LeošJanáček

In August 1865, Janáček’s mother took her eleven-year-old son to Brno and left him at the Augustinian monastery. His father, a schoolmaster in Hukvaldy, was ill, and the family needed the scholarship. Nearly sixty years later, in his autobiographical sketch of 1924, Janáček recalled “a hard bed, harder bread. No caresses.” The monastery’s choirmaster, Pavel Křížkovský, taught him music. The boy sang at services, went to concerts and the theatre, and learned the profession that kept him in Brno for the rest of his life.

He trained as a teacher, studied at the Prague Organ School, and attended the conservatories in Leipzig and Vienna. In Prague he also formed a lasting friendship with Dvořák. Back in Brno he taught, conducted the Beseda choir and organised concerts; in 1881 he founded the Organ School, which he directed until 1919. His programmes included Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and Dvořák’s Stabat mater.

1881–⁠1903Olga, Vladimír and Jenůfa

He married his former piano pupil Zdeňka Schulzová in 1881. They had a daughter, Olga, and a son, Vladimír, who died aged two in 1890. Olga died in February 1903, at twenty, while her father was finishing Jenůfa. The marriage continued. In his 1924 recollection Janáček imagined binding the opera “with the black ribbon of the long illness, pain and lamentation of my daughter Olga and my little boy Vladimír”. He dedicated it to Olga.

He had begun Jenůfa in 1894, adapting Gabriela Preissová’s play Její pastorkyňa (Her Stepdaughter), and he kept her prose. In the play a young woman bears a child outside marriage, and her stepmother, the Kostelnička, drowns the baby to save her from disgrace. The child is found beneath the melting ice on Jenůfa’s wedding day. In the first act a xylophone plays a repeated figure beneath the singing, representing the mill wheel. In the last act Jenůfa forgives the woman who killed her son, and the opera ends with Jenůfa and Laca together.

The notebooksJanáček’s speech melodies

He had already spent years collecting Moravian songs with František Bartoš, and in time he brought a phonograph into the work. Their major joint collection appeared in 1901. In his own music the short phrases and uneven accents remained long after he stopped relying on folk-song arrangements. His male choruses on poems by Petr Bezruč deal with poverty, dispossession and national oppression, and were sung by the Moravian Teachers’ Choir. Writing to Bezruč on 1 October 1924, he recalled making from the poems “a storm of rage, despair and pain in sound”.

1904–⁠16Jenůfa in Brno and Prague

Brno staged Jenůfa on 21 January 1904. Prague had refused it, and twelve more years passed before it reached the capital. Meanwhile Janáček continued teaching and composing in Moravia. His piano sonata 1. X. 1905 commemorated František Pavlík, who was killed during demonstrations for a Czech university in Brno. Janáček destroyed its final movement and later threw away the rest. The first two movements survive because the pianist Ludmila Tučková had kept a copy of them.

1917–⁠28Kamila and the theatre

At Luhačovice in 1917 he met Kamila Stösslová, a married woman thirty-seven years younger than he was. He wrote to her for the rest of his life, associated her with the women in his operas and imagined, in his letters, a life they shared. On 1 February 1928 he announced a new quartet: “Our life will be in it.” He first called it Love Letters and planned to use a viola d’amore. It became Intimate Letters, with an ordinary viola, which has many exposed passages.

Janáček had long read Russian literature. Ostrovsky’s The Storm became Káťa Kabanová, first performed in 1921; its heroine looks for love outside her marriage and is driven to her death. Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata became the First String Quartet in 1923. Its bowing can change within seconds from a sung line to a scraping, rapid repetition. In the opera The Makropulos Affair (1926), after Karel Čapek, a legal dispute leads to the story of a woman who has lived for three centuries.

The Cunning Little Vixen came from the newspaper. The Janáčeks’ servant Marie Stejskalová remembered laughing over Stanislav Lolek’s drawings and Rudolf Těsnohlídek’s story in Lidové noviny, then handing the paper to her employer. The opera reached the Brno stage in 1924. Among the animals, the foxes marry and the hens squabble. The humans drink, and Harašta shoots the vixen. In the final scene the Forester meets a little frog, which has to explain to him that it is the grandson of the one he remembers.

The last summersSinfonietta, Glagolitic Mass, last opera

The Sinfonietta of 1926 began as a fanfare for the Sokol gymnastics festival. Janáček had in mind a military band he had heard in Písek. The opening is scored for nine trumpets, two bass trumpets, two tenor tubas and timpani, and the full orchestra joins these instruments when the fanfare returns at the end. That summer at Luhačovice he also wrote most of the Glagolitic Mass, a setting of Old Church Slavonic words for soloists, chorus, orchestra and organ. The tenor part has high, exposed phrases, and near the end the organ has a movement to itself.