to present a female perspective on the work. "She's very decent, very clever," he said of Miskimmon, who had already created a stylish, hard-hitting touring production of Verdi's La traviata for the company in 2012. "And at the risk of being sexist," Reedijk continued, "Jenufa is very much a woman's story." Does Miskimmon agree with this assessment? Does she consider her gender to be relevant to her take on piece?

"It's really hard to know," she replies with a sigh. "I just feel like a human being. Sure, there might be a link between a female director looking at female characters and saying they're not two-dimensional. In opera we're constantly being told stories about women who behave in a certain way, who get punished in a certain way. But true feminism liberates men as well, so my thinking about the male characters in this opera is just as respectful of their three-dimensionality."

Is it a feminist opera? There's no straightforward answer to that, says Miskimmon. "Although it might be a horrific act, it is a profoundly feminist act for Kostelnicka to value Jenufa's life over that of her male child. Too many productions simplify these dynamics. When I see Jenufa being portrayed as a saint-like figure at the end, I feel angry and upset for all the wrong reasons. Because yet again you have a woman whose life has been destroyed but who simply turns around and forgives: she takes this man Laca who abused her and she marries him... He's a stalker: there's a lot of them in opera and they always get their women. It's such a bad message to give to both men and women. We're all watching this gorgeous girl who the life has gone out of marry this guy who slashed her in the face. And society seems ok with it. I can't let that go."

And yet the moment is sometimes played out like a happy-ever-after romance. "A romance!" Miskimmon exclaims, shaking her head in anger. "It makes me wonder what limitations do people have on their imaginations to think it's acceptable not to honour the muddier psychology of this story. Jenufa's character - all of their characters, the men and the women - are just so much more complex."

Jenufa opens April 7 at Theatre Royal, Glasgow