Leoš Janáček (; 3 July 1854 – 12 August 1928) was a Czech composer, music theorist, folklorist, and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and other Slavic music, including Eastern European folk music, to create an original, modern musical style.
Born in Hukvaldy, Janáček demonstrated musical talent at an early age and was educated in Brno, Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna. He then returned to live in Brno, where he married his pupil Zdenka Schulzová and devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research. His earlier musical output was influenced by contemporaries such as Antonín Dvořák, but around the turn of the century he began to incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music, as well as his transcriptions of "speech melodies" of spoken language, to create a modern, highly original synthesis. The death of his daughter Olga in 1903 had a profound effect on his musical output; these notable transformations were first evident in the opera Jenůfa (often called the "Moravian national opera"), which premiered in 1904 in Brno.
In the following years, Janáček became frustrated with a lack of recognition from Prague, but this was finally relieved by the success of a revised edition of Jenůfa at the National Theatre in 1916, which gave Janáček access to the world's great opera stages. Janáček's later works are his most celebrated. They include operas such as Káťa Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen, the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, two string quartets, and other chamber works. Many of Janáček's later works were influenced by Czech and Russian literature, his pan-Slavist sentiments, and his infatuation with Kamila Stösslová.
After his death in 1928, Janáček's work was heavily promoted on the world opera stage by the Australian conductor Charles Mackerras, who also restored some of his compositions to their original, unrevised forms. In his homeland he inspired a new generation of Czech composers including several of his students. Today he is considered one of the most important Czech composers, along with Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana.
Biography 1854–1872: Early life and family
Leoš Janáček, son of schoolmaster Jiří Janacek and Amálie Janáčková (née Grulichová), was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire) on 3 July 1854. He was born with six surviving siblings, and baptised as Leo Eugen. He was a gifted child in a family of limited means, and showed an early musical talent in choral singing. His father wanted him to follow the family tradition and become a teacher, but he deferred to Janáček's obvious musical abilities.
In 1865, young Janáček enrolled as a ward of the foundation of the St Thomas's Abbey, Brno, where he took part in choral singing under Pavel Křížkovský and occasionally played the organ. One of his classmates, František Neumann, later described Janáček as an "excellent pianist, who played Beethoven symphonies perfectly in a piano duet with a classmate, under Křížkovský's supervision". Křížkovský found him a problematic and wayward student but recommended his entry to the Prague Organ School. Janáček later remembered Křížkovský as a great conductor and teacher.
1873–1880: Education and early career Janáček originally intended to study piano and organ but eventually devoted himself to composition. He wrote his first vocal compositions while choirmaster of the Svatopluk Artisan's Association (1873–1876). In 1874, he enrolled at the Prague organ school, under František Skuherský and František Blažek. His student days in Prague were impoverished; with no piano in his room, he had to make do with a keyboard drawn on his tabletop. His criticism of Skuherský's performance of the Gregorian mass was published in the March 1875 edition of the journal Cecilie and led to his expulsion from the school, but Skuherský relented, and on 24 July 1875 Janáček graduated with the best results in his class.
On his return to Brno he earned a living as a music teacher, and conducted various amateur choirs. From 1876 he taught music at Brno's Teachers' Institute. Among his pupils there was Zdenka Schulzová, daughter of Emilian Schulz, the Institute director. She was later to be Janáček's wife. In 1876, he also became a piano student of Amálie Wickenhauserová-Nerudová, with whom he co-organized chamber concertos and performed in concerts over the following two years. In February 1876, he was voted Choirmaster of the Beseda brněnská Philharmonic Society. Apart from an interruption from 1879 to 1881, he remained its choirmaster and conductor until 1888.
From October 1879 to February 1880, he studied piano, organ, and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory. While there, he composed Thema con variazioni for piano in B-flat, subtitled Zdenka's Variations. Dissatisfied with his teachers (among them Oscar Paul and Leo Grill), and denied a studentship with Camille Saint-Saëns in Paris, Janáček moved on to the Vienna Conservatory, where from April to June 1880, he studied composition with Franz Krenn. He concealed his opposition to Krenn's neo-romanticism, but he quit Josef Dachs's classes and further piano study after he was criticised for his piano style and technique. He submitted a violin sonata (now lost) to a Vienna Conservatory competition, but the judges rejected it as being "too academic". Janáček left the conservatory in June 1880, disappointed despite Franz Krenn's very complimentary personal report. One of his classmates and friends in Vienna was composer and pianist Josef Weiss.
Janáček returned to Brno where, on 13 July 1881, he married his young pupil, Zdenka Schulzová. Their daughter Olga was born in August 1882. In 1888, Olga contracted rheumatic fever, which would lead to her early death at the age of 20. Within three months of Olga's illness, their second child, a son Vladimir, was born. Vladimir lived only until November 1890, when he died of scarlet fever.
