Leoš Janáček
"Speech melody is a window into the soul."
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those close to him ⏳🌊
- MentorPavel Křížkovský
As director of the St. Thomas Abbey choir, he first opened to the boy Janáček the path of chant, choral singing, and composition rooted in Czech folk song.
- FriendshipAntonín Dvořák
An elder whom Janáček revered as the model of Czech music; his influence is plain in the early "Suite for Strings," and the two shared a lifelong friendship.
- FamilyZdenka Janáčková
Married to him at sixteen, she endured the grief of losing both their children and her husband's love affairs, stayed by his side to the end, and bore witness to those years in her memoir.
- FamilyOlga Janáčková
His only daughter, who died at twenty-one; her father dedicated "Jenůfa" to her memory.
- PatronageMax Brod
By translating his operas into German and introducing them to the stages of Vienna and Germany, he turned the aging Moravian composer into a European one.
- InfluenceKamila Stösslová
A woman thirty-seven years his junior whom he met in 1917, she became the inspiration for late masterpieces such as Káťa Kabanová and Intimate Letters.
I. The boy from Hukvaldy · 1854–1874 (age 0–20)
(Roots) He was born in July 1854 in Hukvaldy, a small village in the Moravian region of the Austrian Empire (today the Czech Republic). His father, Jiří, was the village schoolmaster and church organist; his mother's name was Amalie. Of the more than ten children born to the family, several died young. Raising a large household on a teacher's meager pay kept the family perpetually poor. Ringed by a castle ruin on the hill and by beech woods, the village became the place he would return to all his life. (Monastery) In 1865 the eleven-year-old boy was taken by his father to join the choir of the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in Brno's old town, led by the composer and choirmaster Pavel Křížkovský. When his father died the following year, the help that had come from home all but ceased. Here the boy absorbed chant, the organ and strict discipline. The loneliness of those years surfaces again and again in his later recollections. (Teacher) In 1869 he entered the Brno Teachers' Institute, choosing, like his father, the path of a teacher. After graduating he worked as an assistant teacher, and also conducted the monastery choir in place of Křížkovský, who had left Brno. In 1874–75 he studied at the Prague Organ School, so poor that he had to worry about his meals and his rent. The choral and organ pieces of this period were studies that faithfully followed his teacher's tradition. The sharp individuality of his later years had yet to emerge.
II. The young teacher in Brno · 1874–1888 (age 20–34)
(Choir) Back in Brno, he taught music at the Teachers' Institute. From 1876 he conducted the Czech choral society Beseda brněnská. In a city where German held sway, singing in Czech was for him a service to the nation. He enlarged the membership and took on large-scale choral works. (Friendship) Around this time he grew close to Dvořák, thirteen years his senior, whom he regarded as the model of Czech music. The Suite for Strings he wrote in 1877 bears the clear imprint of Dvořák's Serenade for Strings (1875). Dvořák, for his part, treated the younger man warmly, and their friendship lasted until Dvořák's death. (Study abroad) In 1879–80 he studied in turn at the conservatories of Leipzig and Vienna. In Leipzig, though worn down by the unfamiliar German teaching, he poured out exercises and wrote almost daily to his fiancée back home. In Vienna he gave up his studies after a few months and came home. (Marriage) In July 1881 he married Zdenka, daughter of Emilian Schulz, director of the Teachers' Institute. The groom was twenty-seven, the bride sixteen. A marriage between the daughter of a German-speaking family and an ardent Czech nationalist creaked from the start. Shortly after their daughter Olga was born the following year, the two lived apart for a time. They reunited in 1884, and in 1888 their son Vladimír was born. (School) In the year of his marriage he founded an organ school in Brno and became its director, leading it until 1919. Only by combining the directorship, his classes at the Teachers' Institute and his choral conducting could he make ends meet. Composing was still something done in spare moments.
