Composer
Leoš Janáček
The late bloomer whose greatest music came in his sixties and seventies.
Leoš Janáček is one of the great late bloomers of music. For most of his life he was a provincial teacher and choirmaster in the Moravian city of Brno, and international fame came only in his sixties. Then, in his last decade, he produced an astonishing run of masterpieces - operas, quartets, and orchestral works - full of raw emotion and startling originality.
Life in brief
Janáček was born in 1854 in Hukvaldy, a village in northern Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic, the son of a poor schoolmaster. At eleven he became a choirboy at the Augustinian monastery in Brno, the city that would be his home for the rest of his life. He studied at the organ school in Prague and briefly in Leipzig and Vienna, then returned to Brno, where he founded an organ school, taught, conducted choirs, and collected the folk music of Moravia.
His opera Jenůfa, a dark tale of village life, was premiered in Brno in 1904 but rejected for years by the opera house in Prague. When it was finally staged there in 1916, it was a triumph, and soon it was being performed in Vienna and across Europe.
In 1917, aged sixty-three, Janáček met Kamila Stösslová, a married woman nearly forty years younger. His passionate, largely one-sided love for her inspired the extraordinary creative surge of his last years: he wrote her hundreds of letters, and she became the hidden muse of several of his operas and his second string quartet. He died in 1928, after catching a chill while on a holiday near his birthplace.
Music and style
Janáček's music sounds like no one else's. For decades he jotted down the melodies of people's speech - in the street, at the market, in conversation - convinced that the rise and fall of spoken words revealed their emotions. His vocal lines grew from these "speech melodies," and his instrumental music is built from short, repeated motifs, sudden contrasts, and blocks of sharply colored sound. The influence of Moravian folk music runs through everything.
Key works
- Sinfonietta (1926) - a brilliant orchestral work opening with a fanfare for a large brass band.
- Jenůfa (1904) - his breakthrough opera, a story of jealousy, shame, and forgiveness.
- The Cunning Little Vixen (1924) - an enchanting opera about a fox and the cycle of nature, based on an illustrated newspaper serial.
- Glagolitic Mass (1926) - a fiery, pagan-sounding Mass in Old Church Slavonic, with a wild organ solo.
- String Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters" (1928) - a passionate musical love letter to Kamila. See string quartet.
- On an Overgrown Path - a cycle of intimate, nostalgic piano pieces.
Legacy
Janáček is now regarded as one of the most original composers of the early 20th century, and his operas, including Káťa Kabanová and The Makropulos Affair, are staged worldwide. The Sinfonietta even reached a new audience through Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. See also Dvořák and the 20th century.
Where to start listening: the opening fanfare of the Sinfonietta, then the end of The Cunning Little Vixen and the "Intimate Letters" quartet.