Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) is one of the most remarkable composers in the context of both the Czech and world classical music. Although by the date of his birth he belongs rather to a generation of Antonín Dvořák, his work may be ranked among the most progressive pieces of the 20th century. In the twenties he even became a leader of the Czech musical modernism including composers one or even two generations younger. The title of anniversary celebrations “Janáček’s Brno” in 2004 was supposed to remind the tenacious connection of the gifted composer and the Moravian centre. The close relationship of Janáček to Brno is connected not only with the fact that he lived there for the most of his life, but especially with his tireless activities in the area of organization, conducting and education, thanks to which he played an important role in the development of the cultural life in Brno.
Janáček was born as the fourth of the eight children in the village of Hukvaldy and was sent to Brno by his parents at the age of 11 to enter the Augustian Monastery in Old Brno. He became a boarder at the school, a choirboy and later an organist and from that point on Brno became his permanent home until his death in 1928. At the time, many important figures of Brno cultural life worked there and one of them was the choirmaster of the monastery, Moravia’s leading composer, Pavel Křížkovský, who took a keen interest in Janáček’s musical education. After completing his basic schooling, including three years at the German Realschule in Old Brno, Janáček went on a state scholarship to the Czech Teachers’ Institute (c.k. Slovanský Ústav ku Vzdělání Učitelů). He passed his final examinations (excelling in music, history and geography) in July 1872 and served the compulsory two-year period of unpaid teaching at a school run by the institute. In 1872 he also took over the monastery choir when Křížkovský was transferred to Olomouc Cathedral. Janáček raised the level of the society from its Liedertafel traditions, moving the concerts out of the taverns into the new Besední Dům, and widened the repertory which included e.g. Mozart’s Requiem or Dvořák’s Stabat Mater.
Křížkovský found him a problematic and wayward student but recommended his entry to the Prague Organ School in 1874. Janáček was able to complete the whole three-year course during the first year. From October 1879 to February 1880 he studied piano, organ, and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory. However, dissatisfied with his teachers Janáček later returned to Brno where, on 13 July 1881, he married his young piano pupil Zdenka Schulzová, shortly before Zdenka’s 16th birthday.
In addition to all his earlier activities Janáček began to realize his ambition of founding an organ school in Brno which was founded in 1881.
I have been obsessed by the idea of founding an organ school in Brno since my early youth. I travelled to Prague for my studies already with this idea in my mind and I consider its realization as one of my greatest aims.
(From a letter to Zdeňka Schulzová from Leipzig)
Janáček was appointed director and held this post until 1919, when the school became the Brno Conservatory. Teaching began in September 1882, at first in the Teachers’ Institute until separate premises were acquired (1884). From 1886 to 1902 he also taught music at the Old Brno Gymnasium. When the Provisional Czech Theatre opened in Brno in 1884 he founded a journal to review its activities. This was the Hudební listy, published by the Beseda, with Janáček as editor and chief contributor. The journal lasted until 1888; Janáček’s relationship with the Beseda became increasingly difficult and he resigned in 1890.
His married life, too, was no easier. The tensions between a fervently patriotic Czech and very young girl from a staid German middle-class background proved unbearable and the couple separated from the autumn of 1882 (soon after the birth of their daughter Olga) until the summer of 1884. A son, Vladimír, was born in 1888 but died of meningitis in 1890. At the time Janáček did not have much time for composing.
In 1887, three years after the opening of the Brno Czech theatre, Janáček began to compose his first opera, Šárka, to a verse libretto by the well-known Czech poet Julius Zeyer. During this period he also began to collect and study folk music, songs and dances. From the early 1890s, Janáček led the mainstream of folklorist activity in Moravia and Silesia, using a repertoire of folksongs and dances in orchestral and piano arrangements. Most of his achievements in this field were published in 1899-1901 though his interest in folklore would be lifelong. Folkdances formed the basis for two stage works: Rákoš Rákoczy, hurriedly put together for the 1891 Jubilee Exhibition in Prague, and the one-act opera The Beginning of a Romance, which consists of little more than folkdances with added voice parts.
The libretto was adapted from a short story by Gabriela Preissová, who wrote the play Její pastorkyňa or Jenůfa as the opera has become known abroad. When Janáček realized the far greater possibilities of this play as the basis for an opera, also in a Moravian rural setting, he became dissatisfied with his unassuming but favourably received earlier work and withdrew it after four performances.
