Janáček, Leoš

Janáček, Leoš (1854-1928), Czech composer, the most eminent of the early 20th century, known for his style derived from Moravian folk music. Born in Hukvaldy and trained as a choirboy in Brünn (now Brno), he later studied in St Petersburg, in Leipzig, and in Vienna. He directed the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (1881-1888); founded and taught in the Brünn Organ School (1882-1920); and taught at the State Conservatory of Prague (1920-1925). He also collected folk music and briefly published a folk-music journal. His international reputation was established with his opera Jenůfa (1904, revised 1916), which, like his Glagolitic Mass (1926), was influenced by the rhythms and accents of the Moravian language.

Janáček is thought of as a 20th-century composer, even though he was 47 when the century began. This is partly because he only arrived at his mature style—influenced by Moravian folk music and utilizing his theory of “speech melody”, in which melodies were derived from the characteristic inflections of the spoken language—in Jenůfa. Over the following 16 years he produced the strange but compelling piano sonata 1.X.1905 Z Ulice (1905; 1.10.1905 From the Street), written in response to the death of a student during a demonstration; the beautiful groups of piano miniatures On an Overgrown Path (1901-1908) and In the Mists (1912); and a series of great male-voice choruses for the Moravian Teachers’ Choir. However, it was the 1916 Prague premiere of Jenůfa that transformed his reputation.

Following this, in his seventh decade, Janáček produced an astonishing burst of creativity, partly owing to an unrequited infatuation with a married woman, Kamila Stösslová, 38 years his junior; and partly to an upsurge of nationalist feeling at the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918. As a result, most of the works for which he is best known were written in the last ten years of his life. This period saw the two string quartets (respectively subtitled The Kreutzer Sonata, 1923, and Intimate Letters, 1928), the wind sextet Mládí (1925), the orchestral Taras Bulba (1925) and Sinfonietta (1926), the Glagolitic Mass, and five more operas. These include the masterly works Káťa Kabanová (1921), Příhody Lišky Bystroušky (1923; The Cunning Little Vixen), and Vèc Makropulos (1925; The Makropulos Case), which, like Jenůfa, all centre on female roles. In the first two, Janáček probably saw Kamila in his heroines, but he perhaps identified himself, endlessly yearning for Kamila, with the extraordinary Emilia Marty of Vèc Makropulos, a 300-year old opera singer who longs to find rest in death.

Janáček’s extraordinary, unique musical language might best be described as Expressionist. Unlike the Expressionist music of the Second Viennese School, Janáček’s is tonal, but frequently moves fluidly between keys. Jagged ostinatos underpin technically difficult instrumental and vocal lines, using unusual sound effects. The music generally avoids the kind of progressive thematic development common to Western art music since Mozart and Haydn, instead presenting a rhapsodic collage of short musical gestures of searing emotional impact. In the String Quartet no. 2, Intimate Letters, Janáček based many of the musical motifs on speech melodies derived from phrases in his love letters to Kamila.