III. Folk song and speech melody · 1888–1903 (age 34–49)
(Loss) In 1890 his two-year-old son Vladimír died of scarlet fever. Olga was now the couple's only child. (Folk song) Around then he joined the folklorist František Bartoš in collecting and editing Moravian folk songs, immersing himself deeply in the work. From this period came the Lachian Dances, orchestral settings of dances from Lachia, his home region, and Rákoš Rákoczy (1891), which brought folk dance to the stage. For him folk song was no ornament. It was a living idiom that did not fit the textbook rules of meter and harmony. (Speech) From the late 1890s he began taking down on staff paper the rise and fall and the rhythm of people's speech. He noted even the brief remarks of market vendors, children and family members, and over his lifetime collected thousands. From these “speech melodies” came his vocal lines. His ostinatos, stubbornly repeating short, clipped figures, are rooted here as well. (Jenůfa) In 1894 he began writing the opera Jenůfa, based on a play by Gabriela Preissová. Setting the prose play almost as it stood, instead of a text (libretto) polished into verse, was a rare choice for the time. The story follows Jenůfa, who becomes an unwed mother, and her stepmother the Kostelnička, who secretly casts the baby into the icy river. The composition took 9 years. (Olga) As the work neared completion, Olga fell ill. She had gone to her uncle's home in St. Petersburg to learn Russian, came back with typhoid fever, and died in February 1903 at the age of twenty-one. He is said to have played the finished music on the piano for his daughter on her sickbed. The score of Jenůfa was dedicated to her memory.
An opera completed as his daughter Olga lay dying, and dedicated to her memory. It is the first work in which his vocal writing, grounded in speech melody, comes into full bloom.
- As Act 1 opens, the xylophone taps out the same note again and again. It is often heard as the turning of a mill wheel, or as time flowing by, and this relentless repetition (ostinato) lays down tension from the very start.
- In Act 2, listen to the Kostelnička's monologue as she resolves to do away with the baby. Short, broken figures (motifs) repeat breathlessly, depicting a wavering mind. The role is counted a touchstone of great singers' acting powers.
- Also in Act 2, Jenůfa's quiet prayer to the Virgin is a passage like a rest, set against the violence on either side. Listen for the low support of the strings.
- At the end of Act 3, Jenůfa accepts Laca's love. Here the harp and brass swell into a radiant major key, in what is often named one of the most moving endings in operatic history.
- When choosing a recording, it is worth comparing the Prague version revised by Kovařovic with the composer's own Brno version (1908), revived by the conductor Mackerras. The raw edge of the orchestration is strikingly different.
IV. Years of rejection · 1903–1916 (age 49–62)
(Premiere) In January 1904 Jenůfa premiered at the National Theatre in Brno to warm reviews. But it was only a provincial success; the National Theatre in Prague would not take the work. It is often said that the theater's music director, Karel Kovařovic, had never forgotten how Janáček savagely panned his own opera in 1887. That same year he retired from the Teachers' Institute and began drawing a pension. (Fury) On October 1, 1905, a demonstration broke out in Brno demanding a Czech-language university. There the twenty-year-old joiner František Pavlík was bayoneted to death by the soldiers sent to suppress it. He set this death in the piano sonata 1 October 1905, “From the Street.” But just before the premiere he burned the last movement, and later threw even the remaining two into the Vltava in Prague. (Frustration) The opera that followed, Fate (1903–05), never reached the stage in his lifetime. The Excursions of Mr. Brouček he wrestled with for nearly 10 years. The title of the piano cycle In the Mists (1912) is often read as mirroring his bleak circumstances in those years. He kept up his school work and folk-song research without pause. Yet as a composer he seemed destined to grow old as a provincial teacher. (Turning point) The breakthrough came from the dogged persuasion of those around him. The singer Marie Calma and her husband František Veselý, among others, won over Kovařovic. In May 1916 Jenůfa at last reached the stage of the National Theatre in Prague. It was a version with orchestration retouched by Kovařovic, but its success was overwhelming. The composer was sixty-one.
A piece for the young worker killed in the Brno demonstration. Though the composer burned it and threw it into the river, the two surviving movements still hold intact the anger and frustration of those years.
- Movement 1 is titled “Presentiment.” The short opening figure (motif) returns relentlessly in changing shapes, sounding like the unease of sensing a tragedy before it arrives.
- Midway through Movement 1, the same figure surges violently and climbs into the high register. Follow the clash between the low resonance of the left hand and the sharp melody of the right.
- Movement 2 is titled “Death.” A motif like a slow lament repeats, bursts out very loudly (fortissimo), then quietly fades away.
