Zuzana Simurdova, décembre 2006

The Czech composer Janacek was born in Hukvaldy in Moravia on 3rd July 1854. Hukvaldy now is more like a small town than the tiny village - Pod Hukvaldy - of his youth, but the school in which he was born and the adjacent church are still used. The nearby house which he purchased later in life is a museum. He was the ninth of the village schoolmaster's 14 children. At the age of eleven he was sent to the monastery school in Brno where he sang in the choir. After graduating he went back to the monastery as a teacher and deputy choirmaster, and his earliest organ and choral works date from this period. He decided to improve his musical skills with a view to a career in music and moved to Prague where he trained at the Organ School.

He had become a friend of Dvorak in 1877. In 1879 he attended the Leipzig Music Conservatoire to study composition. The next Spring he attended the Vienna Conservatoire but left after three months because of an argument with his music supervisor.

Janacek married one of his piano students, Zdenka Schulzova on 13th July 1881 about two weeks before her 16th birthday. He participated in the foundation of an organ school in Brno which opened its doors in 1882, with Janacek as director. Olga, the Janaceks' elder child, was born August 1882. For some time the couple had separated but patched up their differences by mid- 1884. In this year Janacek started the music journal "Hudebni listy". A son, Vladimir, was born in 1888, but he died of scarlet fever in November 1890. The death was a tragedy to both parents, as was their daughter's death in 1903, and did not help their difficult marriage.

In the late 1890's Janacek became interested in the melodies of sounds including human speech, animals and other sounds of nature. This interested him for the rest of his life, and he carried a notebook on which to record the music of sounds he heard. Janacek aspired to independence from the influence of the Austro-hungarian empire, and this too had a pervasive influence on his oeuvre. Jenufa , which became Janacek's first major international success and was premiered in Prague in 1916, makes use of speech melodies as do many of his later works. The work is very melodious and in places shows the stamp of Smetana.

In 1917 Janacek was holidaying in the spa resort of Luhacovice, and there he met Kamila Stosslova (nee Neumannova) who was 25 years old at the time. He became infatuated with her, and she was the inspiration of his late masterpieces. Over 700 letters record his affection for Kamila, and his second string quartet called Intimate Letters first performed in 1928, after his death on 12th August, refers to their relationship. Perhaps the opera most directly inspired by Kamila is Katya Kabanova premiered in 1921. The Cunning Little Vixen or The Adventures of Sharp-ears, a tale about the e ndless cycle of nature, could be thought of as the first opera of a trilogy about life and death. The other operas of the "trilogy", works of his final years and less approachable than earlier works, are The Makropulos Case and From the House of the Dead.

The Organ School in Brno now houses many of Janacek's papers and manuscripts. In some ways the life and art of Janacek is comparable with that of Verdi.

Although he was 47 when the 20th century began, he is essentially a 20th-cent. composer. His father was a choirmaster. At 11, Janácek entered the Augustinian monastery, Brno, as a choirboy, studying music with Pavel Krizkovský. In 1872 he became a junior master at Brno teachers' training college, and was at the Prague Organ School, 1874-6. He went to Leipzig and Vienna in search of fame and fortune but returned disappointed to Brno as music master at the training coll. His early composers met with little success, but he became deeply involved with Moravian folk music, working with Bartos on editing, harmonizing, and performing folk-songs. He also founded Brno Organ School in 1881, becoming director and remaining as organizer until 1919. In 1894 he began work on his 3rd opera, Jenufa, which was performed in Brno with considerable success in January 1904, the year of his 50th birthday. He had every right to expect it would then be staged in Prague, but some years earlier he had severely criticized a comp. by Karel Kovarovic who was now head of the Prague Opera. He refused to hear Jenufa and it took Janácek's friends until 1916 to have the work accepted for Prague-even then, Kovarovic insisted on 'editing' it himself, for which he received a royalty.

Nevertheless the opera was a triumph, as it was in Max Brod's Ger. version in Vienna and Cologne in 1918. This success at the age of 62, coupled with the formation of the Czech Republic, was a tremendous creative spur to Janácek and in the last 10 years of his life he produced a series of works full of originality, vitality, and power. The opera The Excursions of Mr Broucek (1917) and the orchestral rhapsody Taras Bulba (1918) were followed by the song-cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared, the operas Kátia Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen, the concertino for pf. and chamber orchestra, the Sinfonietta, 2 string quatuors, the wind sextet Mládi, the Glagolitic Mass, and 2 more operas, The Makropulos Affair and From the House of the Dead. Music history can offer few, if any, parallels with this upsurge of sustained inspiration-an inspiration partly derived from his love for a young married woman, Kamila Stösslová, whom he met in 1917 and to whom he wrote over 600 letters. He visited London for a concert of his works in 1926.

Janácek's early works belong to the 19th-century world of Dvorák and Smetana. But in his maturity, from Jenufa onwards, his individual style developed. His works are based on short bursts of melody, strongly rhythmical, like vocal exclamations, these deriving from his fascination by speech-rhythms. He noted in sketch-books phrases he overheard in town and countryside, particularizing the moods in which they were spoken. The melodic fragments undergo sudden changes of tonality and mood, being built by simple but unusual means to strong emotional climaxes. His harmonic language, however, was in no way innovatory. His staple fare in this respect comprised common chords, 7ths, 9ths, and the whole-tone scale, but what is unusual is his spacing and juxtaposition of chords. His orchestration is equally striking and unusual, often seeming harsh and raw but invariably being apt and effective. He liked to use instruments at the extremes of their range.

Janácek's operas have held their place in the repertory since they were first performed in Europe but only since the 1950s has the Eng. public been awakened to their originality and beauty, largely through the efforts of the conductor Charles Mackerras, who has also purged the scores of corruptions and accretions by other hands. The emotional range of the operas is wide: jealousy, hatred, love, and guilt are explored in Jenufa and Kátia Kabanová, nature and the eternal round of the seasons in the fantasy The Cunning Little Vixen, satire in The Excursions of Mr Broucek, and harsh reality in The Makropulos Affair and the extraordinary From the House of the Dead-yet in all these disparate works the principal element is a compelling faith in humankind and its grip on life.