Leos Janácek - Biography
Leos Janacek the great Czech composer was born on July 3rd 1854 in Hukvaldy Moravia (now Czech Republic) and died on August 12th 1928 in Moravska Ostrava Czechoslovakia. Janacek’s father was local choirmaster Jiri Janacek and was taught the rudiments of music at an early age. At the age of eleven Janacek was sent to the provincial capital of Moravia Brno to study at the Abbey of Saint Thomas for practical training as a chorister and later as an organist. He continued his education at the German College at Brno and the Prague Organ School. Czechoslovakia was part of the Austrian Empire and did not exist as a sovereign country but as three separate entities Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. Janacek rather than staying in Prague the great city of Bohemia chose to start his career as a provincial choirmaster with the Men’s Chorus of Svatoplutik. Janacek continued to take posts in Brno conducting choirs and teaching in music conservatories. He felt he needed a more cosmopolitan education and in his thirties continued his studies in Leipzig and Vienna. During this period he married the daughter of the director of the Teachers College at Brno Danka Schulzova. Janacek was also composing music for the various choruses he directed, while very accomplished they do not reflect the style of Janacek’s later work and could be identified as the work of his contemporary Fibich or a lesser work of Dvorak. For all intensive purposes it looked as if Janacek as he was approaching middle age was to have a distinguished local reputation as a regional composer.
The first of his works that showed his future genius was the opera Sarka (completed 1888 with a major revision thirty years later). He had a prolonged visit to Russia in 1892 where he discovered the music of Mussorgsky and met and spent time with Tchaikovsky whose music he greatly admired. He was tremendously impressed by the Mussorgsky’s ability in documenting the speech patterns of the Russian people. From this time he changed his style from Austro/Bohemian to Slavic and absorbed all elements of Slavic culture including literary. He traveled all over Moravia to document the various unique speech patterns of its villages and towns. As the century turned he worked on his first indisputable masterpiece Jenufa (original title Her Foster Daughter) a unique folk drama about a woman’s love for two step brothers one ’bad’ one her cousin who impregnates her, a ‘good one’ who loves her, slashes her face out of jealousy and a possessive foster mother, this all comes to a harrowing conclusion. He had a personal tragedy while completing the opera when his daughter Olga died and the opera is dedicated to her. The opera was initially declined by the Prague National Theatre. Gustav Mahler evidently was interested in producing at the Vienna Opera but resigned before he could produce it (it eventually had its success in Vienna where it became a signature role for the glamorous Moravian singer Maria Jeritza). After completing Jenufa he wrote an opera entitled Fate (Osud) a fine work but which wasn’t performed during his lifetime.
Janacek was politically liberal and his next great piece 1 X 1905 a piano sonatas inspired by a protest against Austrian rule in Moravia at the Brno University that Janacek supported .Janacek during the early 1900’s was still composing prolifically for chorus but the music now has the intensity unique power of his capturing the rhythm of natural speech. He completed his next works for piano the On an Overgrown Path two sets of sketches that synthesize Moravian folk tunes around the same time he wrote the piano cycle In the Mist. The superb orchestral piece The Fiddlers Child was written in 1912 he was also to complete a challenging Violin Sonata in 1914. His last major work before the First World War was his fourth opera the satiric Excursions of Mr. Broucek which tells the adventure of a typical Czech provincial who has two dreams one where he is transported to the moon the second where he winds up in fifteenth century Bohemia during the Hussite rebellion. The comic style is reminiscent of the famed Czech novel The Good Soldier Schwiek.
Janacek had a remarkable blooming of genius past the age of sixty. Part of it may have been precipitated by a romance he started in 1917 with young married women Kamila Stosslova who he was to be in love with for the rest of his life. He wrote her hundreds of letters, on her side it seems she was flattered to receive attention from a distinguished and famous old man. But he was deeply in love with her. Janacek at the time was to start a friendship with Czech writer Max Brod who was part of Franz Kafka’s circle; as a Bohemian Jew he was fluent in German and was responsible for the translations of Janacek’s work that made it accessible to Austria and Germany and was also to become his biographer. Taras Bulba a three part tone poem based on a tale by Gogol with particularly realistic and gruesome orchestral effects was completed in 1918. The creation of Czechoslovakia after World War One was a source of pride to Janacek who was a fervent Czech patriot.
Janacek in 1919 was to write a very moving song cycle Diary of one who Disappeared about a village boy who falls in love with a Gypsy girl and abandons his family. Janacek composed two String Quartets that have definite programs the First subtitled Kreutzer Sonata after the Tolstoy novella, the Second “Intimate Letters” a love poem to Stosslova. His next opera Kata Kabanova based on a well known Russian play the Storm by Ostrovsky. The heroine Kata drew inspiration again from his love for Stosslova. This is what is followed by what I believe is his greatest opera The Cunning Little Vixen. The story is about a vixen (female fox) that poaches and eludes but entrances the town’s forest ranger. It creates a dual world of the small village and the animals of the forest. Janacek uses this parable to write a deeply felt story about the cycles of life and death.
The final two years of Janacek’s were very productive he composed in 1926 his most famous work Sinfonietta written for a gymnastic festival and whose modest title belies the overwhelming power and drive of this work for a huge orchestra with 14 trumpets in different keys delivering blazing fanfares. Its fanfare was used by Emerson, Lake & Palmers in their song Knife Edge. His next opera Makropulos Case based on a play by famed Czech playwright Karel Capek. It is built around the story of a mysterious woman Emilia Marty who ensnares men and whose secret is that she is 300 years old and is perpetually beautiful and young. Again many Janacek scholars feel that Marty is a portrait of Stosslova. In the last year of life he composed his tremendous Glagolitic Mass setting the Catholic Mass to a historic Slavic dialect and includes passages for the organ and brass of overwhelming intensity. This along with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms are the greatest sacred works of the Twentieth Century. Janacek’s last opera From the House of the Dead was an adaption Dostoyevsky’s famous novel about his Russian imprisonment. Janacek died before the final completion of the work and for years it was performed in a version by his assistant ,the conductor Bakala, many years later additional material in Janacek’s hand was found (both versions are now performed). While visiting Stosslova in Moravia he became ill and died on August 12th 1928.
Janacek outside of Czechoslovakia is a cult composer. Besides the fact that his operas are in Czech they don’t aim to please nor do they have lush melodies or set pieces for star singes but are ensemble works with musical and power but often harsh spasmodic effect both orchestral and vocally. The first success in English speaking countries occurred with performance in English at the Sadler’s Wells Company in the late 1950’s. These performances were led by a young Australian conductor Charles Mackerras who had studied in Prague with the great conductor Talich and was fully immersed in the idiom of the music. These performances created enormous enthusiasm for the Operas amongst the young progressive critics. Germany with its many opera houses had already embraced the operas in the 1950’s. Recognition in America was slower and enthusiasts were dependent on recordings from Czechoslovakia on the Supraphon label. Starting in the late 1970’s now Sir Charles Mackerras recorded his matchless cycle of the operas Along with Mackerras there were wonderful recording of the orchestral music by Czech conductors Kubelik and Ancerl and his piano music was recorded by Rudolf Firkusny who knew Janacek as a teenager among living conductors of Janacek one need to single out Simon Rattle. Janacek is tough stuff bit it is worth the effort to explore his great and original music.