The main event: The Adventures Of Mr Broucek

HE loves beer, sausages and making lewd jokes. He's coarse, he swears and he farts. At first glance, Mr Broucek doesn't sound like someone you'd immediately warm to, and even composer Leos Janácek set out to make the main character in his opera the sort of person you would want to strangle.

Scottish audiences will have a rare chance to decide for themselves when the Scottish Opera co-production with Opera North, The Adventures Of Mr Broucek, opens this week in Glasgow. Not only are performances of Jancek's operas in general rather thin on the ground, but those of his only satirical opera are even rarer. Since Mr Broucek was first premiered in Prague in 1920, the opera has only had about 20 new productions throughout the world, with at least half of those in the Czech Republic.

Scottish Opera has played an important role in introducing Jancek to UK audiences, starting a long-term cycle of his operas in 1977 with Jenufa translated by David Pountney and conducted that year by Richard Armstrong. The Adventures Of Mr Broucek is the last in the cycle, although Scottish Opera is keen to stage more.

The director of this production, John Fulljames, believes Jancek is the giant of 20th-century opera. "For people who have seen a Jancek opera, he is a god, yet it has taken a century for his work to catch on. His operas found a way 100 years ago of being entirely modern as he looked to develop the form, drawing on material that wasn't the usual staple of operatic narratives. He picked his stories not from romantic novels but from newspapers or cartoons, or in the case of Mr Broucek, satirical novels."

Indeed the opera is based on two of Svatopluk Cech's satirical novels which follow the boring, philistine Mr Broucek from Prague on dream-like journeys, first to the Moon and then back in time to Prague in 1420, a defining moment in Czech history when the Hussites rose up against the Holy Roman Empire. The latter story was added at the 11th hour by Jancek, who by this time had worked his way through at least seven librettists since 1908, when he first decided to write the opera.

Given that there are three different worlds in the opera, Fulljames says his first decision was to create a home world with a particular vocabulary which could be distorted in each of the dream worlds. "We set the home world in 1968, when man is on the brink of landing on the Moon. It was the last moment in which you could have a Moon fantasy. There was also this sense of artistic flowering in the Prague Spring of 1968 as Alexander Dubcek tried to break away from the USSR. So we have a world where the stakes are very high with a dream on the Moon looking west towards flower power, the US and the capitalist dream of mass-produced art and consumption then the medieval dream looking east towards dogma and fundamentalism and defending your country against the big shadow."

Language in opera can be a contentious issue, and for Jancek, where the marriage of text and music is crucial, some purists may question the decision to stage the opera in English. Fulljames, who worked with conductor Martin Andre to produce the English translation and surtitles, argues that it's precisely for this reason that the opera should be sung in English. "Jancek writes specifically to capture speech melody in his writing, which is often used as an argument for performing his operas in Czech. Yet the reason he did that was so that the text would communicate itself directly to an audience, so we would argue that's exactly why the opera should be performed in the language of the audience.'

Andre agrees, pointing out that the work is such a huge visual, aural and intellectual assault it would be an added complication to try to understand it in a foreign language. "There is no let-up in the music, which is very concise, there's no room to dwell; you're straight on to the next thing as none of the text is repeated. The music is incredibly pithy but complex, a bit like a blanket so you really have to fine-tune the colours. There's a lot of top and a lot of bottom, so you have squealing piccolos and farting tubas at the same time."

Theatre Royal, Glasgow, Thursday and Saturday; Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 14 and 16 April. www.scottishopera.org.uk