Leos Janácek
(Born; Hukvaldy, 3 July 1854; Died; Moravská Ostrava, 12
Aug 1928). Czech composer. He was a chorister at the Augustinian 'Queen' s' Monastery in
Old Brno, where the choirmaster Pavel Krizkovský took a keen interest in his musical
education. After completing his basic schooling he trained as a teacher and, except for a
period at the Prague Organ School, he spent 1872-9 largely as a schoolteacher and choral
conductor in Brno. In 1879 he enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory, where he developed his
interest in composition under the strict and systematic supervision of Leo Grill. After a
month in Vienna he returned to Brno in May 1880; there he became engaged to one of his
pupils, Zdenka Schulzová, whom he married in July 1881.
In Brno, Janácek took up his former activities, and he
also founded and directed an organ school and edited a new musical journal, Hudební
listy. After composing his first opera, Sárka, he immersed himself in
collecting and studying Moravian folk music, which bore fruit in a series of orchestral
suites and dances and in a one-act opera, The Beginning of a Romance. This was
favourably received in 1894, but Janácek withdrew it after six performances and set to
work on Jenufa.
During the long period of composition of Jenufa
(1894-1903), Janácek rethought his approach to opera and to composition in general. He
largely abandoned the number opera, integrated folksong firmly into his music and
formulated a theory of 'speech-melody', based on the natural rhythms and the rise and fall
of the Czech language, which was to influence all his ensuing works and give them a
particular colour through their jagged rhythms and lines. Jenufa was soon followed
by other operatic ventures, but his reputation in Brno was as a composer of instrumental
and choral music and as director of the Organ School. Outside Moravia he was almost
unknown until the Prague premičre of Jenufa in 1916. The creative upsurge of a man
well into his 60s is explained partly by the success of Jenufa in Prague and
abroad, partly by his patriotic pride in the newly acquired independence of his country,
and perhaps most of all by his passionate, though generally distant, attachment to Kamila
Stösslová, the young wife of an antique dealer in Pisek, Bohemia.
Between 1919 and 1925 Janácek composed three of his
finest operas, all on subjects with special resonances for him: Katya Kabanova with
its neglected wife who takes a lover, The Cunning Little Vixen with its sympathetic
portrayal of animals (and particularly the female fox), and The Makropoulos Affair
with the 'ageless' woman who fascinates all men. Each was given first in Brno and soon
after in Prague. His 70th birthday was marked by a doctorate from the Masaryk University
in Brno. Early in 1926 he wrote the Sinfonietta for orchestra, characteristic in its
blocks of sound and its forceful repetitions, and later that year his most important
choral work, the Glagolitic Mass. While performance of his music carried his fame
abroad, he started work on his last opera, From the House of the Dead, which he did
not live to see performed. It received its premičre in April 1930 in a version prepared
by his pupils Bretislav Bakala and Osvald Chlubna.
Janácek's reputation outside Czechoslovakia and
German-speaking countries was first made as an instrumental composer. He has since come to
be regarded not only as a Czech composer worthy to be ranked with Smetana and
Dvorák, but also as one of the most substantial and original opera composers of the
20th century.
Operas Sárka (early, perf. 1925); The
Beginning of a Romance (1894); Jenufa (1904); Osud (1903-7, perf. 1958); The Excursions of
Mr Broucek (1920); Katya Kabanova (1921); The Cunning Little Vixen (1924); The Makropoulos
Affair (1926); From the House of the Dead (1930) Vocal music Glagolitic Mass (1926); Diary
of One who Disappeared, cycle (1919); cantatas, choruses, sacred pieces
Orchestral music Taras Bulba (1918);
Sinfonietta (1926) Piano music Sonata 1.x.1905 (1905); On the Overgrown Path (1908); In
the mists (by 1912)
Instrumental music Str Qt no.1, 'Kreutzer
Sonata' (1923); Str Qt no.2, 'Intimate Letters' (1928); Mládí [Youth], fl/pic, ob, cl, b
cl, hn, bn (1924)
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