- The recording by the pianist Rudolf Firkušný, who studied with Janáček, is often cited as the benchmark interpretation of this work.
V. A late spring · 1916–1923 (age 62–69)
(Fame) The Prague success soon crossed borders. In 1918 the Vienna Court Opera staged Jenůfa. The writer Max Brod made the German translation, and a publishing contract with Universal Edition in Vienna followed. When Czechoslovakia won its independence that same year, he rejoiced. That year he also finished the orchestral rhapsody Taras Bulba, based on Gogol's novella, a work that carries the faith in Slavic brotherhood he had cherished all his life. (Rift) Success cast a shadow over his home. When he grew close to Gabriela Horvátová, who sang the Kostelnička in the Prague production, Zdenka fell into such despair that she attempted suicide. The couple did not divorce. They agreed to live under one roof but, in effect, to lead separate lives. (Kamila) In the summer of 1917, at the spa resort of Luhačovice, he met Kamila Stösslová. Thirty-seven years his junior, she was the wife of an antiques dealer and the mother of two sons. She knew little of his music, and the relationship was largely his own one-sided passion. Even so, over 11 years he sent her more than 700 letters, and this passion became the force that drove his late works. (Káťa) He wrote the opera Káťa Kabanová (premiered 1921), based on Ostrovsky's play The Storm. Onto Káťa, who dreams of love amid a suffocating life in her husband's household and throws herself into the Volga, he laid the image of Kamila. The song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared also dates from this time. In 1919, when the organ school became the state conservatory, he stepped down as director. In 1921 he bought a small house in his native Hukvaldy.
Completed in the year Czechoslovakia gained its independence. A work that carries the composer's own Slavic brotherhood into the tragedy of Gogol's Cossack hero.
- Movement 1, “The Death of Andrei,” tells of a son who loved a woman of the enemy. A lyrical melody sung by the organ and English horn depicts love; the furious orchestra that follows depicts battle.
- In Movement 2, “The Death of Ostap,” the E-flat clarinet lets out a high, scream-like cry at the moment of execution. It is widely heard as the cry of the son dying after torture.
- At the close of Movement 3, “The Prophecy and Death of Taras,” organ, bells and brass join to build a majestic ending. It is the scene in which Taras, at the stake, prophesies his nation's future.
This was the first work in which his passion for Kamila became an opera. In Káťa, who dreams of love in a suffocating household, he overlaid her image.
- The low timpani figure at the start of the overture is often heard as the approaching tragedy, that is, fate. The sleigh bells that follow foreshadow the departure of her husband, Tichon.
- In Act 1, as Káťa confides her childhood and her dreams to her sister-in-law Varvara, the soft timbre of the viola d'amore enfolds her inner world.
- In the first scene of Act 3 the orchestra paints a storm, and amid its sound Káťa confesses her sin before the people. Listen for the brass and timpani cutting in like lightning.
- In the final Volga scene, an offstage chorus sings a wordless “ah.” Sounding like the river and the wind, it enfolds Káťa's death.
VI. The last blaze · 1923–1928 (age 69–74)
(Forest) As he neared seventy, his creative pace only quickened. Out came the opera The Cunning Little Vixen (premiered 1924), in which the lives of forest animals and people turn in interlocking circles, followed by String Quartet No. 1, "Kreutzer Sonata" (1923), which took Tolstoy's novella as its starting point, and the wind sextet Mládí ("Youth") (1924), a look back at his young days. In the opera The Makropulos Affair (1926), after Karel Čapek, he told the story of a woman who has lived more than 300 years and at last accepts death. (Festival) In 1926 he wrote the Sinfonietta for a rally of Sokol, the Czech gymnastics movement. The spark was an open-air military band concert he had heard with Kamila in Písek. The opening fanfare grew out of that memory. The same year, at the invitation of the British critic Rosa Newmarch, he visited London, where a concert of his works was given. (Faith) In the summer of 1926 he wrote the Glagolitic Mass, a setting of the Ordinary of the Mass not in Latin but in Old Church Slavonic. When a critic described it as the work of 'a devout old man,' he is said to have replied that he was 'neither old nor a believer.' He explained the piece as a mass with the forest for a cathedral and the fir trees for candles. (Letters) In January and February 1928, in a matter of only a few weeks, he wrote String Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters." A letter survives in which he told Kamila that the piece was the story of the two of them. That year he also completed the opera From the House of the Dead, after Dostoevsky. (Death) In August 1928, while he was staying in Hukvaldy, Kamila's young son Otto got lost in the woods. He went out to search for the boy and caught a chill, which turned into pneumonia. On August 12 he died in a sanatorium in Ostrava, at seventy-four. At his funeral in Brno, the final scene of The Cunning Little Vixen was played.