Janáček worked on Jenůfa for two or three years but then he stopped as his life was immensely busy at the time. Janáček’s busy life, however, may not account fully for his stopping work on Jenůfa. The rather different idiom of the later two acts suggests that he may have found his technique inadequate to the demands of the libretto and spent about five years rethinking his approach to composition and to opera in particular. Towards the end of 1901 there are indications that he was working on Act 2 of Jenůfa. A few months later his daughter Olga, who was now almost 21 and wanted to become a Russian-language teacher, left for Russia to stay with Janáček’s younger brother František who had settled in St Petersburg. Within a month she caught typhoid fever and although she recovered enough to return to Moravia by the summer, her constitution, already undermined in childhood by chronic rheumatic heart disease, was fatally weakened. Her long illness cast a shadow over the composition of the rest of the opera: Janáček played it to her four days before she died, on 26 February 1903.
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 and twelve years passed until its first performance in Prague. Dejected and emotionally exhausted Janáček retired, so as he would be able to focus fully on composing and his organ school. At the time he also started his regular visits to Luhačovice spa where he met Kamila Urválková whose love story supplied the theme for Janáček’s fourth opera, Fate.
What was I searching for in the spa? From thirty to fourty hours a week of teaching, then conducting of the vocal community, concerts, leading the choir of the monastery in Králové, while composing Jenůfa, wedding and then losing children – I just had to forget about myself.
(Leoš Janáček: Pohled do života a díla)
However, even during the work on the next opera Janáček did not give up the idea of preforming Jenůfa in Prague, which was still not realized. 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, Maryčka Magdónova and Sedmdesát tisíc. 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, destroyed some of his works, others remained unfinished. Nevertheless, he continued composing and created several remarkable choral, chamber, orchestral and operatic works, such as The Eternal Gospel, Fairy tale for violoncello and piano, the 1912 piano cycle In the Mist and his first symphonic poem A Fiddler’s Child. His fifth opera, Mr. Brouček’s Excursion to the Moon, composed from 1908 to 1917, has been characterized as the most purely Czech in subject and treatment of all Janáček's operas.
For Janáček, however, the most significant event of the period was the acceptance and performance of his opera Jenůfa in 1916. It was an instant and sustained success which transformed at the time 62-year-old Janáček’s fortunes and above all his confidence in himself.
By the end of 1918 he completed his work on the second story about Mr. Brouček and both excursions later found their final form as a ‘bilogy’ now entitled The Excursions of Mr Brouček. His way of a respected composer was confirmed after successful performance of Jenůfa in Vienna in 1918, which helped Janáček to become a famous European composer.
There were also other consequences of Janáček’s new fame. His married life, never easy, had lost much of its meaning at the death of the Janáček’s surviving child Olga, and although he and Zdenka had eventually achieved a stable and reasonably contented relationship, it was easily upset by Janáček’s interest in other women. 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 younger, who was to inspire him for the remaining years of his life. He conducted an obsessive and 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 works influenced by Kamila, the opera Káťa Kabanová. In Kamila Janáček found a new sense of life, an ideal of a woman and thus the last ten years of his life became his most productive period.
And people? They are goggling at me; I am successful, my music is full of vigour. Where does the man take it? A riddle. They are digging in it like moles to puzzle it out. And I would like to scream it aloud so much, to highlight you and say: Behold, this is the sweet riddle of my life!
(from a letter to Kamila Stösslová, March 12, 1928)
Unusual number of compositions in a relatively short period of time was, however, caused also by a different status of Janáček in the musical world at the time. By the time he had passed his 70th birthday Janáček’s change in fortune was remarkable. He had retired from the Brno Organ School (which in 1919 joined the Beseda music school to become the Brno Conservatory) and instead gave composition masterclasses for the Prague Conservatory (1920–25). In 1925 he was awarded the first honorary doctorate to be given by Masaryk University in Brno and in 1927 became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, along with Arnold Schönberg and Paul Hindemith. The success helped Janáček to focus more on composing new works, such as the wind sextet Youth, the monumental orchestral work Sinfonietta which rapidly gained wide critical acclaim, his second string quartet Intimate Letters or four more operas – Káťa Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Affair, and From the House of the Dead.
The older Janáček was, the younger and more expressive was his music. In August 1928 he took an excursion to Štramberk with Kamila Stösslová and her son Otto, but caught a chill which developed into pneumonia. He died on the 12th August 1928 in Ostrava at the sanatorium of Dr. L. Klein. He was given a large public funeral to music from the last scene of his Cunning Little Vixen, and was buried in the Field of Honour at the Central Cemetery, Brno.