Leoš Janáček

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) spent most of his life as a provincial Czech composer — a teacher, conductor, and folk music researcher in Brno — and only became internationally famous in his last five years, when his late operas suddenly revealed a composer of extraordinary dramatic power and harmonic strangeness. Born in Hukovice in the Moravian highlands, he trained at the Prague organ school and then spent decades in Brno, writing church music, conducting, and collecting folk songs from the Moravian countryside with an ethnographic rigor that would later inform every bar he composed. His early operas were unsuccessful; his orchestral works barely registered. He was nearly sixty and still unknown outside Brno when he discovered the writer Maxim Gorky and wrote the opera that would change everything: "Jenůfa" (premiere 1904, heavily revised 1907–1916).\n\nJanáček's harmonic language is like no one else's: he built his music on the rhythms and inflections of spoken Czech — its speech melodies, its emphases, its rising and falling patterns — rather than on conventional harmony or motivic development. His operas ("Jenůfa," "Káťa Kabanová," "The Cunning Little Vixen," "From the House of the Dead") are built from short, repeated musical cells that mirror the psychology of their characters: Jenůfa's obsessive, circling music, the Vixen's irrepressible vitality, the brooding atmosphere of the prison in "From the House of the Dead." His orchestral works ("The Cunning Little Vixen" suite, the "Sinfonietta," the "Lachian Dances") reveal the same folk-based, rhythmically intricate style. In his last years he wrote some of the most beautiful music of the 20th century: the two string quartets, each a portrait of a woman who had mattered to him, each a small miracle of compressed expression.\n\nStyle: Czech modernist opera; speech-melody principle; folk rhythms; late Romantic harmonic invention; intense psychological characterization. Jenůfa, Káťa Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, String Quartets as defining works.\n\nListening recommendation: "The Cunning Little Vixen" is the most immediately appealing of the operas — it's a ballet-opera about a fox's life, full of animal vitality and tender melancholy. The "Sinfonietta" is orchestral Janáček at his most celebratory and brass-heavy. The two string quartets are brief and devastating, especially the second ("Intimate Pages") dedicated to his young lover Kamila Stösslová.