Leoš Janáček

Czech composer

• Born: July 3, 1854
• Birthplace: Hukvaldy, Moravia, Austrian Empire (now in Austria)
• Died: August 12, 1928
• Place of death: Ostrava, Czechoslovakia (now in Czech Republic)

As the originator of a unique method of musical composition utilizing Moravian speech patterns and folk music, Janáček created the ideal medium for the musical expression of Czech folk culture and aspirations. He became one of the few composers to integrate folk art into formal European music.

Early Life

Leoš Janáček (LEE-ohsh YAHN-eh-chehk) was born in the tiny village of Hukvaldy, Moravia, which is now in Czech Republic. He was the fifth of nine children born into an extremely poor family that, nevertheless, had a long tradition in the music profession: his father, grandfather, and several other ancestors were all music teachers. At age eleven, he, too, was sent to begin preparation for this profession at the choir school of the Augustinian monastery in Brno, then the capital of Moravia. He received his lodging, food, and training in return for playing organ and singing in the choir. An important formative influence on Janáček was the conductor of the choir, Moravia’s leading composer and music teacher, Pavel Krizkowsky.

In 1866, Janáček’s father died, leaving the family in even deeper poverty. Since going home would have added another mouth to feed, the boy stayed in school, earning a state scholarship to the Czech Teachers’ Institute in September, 1869. An outstanding pupil, Janáček was graduated with honors in music, history, and geography in July, 1872, and went on to serve the compulsory two years of unpaid service in one of the schools of the institute. Already, he had begun to display the phenomenal energy that characterized his entire life, for, in addition to his unpaid service, he succeeded Krizkowsky at the Brno choir school when the latter was transferred. The following year, he was also appointed choirmaster for a workingmen’s choral society, the Svatopluk, for which he wrote his first secular compositions, four-part settings of folk texts. In the autumn of 1874, he was granted leave from his positions to begin a three-year course of study at the Prague Organ School, but he was so poor that he could not even afford to rent a piano on which to practice. Even so, he composed several choral and organ works during this time.

Completely destitute, Janáček returned to Brno in 1874 and resumed all of his previous duties there. His first published work was an offertory, Exaudi Deus, written for the monastery choir. Soon, he acquired yet another appointment, becoming conductor of a middle-class choral society, the Beseda. In this position, as in all the others, Janáček successfully strove both to improve the quality of performance and to broaden the repertoire of the group. He also championed the works of Antonín Dvořák, the first, and best-known, of the three great Czech nationalist composers. Janáček and Dvořák became friends, and the two went on a walking tour of Bohemia together in 1877. It is likely that Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings was the inspiration for Janáček’s Suite for String Orchestra (1877) and Idyll for Strings (1878).

In 1879, Janáček returned to school, first to the Leipzig Conservatory, then in Vienna. He was once more mired in poverty, and, though he polished his composition technique during this period, he was extremely unhappy. Perhaps the most important reason was that, being without money, he could not afford to marry his fiancé, one of his own piano pupils. In May, 1880, he was (finally) certified by the ministry of education as a fully qualified teacher of music, and, returning to Brno to resume all of his former activities, he was able to get married in July, 1881.

Life’s Work

It is difficult to determine exactly where Janáček’s youth ends and his adulthood begins: He started working very early in life and continued almost to the moment he died. In December, 1881, he founded the Brno Organ School, with which he was associated as director and teacher for nearly forty years. From 1886 to 1902, he also taught at the Brno gymnasium (secondary school) and continued to expand and improve the Beseda, establishing singing, violin, and piano classes, and even adding a permanent orchestra. In 1884, he founded and edited a journal to review the productions of the new Provisional Czech Theater, which had just opened in Brno. Overburdened by these responsibilities, he stopped composing for about four years, but, in 1885, he resumed with a series of choral works, some of which demonstrated the startling changes of key that later often characterized his music.

It was not until 1887 that Janáček began working on his first opera, Šárka , using a verse libretto based on Czech mythology by Julius Zeyer. Unfortunately, Janáček did not seek Zeyer’s permission to use the text until after he had composed the music. Since Zeyer had intended the libretto for Dvořák (who did nothing with it), he refused to release it to Janáček, and Šárka was not staged until 1925.

The following year marked an important juncture in Janáček’s career: He accepted the invitation of another teacher at the Brno gymnasium to visit northern Moravia to collect folk songs for publication. Collecting and publishing folk songs was very popular among nineteenth century composers, many of whom used elements of them in their works. For the next three years, Janáček not only helped edit several volumes of the folk songs of his native land but also composed a group of popular works based on them. These included the Lachian Dances, the Suite for Orchestra, a folk ballet, and a one-act opera entitled The Beginning of a Romance, which had a modestly successful production in 1894.