Written for the Sokol rally, it began with the memory of a military band concert he had heard with Kamila. It became a hymn to the newly independent nation and to his home city of Brno.
- In the first-movement fanfare, nine trumpets, two bass trumpets and two tenor tubas, set apart from the orchestra, ring out together with the timpani. The rank of brass lined up on stage is a spectacle in itself.
- The composer originally gave movements two through five the names of places in Brno: 'The Castle,' 'The Queen's Monastery,' 'The Street' and 'The Town Hall.' It is worth listening with a scene of the city in mind for each movement.
- At the close of the last movement, the opening fanfare returns above the full orchestra. It is the moment when beginning and end join into one.
- This piece shows especially clearly his method of building up short figures through layer upon layer of repetition (ostinato). While the woodwinds keep cycling through the same figure, follow what the other instruments are doing.
A mass written, with the forest for a cathedral, by a composer who called himself 'neither old nor a believer.' It is closer to a hymn to nature and the Slavic peoples than to a church service.
- The 'Intrada' that opens the first and last numbers is a fanfare of brass and timpani that sounds less like worship than like the gates of a festival swinging open.
- In the middle of the 'I believe' (Credo) comes a long stretch played by organ and orchestra. While the chorus falls silent, the instruments clash fiercely.
- The tenor solo must hurl out notes in a very high range with full force, which has made it a part notorious among tenors for its difficulty.
- The penultimate number, the 'Organ solo,' sends hands and feet storming across the keyboards and is infamous among organists. It is sometimes performed on its own in recital.
- Compare the original version reconstructed by the scholar Paul Wingfield with the traditional version, and you will hear how much rougher and bolder the original is in its meters and colors.
Written in a few weeks, half a year before his death, it is his last confession — as if the more than 700 letters he sent Kamila had turned directly into music.
- At the very start of the first movement, the viola bows close to the bridge with a scraping stroke (sul ponticello), producing a hissing sound. This eerie color is widely understood to represent Kamila.
- The composer originally meant to use the viola d'amore, an old instrument, in place of the viola. So the viola is effectively the protagonist of this piece — follow its sound as you listen.
- The second movement alternates slow passages with sudden fast ones. It sounds like a letter in which giddy longing and anxiety cross paths.
- The fourth and final movement begins in a dancing rhythm and ends in a passionate rush, the four instruments trading shimmering ornaments (trills).
Lesser-known stories
At the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in Brno, which he entered at eleven, lived the friar Gregor Mendel — the very Mendel who uncovered the laws of heredity through his pea-crossing experiments, and who became abbot of the monastery in 1868. Janáček knew him from boyhood, and in January 1884 he played the organ at Mendel's funeral Mass. Mendel's work was rediscovered by the world only in 1900, so at the time no one took notice of the bond between the abbot and the former choirboy. In the 1930s, his wife Zdenka dictated a memoir, My Life — testimony, from a wife's vantage, about her husband's love affairs and the discord in their home. Because those involved considered it sensitive, the account lay buried for more than half a century and was not published until 1998. Since then, Janáček biographies have come to give as much attention to the years Zdenka endured as to his passion for Kamila. For most of the 20th century, the Jenůfa the world heard was the Prague version, its orchestration smoothed out by Kovařovic. The rough, rugged sound the composer himself intended became widely known only when the conductor Charles Mackerras and the scholar John Tyrrell restored the Brno version (1908) and recorded it in 1982. The Glagolitic Mass has a similar history. Before the premiere, passages the performers found hard to manage were simplified. In the 1990s the British scholar Paul Wingfield used the surviving sources to reconstruct its bolder original form, and today both versions are performed.