1881–1899: Folkloristic work and early compositions In 1881, Janáček founded and was appointed director of the organ school, and held this post until 1919, when the school became the Brno Conservatory. In the mid-1880s, Janáček began composing more systematically. Among other works, he created the Four male-voice choruses (1886), dedicated to Antonín Dvořák, and his first opera, Šárka (1887–1888). During this period he began to collect and study folk music, songs and dances. In the early months of 1887, he sharply criticized the comic opera The Bridegrooms, by Czech composer Karel Kovařovic, in a Hudební listy journal review: "Which melody stuck in your mind? Which motif? Is this dramatic opera? No, I would write on the poster: 'Comedy performed together with music', since the music and the libretto aren't connected to each other". Janáček's review apparently led to mutual dislike and later professional difficulties when Kovařovic, as director of the National Theatre in Prague, refused to stage Janáček's opera Jenůfa.
From the early 1890s, Janáček led the mainstream of folklorist activity in Moravia and Silesia, using a repertoire of folk songs and dances in orchestral and piano arrangements. Many of the tunes he used had been recorded by him but a second source was Xavera Běhálková who sent him 70 to 100 tunes that she had gathered from around the Haná region of central Moravia.
Most of his achievements in this field were published in 1899–1901 though his interest in folklore would be lifelong. His compositional work was still influenced by the declamatory, dramatic style of Smetana and Dvořák. He expressed very negative opinions on German neo-classicism and especially on Wagner in the Hudební listy journal, which he founded in 1884. The death of his second child, Vladimír, in 1890 was followed by an attempted opera, Beginning of the Romance (1891) and the cantata Amarus (1897).
1900–1915: Difficult years
In the first decade of the 20th century, Janáček composed choral church music including Otčenáš (Our Father, 1901), Constitues (1903) and Ave Maria (1904). In 1901, the first part of his piano cycle On an Overgrown Path was published and gradually became one of his most frequently-performed works. In 1902, Janáček visited Russia twice. On the first occasion he took his daughter Olga to Saint Petersburg, where she stayed to study Russian. Only three months later, he returned to Saint Petersburg with his wife because Olga had become very ill. They took her back to Brno, but her health worsened.
Janáček expressed his painful feelings for his daughter in a new work, his opera Jenůfa, in which the suffering of his daughter had transfigured into Jenůfa's. When Olga died in February 1903, Janáček dedicated Jenůfa to her memory. The opera was performed in Brno in 1904, with reasonable success, but Janáček felt this was no more than a provincial achievement. He aspired to recognition by the more influential Prague opera, but Jenůfa was refused there (twelve years passed before its first performance in Prague). Dejected and emotionally exhausted, Janáček went to Luhačovice spa to recover. There he met Kamila Urválková, whose love story supplied the theme for his next opera, Osud (Destiny).
In 1905, Janáček attended a demonstration in support of a Czech university in Brno, where the violent death of František Pavlík, a young joiner, at the hands of the police inspired his piano sonata, 1. X. 1905 (From The Street). The incident led him to further promote the anti-German and anti-Austrian ethos of the Russian Circle, which he had co-founded in 1897 and which would be officially banned by the Austrian police in 1915. In 1906, he approached the Czech poet Petr Bezruč, with whom he later collaborated, composing several choral works based on Bezruč's poetry. These included Kantor Halfar (1906), Maryčka Magdónova (1908), and 70.000 (1909).
Janáček's life in the first decade of the 20th century was complicated by personal and professional difficulties. He still yearned for artistic recognition from Prague. He destroyed some of his works, others remained unfinished. Nevertheless, he continued composing, and would create several remarkable choral, chamber, orchestral and operatic works, the most notable being the 1914 cantata, Věčné evangelium (The Eternal Gospel), Pohádka (Fairy tale) for 'cello and piano (1910), the 1912 piano cycle V mlhách (In the Mists), his violin sonata, and his first symphonic poem Šumařovo dítě (A Fiddler's Child). His fifth opera, Výlet pana Broučka do měsíce (The Excursions of Mr. Brouček to the Moon and to the 15th Century), composed from 1908 to 1917, has been characterized as the most "purely Czech in subject and treatment" of all of Janáček's operas.
1916–1928: Breakthrough and masterworks In 1916, he started a long professional and personal relationship with theatre critic, dramatist and translator Max Brod.C Susskind, Janáček and Brod. Yale University Press, 1985, In the same year, Jenůfa, revised by Kovařovic, was finally accepted by the National Theatre. Its performance in Prague in 1916 was a great success, and brought Janáček his first acclaim.
Following the Prague première, he began a relationship with singer Gabriela Horváthová, which led to his wife Zdenka's attempted suicide and their "informal" divorce. A year later (1917), he met Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman 38 years his junior, who was to inspire him for the remaining years of his life. He conducted an obsessive and (on his side at least) passionate correspondence with her, of nearly 730 letters. From 1917 to 1919, deeply inspired by Stösslová, he composed The Diary of One Who Disappeared. As he completed its final revision, he began his next 'Kamila' work, the opera Káťa Kabanová.