Janáček’s work with folk songs, as well as the positive reception given The Beginning of a Romance, inspired him to begin what is regarded as his greatest work, a serious opera in a Moravian folk setting entitled Janůfa . Unlike Janáček’s other works, Janůfa required an extremely long gestation, nearly nine years (1894-1903), during which Janáček gradually transformed his whole approach to composition. In about 1897, he began to formulate a theory of melodic structure based on the speech patterns of the peasantry of Moravia. Coming himself from a village background of poverty, Janáček identified strongly with the attitudes, problems, and struggles of his people, perhaps especially with their desire for a nation of their own.

Moravia, as well as its western neighbor Bohemia, were at this time parts of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by the Habsburg monarchy and dominated by ethnic Germans and Hungarians. The many Slavic groups of the empire had long chafed under Habsburg rule. In the nineteenth century, the success of nationalism as an ideology and unifying force in France, Italy, and Germany led Moravians and Bohemians to hope that they, too, could form an independent nation. Patriotic composers such as Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana had both reflected and encouraged this feeling through works that incorporated folk elements and created powerful musical images of Bohemia and Moravia. Janáček now took this process a large step further through a theoretical analysis of the speech patterns of the Moravian language and their relationship with the words and melodies of Moravian folk music.

In a series of articles on music theory, Janáček insisted that this relationship must be reflected in the works of Moravian composers, and he apparently spent much time reworking Janůfa so that it would reflect this relationship. He created several new techniques, including the use of short, highly dramatic motifs, rather than the long, well-developed themes of most European romantic music of the time. Emphasizing the tonal colors of individual instruments within the orchestra, he used them to produce maximum heightening of expression. Perhaps most powerfully, he employed both vocal and instrumental repetition to build the musical tension toward great emotional climaxes.

As a result of Janáček’s new approach, Janůfa, a powerful story of lust, hypocrisy, and murder set in a Moravian peasant village, was significantly different from his earlier works. He was unable to persuade the Prague National Opera to present it, so the premiere took place in Brno in 1904, where it was fairly well received. Over the next twelve years, Janáček composed several additional operas as well as a large number of instrumental works and choral pieces. Throughout this period, he continued to integrate folk elements into his personal style. These included not only themes from folk music but also settings and stories, as well as the linguistic inflections and rhythms of the Moravian peasantry. By 1914, when World War I began, he was well respected in Brno and had finally gained at least a moderate level of prosperity. Outside Moravia, however, he was still virtually unknown.

Janáček generally avoided involvement in the war, though his pro-Russian sympathies were expressed in a three-movement tone poem for orchestra, Taras Bulba , based on the novel by Nikolai Gogol. Like many of his fellow Slavs, Janáček looked to Russia for liberation from the Habsburgs. Toward the end of the war, the declining fortunes of Austria-Hungary increased the probability that an independent Czechoslovakia would be created, and Janáček began to write music specifically intended to endorse this idea. In 1918, his patriotic opera Mr. Brouček’s Excursion to the Fifteenth Century was dedicated to Tomáš Masaryk, the first president of the new Czechoslovak republic.

By this time, Janáček had become a celebrity, for, through the influence of some of his friends, Janůfa had finally been staged by the Prague National Opera in 1916. It was an immense success and was soon produced in cities throughout Europe and the United States. Finally assured of a broad audience, Janáček concentrated primarily on opera, and, from 1919 to 1925, he composed three of his finest works in this genre: Kat’ a Kabanova (1921), The Cunning Little Vixen (1923), and The Makrapoulos Affair (1925). At the same time, he demonstrated his awareness of current trends in instrumental music by incorporating some elements of the methods of Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Claude Debussy in symphonic works such as The Danube (1923) and Sinfonietta (1926). His groundbreaking First String Quartet was written in a few days in 1923, and a Concertino for Piano and Chamber Ensemble in the spring of 1925. All this creative energy came from a composer in his late sixties.

On his seventieth birthday, Janáček was awarded an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University in Brno, a distinction that he cherished for the rest of his life; he was also honored at a special concert of his works given in London the following year. That summer, he wrote perhaps his finest choral work, the powerfully dynamic Glagolitic Mass . At seventy-one, he finally retired from the Brno Organ School, but he continued to teach master classes in composition at the Prague Conservatory. His fame continued to grow, and his prodigious energy remained undiminished. In 1927, he began work on From the House of the Dead , an opera based on Fyodor Dostoevski’s account of life in prison. Though he took three weeks off in January, 1928, to write another string quartet, the new opera occupied most of his time. At the end of July, while working in the cottage he had recently purchased in his home town of Hukvaldy, he contracted pneumonia. On August 10, he was moved to the hospital at Ostrava, where he died on August 12. His funeral, held three days later in Brno, was one of the largest public events in Czech history. From the House of the Dead, which had been nearly completed, received some finishing touches from two of Janáček’s students and was produced in 1930. It is regarded generally by critics as one of his finest works.