Glossary 📚🔎
Speech melody
(Meaning of the word) A rendering of the Czech nápěvky mluvy, meaning 'tunes attached to speech.' (In music) Transcriptions in musical notation of the rises and falls in pitch and the rhythms that arise naturally when people talk. Janáček collected thousands of them over his lifetime and built the vocal lines of his operas on them. Think of how a friend's voice shoots up at the end when they ask, astonished, 'Really?', and drops at the end when they say, let down, 'Really…' The same word conveys a different feeling depending on its tune, and it was precisely that tune he set down in notes.
Ostinato
(Meaning of the word) The Italian ostinato means 'stubborn, persistent.' The character of this technique — stubbornly repeating a short figure — is built right into its name. (In music) The continuous repetition, in the same shape, of a short melodic or rhythmic fragment throughout a section of a piece. Even as the other instruments change above it, the figure keeps doggedly repeating, creating tension or momentum. It is like jumping rope while your friends keep chanting the same rhyme, 'Kkomaya, kkomaya,' to the same beat, and the jumper switches from move to move on top of it.
Motif
(Meaning of the word) The English motif comes from the Latin movere, 'to move.' It carries the sense of a small seed that sets a piece in motion. (In music) A very short figure of just a few notes, distinctive enough to recur throughout a piece in changing shapes. Composers grow large works from this seed by stretching it, inverting it or breaking it apart. Think of the short sound effect that plays every time you pick up an item in a video game. It is only a few notes, yet you recognize it instantly — a motif is just as short and clear. (Elsewhere) In art and literature it refers to a subject or pattern that recurs in a work, and in everyday Korean the word dongi ('motive') means the reason someone does something.
Libretto (script)
(Meaning of the word) The Italian libretto means 'little book.' The name comes from the slim booklets that audiences in old opera houses held in their hands to follow the words. (In music) The script of an opera, containing the sung words and dialogue and the whole story. It was once customary to write it in rhymed verse suited to singing, but in Jenůfa Janáček set a prose play almost as it stood. Think of the script you are handed when preparing a school play — except that in an opera every line is sung, not spoken.
Fanfare
(In music) A short signal piece in which brass instruments such as trumpets ring out bold and bright. Long ago fanfares announced a king's entrance, a hunt or the start of a battle. The Sinfonietta opens with a fanfare from a separate rank of brass. The 'ta-da-da-dum!' that sounds at a sports day or an awards ceremony as you walk up to receive a prize — that is a fanfare. (Elsewhere) The phrase 'to sound a fanfare' means to launch or announce something with great flourish, and it turns up often in places like newspaper articles.
Mass
(Meaning of the word) The name comes from the Latin words the priest speaks at the end of the Catholic service, 'Ite, missa est' — 'Go, you are sent forth.' (In music) A setting of the five prayers of the Catholic Mass that do not change from day to day: 'Lord, have mercy' (Kyrie), 'Glory to God' (Gloria), the 'Creed' (Credo), 'Holy' (Sanctus) and 'Lamb of God' (Agnus Dei). It is usually written in Latin, but Janáček used Old Church Slavonic. Think of a ceremony with a fixed program, like a graduation. The order is always the same, but each school fills it with different songs and performances. In the same way, each composer gives the same prayers entirely different music. (Elsewhere) The word is most often used not for a musical work but for the Catholic service itself.
String quartet
(Meaning of the word) Sajungju (四重奏), the word for quartet, means 'four (四) layered (重) in playing (奏).' (In music) A performance by four stringed instruments together — two violins, a viola and a cello — or a piece written for them. With no conductor, the four must stay together by listening to one another's breathing, which is why the quartet is also called 'a conversation among four people.' It is like a group project in which four students each take a different role, yet no one stands out alone; they trade ideas back and forth to complete a single presentation.
Viola d'amore
(Meaning) The Italian viola d'amore means 'viola of love.' The name is thought to come from its soft, sweet tone. (In music) A string instrument used in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a second set of strings running beneath the ones played with the bow. The lower strings are never bowed, yet they sound along on their own in response to the strings above (resonance), producing a soft, echo-like tone. It is the same principle as the science-class experiment in which two tuning forks are set side by side and one is struck, and the other, untouched, begins to sing along. Janáček used this instrument in Káťa Kabanová and meant to use it in Intimate Letters as well.