Leos Janacek

Leos Janacek was a Czech composer musical theorist folklorist, publicist and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and all Slavic folk music to create an original, modern musical style. Until 1895 he devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research and his early musical output was influenced by contemporaries such as Antonin Dvorak. His later, mature works incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music in a modern, highly original synthesis, first evident in the opera Jenufa, which was premiered in 1904 in Brno. The success of Jenufa at Prague in 1916 gave Janacek access to the world’s great opera stages. Janacek’s later works are his most celebrated. They include the symphonic poem Sinfonietta, the oratorial Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, string quartets, other chamber works and operas. He is considered to rank with Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana, as one of the most important Czech composers. With an instinct for dramatic timing worthy of his subject, John Tyrrell lifts the curtain on the second volume of his biography of Leos Janacek, Tsar of the Forests, just as the central event of the composer’s career is about to take place. The Prague unveiling began Janacek’s rapid transformation from respected provincial choirmaster and pedagogue to internationally renowned composer. But as Tyrrell brilliantly shows, the ripples spread still wider, setting processes in train that left no aspect of Janacek’s complex personal and professional life unaffected. Many of the relationships that became crucial to Janacek were established or profoundly altered by that production. Brod brought Janacek to the attention of an audience far wider than the Prague–Brno axis where he was hitherto known. A still more significant relationship arising from the Prague Jenufå was the one that Janacek struck up with the flamboyant soprano Gabriela Horvatova who played the part of the Kostelnicka, Jenufa’s stepmother. Horvatova is not even mentioned in the biographical article on Janacek that Tyrrell himself contributed to the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Whatever the truth of this, Janacek’s grief and long-suppressed paternal instincts would surface with increasing frequency and in strange ways as he entered old age: the curious incident of Horvatova phantom pregnancies Janacek reported to Zdenka on numerous occasions that the singer was expecting his child was followed in the composer’s final years by increasingly fevered fantasies that Kamila Stosslova would bear his son. Janacek composed very little in the twelve years that separated the Brno and Prague premieres of Jenufå, and even after his National Theatre triumph did not immediately rediscover his fluency. For the rest of Janacek’s life, she remained his main correspondent and the object of his infatuation. Making no demands and seeming quite uninterested in Janacek’s compositions, Kamila Stosslova turns out to have been his ideal muse: Janacek needed an empty canvas for his fantasies. Both the Kamila Stosslova that Janacek imagined and the works this imaginary person inspired were Janacek’s creation. This stable state of affairs lasted for almost a decade, allowing Janacek to preserve mainly good relations with Zdenka with typical self centredness, Janacek argued that Zdenka should be grateful to Kamila since she had been able to save him from that terrible perverted woman Horvatova. David Stossel’s views on the relationship are unclear, though he remained sufficiently close to Janacek to enlist his help in securing a Czech passport. Tyrrell argues convincingly that “tragicomedy” rather than tragedy is the prevailing mode of Janacek’s late work, and points out the affinity of his operatic grammar with cinema. Perhaps the biggest absence is of any lengthy consideration of Janacek’s instrumentation. It would have been interesting to have more of Tyrrell’s views on how Janacek wrote for instruments and often against them. Tyrrell’s style is readable and unpretentious, with occasional but effective use of colloquialism: it is good to read that Janacek was bugged by Horvatova failure to respond to his letters, and that the composer’s feuilleton style is off the wall.

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