Significance

It has been said that Janáček left no unsolved problems for other composers; his work is complete in itself. No other composer has so completely integrated folk art which is unconscious, improvisational, and organic in its development into a consciously developed style. Thus, Janáček left no “school” or “movement” to follow him. Music critics have often likened Janáček to the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, who also tried to form his melodies out of the inflections, cadences, and rhythms of his native tongue. Though Janáček, as a Czech national composer, is often grouped with Dvořák and Smetana, his method, and the attitudes underlying it, were fundamentally different. Both Dvořák and Smetana created music that was folk-oriented, but their approaches to both melody and harmony remained within the formal principles of the Western tradition as it developed in the nineteenth century. For Janáček, the use of folk tunes and peasant speech patterns was not simply a device to be adapted to a previously existing system. As a Czech patriot and of peasant origins himself, he believed that Czech music must find its own unique medium of expression. He regarded the structure of Western music as alien to the Czech experience, and, as a result, created his own theory of musical forms appropriate to that experience.

In practice, this meant the use of short musical phrases, heavily ornamented, that were shaped into asymmetrical groups rather than smoothly developed melody lines. These were frequently repeated, using different instruments, and were combined with abrupt shifts, unconventional rhythms, and extreme variations of tempo, volume, and tone color. In many of Janáček’s works, the result is often a highly dramatic structure of immense emotional power. Because these methods are most clearly exhibited in Janáček’s operas and later vocal music, he is usually grouped with twentieth century composers. Unlike the works of many of these, however, Janáček’s music has remained popular with concert audiences all over the world. It should also not be forgotten that he created a very large body of work before the Prague premiere of Janůfa, and some of his most pleasant pieces, such as the Suite for Strings, were composed long before he became a figure of international renown. In a career that spanned more than six decades, Janáček crafted a unique musical style, one that effectively communicates the spirit of Moravia to listeners far removed from it.

Bibliography

Beckerman, Michael, ed. Janáček and His World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. Collection of essays by leading Janáček scholars, examining the influences on his work and how he composed his operas. Includes several essays previously unpublished in English translation.

Deri, Otto. Exploring Twentieth Century Music. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. A well-written text that attempts to aid the listener in understanding and appreciating twentieth century music by explaining how its aesthetic principles and materials evolved. Though brief, the section on Janáček offers a cogent analysis of his career and music. Extensive bibliography and discography.

Ewen, David. The World of Twentieth Century Music. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968. An encyclopedic source book of brief articles on all the major composers, musicians, movements, and other aspects of modern music. The essay on Janáček contains a short biographical section as well as an analysis of some of his major works. Readers should take care not to confuse this work with others on twentieth century music by the same author, which are much less helpful.

Hartog, Howard, ed. European Music in the Twentieth Century. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957. A book of essays by specialists. Focuses on several specific composers but also includes a group of articles classified by country, which allows for enlightening comparisons between different composers from the same country.

Hollander, Hans. Leoš Janáček. Translated by Paul Hamburger. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1963. The only full-length biography of Janáček in English. An extremely well-written study, unusual in that its analyses of Janáček’s music do not require extensive background knowledge in music theory. Extensive use of Janáček’s letters and theoretical works provides helpful insights into the composer’s personality and attitudes.

Machlis, Joseph. Introduction to Contemporary Music. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961. An essential work for general readers interested in twentieth century music. Introduces modern music through comparison and contrast with earlier periods, creating a painless introduction to music theory. European and American composers are grouped by types; each receives a concise biographical treatment and analysis of important works. Includes an excellent bibliography, discography, and texts and translations of vocal works.

Tyrell, John. “Leoš Janáček.” In Iacobus-Kremlin. Vol. 9 in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan, 1980. Though articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians are often too technical for those without musical training, this essay on Janáček is probably the best brief source available, especially because the section on Janáček himself is clearly separated from the technical discussion of his style and works. Contains an extensive bibliography.

Zemanová, Mirka. Janáček: A Composer’s Life. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002. Zemanová, a Czech-born musicologist, provides a solidly researched and comprehensive biography of the composer.