Leoš Janáček

The early 20th century witnessed a remarkable flowering of music in east central Europe, associated with a handful of key modernist composers: Leoš Janáček in the Czech lands, Béla Bartók in Hungary, Karol Szymanowski in Poland, and George Enescu in Romania. In the case of Janáček, this awakening occurred in later life with a group of works composed at the turn of the century, culminating in the opera Jenůfa. This was completed in 1904, when the composer was already 50 years old. His best-known music was composed after Jenůfa and includes a series of operas and chamber works that are standard repertory today. The singularity of Janáček’s mature musical idiom—it is instantly recognizable—was partly due to his close study of speech rhythms and inflections, and the translation of these into melodic contours infuses his instrumental and vocal works alike. Harmonic settings of these contours, while still centered on the triad, extend well beyond the boundaries of tonality. 

The First Fifty Years: In the Shadow of Dvořák

Janáček was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, which was then part of the Czech lands of the Habsburg Empire and is today in the Czech Republic. He studied initially in the Moravian capital, Brno, and apart from a year at the Prague Organ School, remained in Brno until his mid-twenties. There followed two years of formal study (1779–1881)—first at the Leipzig Conservatory and then the Vienna Conservatory—but neither institution suited him, and he returned to Brno, where he settled into a provincial round of teaching and choral conducting. His main source of income was as Director of the Brno Organ School, and later the Conservatory, where he lived on site with his wife, Zdenka. He composed prolifically from the mid-1880s onwards, in a late-Romantic idiom influenced by his great Czech predecessors, Bedřich Smetana and (especially) Antonín Dvořák. At the same time, in collaboration with the ethnologist František Bartoš (1837–1906), he made a detailed study of Moravian folk music, and the modal basis of this music increasingly influenced his own pre-Jenůfa compositions. These included a series of orchestral dances and dance suites, the ballet score Rákoš Rákoczy of 1891, and the folk opera Počatek románu (The Beginning of a Romance) of 1894.

Middle Period: Jenůfa and Stylistic Maturity

Around the turn of the century, Janáček’s growing interest in “speech melody” resulted in a group of works in which a more distinctive voice emerged, notably the cantata Amarus (1897) and several of the 15 piano miniatures that constitute Po zarostlém chodníčku (On an Overgrown Path, 1900–11). This voice took definitive form in Jenůfa (1894–1903). Yet the path-breaking qualities of this opera, in which tragedy is located in the village rather than the court, were not recognized on its first performance in Brno in 1904. Nor was the work accepted for performance on the more prestigious stage of the National Theatre in Prague. Janáček’s disappointment at this lack of wider recognition was immense, and it was compounded by difficulties in his personal life—the death of his daughter Olga and growing problems in his marriage.

None of this stemmed the flow of compositions, however, as Jenůfa unlocked his creativity and helped establish his unique profile as an opera composer. In the tradition of the 19th-century Russian masters Alexander Dargomyzhsky and Modest Mussorgsky, he committed to a Realist aesthetic, in which emotional truth is sought through speech melody (his surviving notebooks are replete with melodic notations of everyday speech), and to Literaturoper, an opera genre in which the libretto is closely aligned with, and sometimes all but identical to, the original literary source. This aesthetic, and especially the speech melody, also influenced his instrumental music at this time, notably the piano cycle V Mlách (In the Mists, 1912), the Violin Sonata (1914), and Šumařovo ditě (The Fiddler’s Child) for Violin and Orchestra (1914).

Janáček: Sonata for Violin and Piano

Late Period: The Final Decade and International Acclaim

1916 was a seminal year for Janáček. Partly due to his developing friendship with the theater director Max Brod, Jenůfa was finally produced to great acclaim in Prague, and from that point onwards the composer became much sought after, both domestically and internationally. The majority of his most highly valued works date from these later years, including the song cycle Zápisník zmizelého (The Diary of One Who Disappeared, 1919), the opera Kat’a Kabanová (1920–21) and the String Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters” (1928), all three of which were inspired by his infatuation with Kamila Stösslová. She was a married woman, 37 years his junior, who befriended Janáček and his wife, and successfully kept the composer at arm’s length, though in due course she came to accept and even appreciate that he loved her. (He poured out his heart to her in more than 700 letters.) It was while she and her son Otto were visiting him in July 1928, in his recently acquired cottage retreat in Hukvaldy, that Janáček caught the pneumonia from which he died a few weeks later. He had been making a fair copy of Act 3 of his last opera, Z Mrtvého domu (From the House of the Dead, 1927–28).

Janáček: Quartet No. 2 for Strings, “Intimate Letters”

Legacy

In his homeland, Janáček’s direct musical influence was limited, first by the prevalence of neoclassical styles in the interwar period, and then by the politics of the post-World War II era. His international stature was such that, despite the anti-modernist strictures of socialist realism, the communist authorities in what was then Czechoslovakia were unable to ignore him. But they were selective in their appreciation and denigrated the focus on individual tragedy in Kat’a Kabanová, and the despair and pessimism of From the House of the Dead. Everything changed during the 1990s, and in the Czech Republic today Janáček is celebrated as a national paragon. In the wider world, his reputation has long been secure, not least thanks to the collaborative promotional efforts of the musicologist John Tyrrell and the conductor Charles Mackerras, and to the support of modernist figures such as Pierre Boulez.

Watching and Listening

Of the works represented in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Digital Archive, it may be worth starting with the selections from Book I of On an Overgrown Path. These piano miniatures date from 1900 to 1911 and occupy a midway point between Janáček’s earlier and later musical styles. Note, especially in No. 10, how what seem to be mere accompaniment figures emerge into the foreground to take on new meanings, becoming motifs in their own right. You can hear this too in Pohádka (Fairy-tale) for Cello and Piano (the formal discontinuities of its second movement are also characteristic), and in the two movements, respectively impassioned and elegiac, of the Sonata I.X.1905.

The last two movements of Mládí (Youth) for wind sextet, composed in 1924, exemplify the continuing folkloric input to Janáček’s music, with the third movement alternating dance and song, and the fourth displaying the kind of youthful exuberance one has no right to expect of a composer who was in his late sixties at the time of its composition. In all these pieces the driving force is theme or motif, invariably speech-based. The motif generates its own formal and harmonic contexts, resulting in a musical discourse that is far from orthodox (often constant repetitions of short, “unfinished” phrases that gather momentum cumulatively), but invariably compelling. Nowhere is this clearer than in the String Quartet No. 2, in which a handful of related motifs, transformed in various ways across the four movements, shape the entire musical substance. Listen for a special moment at the heart of the second movement. Following a rather frenzied episode, the mood is stilled, and the first violin almost literally “speaks” to us, in a passage marked espressivo and rubato, with heartfelt eloquence.

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