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Janáček, Leoš

  • Slavic / pan-SlavicCzechMusic
  • GND ID
    118556878
    Social category
    Composers, musicians
    Title
    Janácek, Leoš
    Title2
    Janáček, Leoš
    Text

    Leoš Janáček (Hukvaldy 1854 – Ostrava 1928; birth name Leo) was born into a teaching family and from his schooldays in Brno devoted himself to music; he graduated from the Prague Organ School in 1875, then worked as a music teacher and choral conductor in Brno, interrupted by further music studies in Leipzig and Vienna (1879-81). His first serious compositions date from the second half of the 1880s, when he also became deeply involved in folk-song collecting, together with the eminent folklorist František Bartoš; Janáček considered the preservation of Moravian folk song a “sacred duty”. He eventually became so respected an authority on Moravian folk song that he was asked to head the preparation of the Moravian section of the Czecho-Slavonic Ethnographic Exhibition in 1895, a seminal event and major manifestation of Czech nationalist sentiment. Janáček’s first ballet, Rákos Rákocsy, composed in 1891, consisted of concatenated folk songs and dances.

    The majority of Janáček’s creative activities were, however, devoted to opera. His first opera, Šárka (1887), fitted neatly into the model of Czech mytho-historical opera in the mode of Smetana’s Dalibor and Libuše: the libretto was based on a Czech legend of a warrior maiden, Šárka, who seduces a male warrior, Ctirad, and then murders him with the help of her Amazonian followers. That same legend had also formed the basis for one of Smetana’s tone poems from Má vlast, likewise called Šárka (1875), and Zdeněk Fibich, another Czech composer of some renown during his lifetime, would similarly write an opera based on the Šárka story (1897). Janáček’s Šárka, however, went unperformed until after the composer’s 70th birthday. A second opera, Počátek románu (“The beginning of a romance”, 1891), was a one-act comedy that drew on folk songs to the point that  only a third of the score was newly written; the other two-thirds either quoted or were orchestrations of folk songs.

    Její pastorkyňa (known in English as Jenůfa, 1903) is usually considered the turning point in Janáček’s compositional career, along with the concurrent development of Janáček’s theory of “speech melodies” (nápěvky mluvy). Jenůfa was based on a play by the Moravian playwright Gabriela Preissová, who had also written the source for Počátek románu. Set in a Moravian village and concerned with the actions of the inhabitants there, Jenůfa arguably falls into a long tradition of Czech village operas, among them Smetana’s Prodaná nevěsta (“The bartered bride”). Preissová’s play was written in the Moravian dialect of Czech, from which Janáček drew inspiration. His conception of speech melody held that one could transcribe normal speech in musical notation and in so doing uncover subconscious meanings. Janáček transferred this idea into the music he wrote for operatic characters, and in turn left behind folk song as a means of providing a musical connection to ideas of the Czech character.

    Janáček would go on to develop his ideas of speech melody over the next two decades, and the theory was at the heart of his later operatic compositions. Jenůfa’s great success following its 1916 staging in Prague helped to spur the creative outpouring that characterized his final decade. Immediately after the premiere he wrote Výlet pana Broučka do XV. století (“Mr Brouček’s excursion to the 15th century”, 1917), featuring a boorish, drunken, and cowardly Czech gentleman magically transported across time to the age of the Hussite Wars. While the Hussites and their history were hugely important for 19th-century Czech nationalists as a historical example of Czech resistance to outside oppression, Janáček’s opera, composed with independence from Austria-Hungary looming, eschews the nationalist fervour usually elicited by musical Hussitism. Brouček is criticized by the Hussites for mixing too much German into his spoken Czech, fails to join a rousing chorus of the famous battle hymn Ktož jsú boží bojovníci (“Ye who are warriors of God”), and stays away from a battle against the invading Germans.

    His last four operas, written in the final seven years of his life, are also among his most famous. Příhody Lišky Bystroušky (“The cunning little vixen”, 1923) drew its subject from a Prague newspaper cartoon about a gamekeeper and a clever vixen; the other three operas avoid specifically Czech subjects or nationalist concerns altogether. Kaťa Kabanová (1921) is a realist tragedy based on the Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The storm; Věc Makropoulos (“The Makropoulos affair”, 1925), based on a work by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek and nominally set in Prague, is a philosophical reflection on issues of life and death; and Z mrtvého domu (“From the house of the dead”, 1928) is based on Dostoevskij’s novel about life in a Siberian prison camp. Like the acclaimed 1926 Sinfonietta, these four operas tend to be seen as a modernist Spätwerk in Janáček’s life, rather than as nationally Czech.

    Whatever his reputation among international audiences, Janáček considered himself a Czech composer and patriot to the end of his life. Shortly after his engagement with his wife Zdenka in 1880, he insisted that they only speak in Czech, an attitude which caused considerable strain with his wife’s family, half of which was ethnically German. As the subjects of some of his later operas indicate, Janáček was fascinated by Russian culture and literature. His Pan-Slavic leanings are also reflected in the late Glagolská mše (“Glagolitic Mass”, 1926), set to a text in Old Church Slavonic but structurally corresponding to the liturgy of the Catholic Mass.

    Word Count: 934

    Article version
    1.1.1.4/a
    Project credit

    Part of the “Music and National Styles” project, funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences

    Word Count: 16

  • Ewans, Michael; “Wagnerism in Moravia: Janáček’s first opera, «Šárka»”, in Muir, Stephen; Belina-Johnson, Anastasia (eds.); Wagner in Russia, Poland, and the Czech Lands (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 119-135.

    Katz, Derek; Janáček beyond the borders (New York: Rochester UP, 2009).

    Katz, Derek; “A Turk and a Moravian in Prague: Janáček’s Brouček and the perils of musical patriotism”, in Beckerman, Michael B. (ed.); Janáček and his World (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 145-164.

    Taruskin, Richard; The Oxford history of Western music (5 vols; New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2005).

    Tyrrell, John; et al.; Czech opera (New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 1988).

    Zemanová, Mirka; Janáček (Boston, MA: Northeastern UP, 2002).


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    All articles in the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe edited by Joep Leerssen are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://www.spinnet.eu.

    © the author and SPIN. Cite as follows (or as adapted to your stylesheet of choice): Campo-Bowen, Christopher, 2022. "Janáček, Leoš", Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, ed. Joep Leerssen (electronic version; Amsterdam: Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms, https://ernie.uva.nl/), article version 1.1.1.4/a, last changed 20-04-2022, consulted 28-03-2024.