Bachtrack top ten: Leoš Janáček

If you solicit ideas for a good “first opera” to encourage a newcomer to the art form, you’ll doubtless receive suggestions like La bohème or La traviata – Italian weepies – or something frothy such as The Barber of Seville. Depending on the individual, a more astute choice could be something by Leoš Janáček – Jenůfa, perhaps, or Kátya Kabanová – which are not about florid vocal display, but are compact dramas that get to the very core of what being human means. 

Janáček was an unusual composer. His early musical life was unremarkable and it wasn’t until relative old age that he achieved renown, especially during his final decade when his greatest works were composed. Born in the Moravian village of Hukvaldy in 1854, the son of a schoolmaster, he was educated in nearby Brno and later in Prague, Leipzig and Vienna, returning to Brno to marry his pupil Zdenka Schulzová and earning a living as a music teacher. 

He began composing in the 1880s, during which time he also started collecting folk songs with František Bartoš, published in the journal Hudební Listy (Musical Pages). These studies influenced his writing, especially the speech rhythms of Moravian dialects in his operas. In many ways, Janáček’s attention to speech inflection marked him as something of a Czech counterpart to Modest Mussorgsky in Russia. 

The turn of the century saw an upturn in his fortunes as a composer. On an Overgrown Path (1901) became his most performed piano work, around the time he was writing Jenůfa. The latter is a harrowing drama on the themes of jealousy, infanticide and redemption. It was during this time that Janáček’s 21-year old daughter, Olga, died. His wife, Zdenka, later recalled their despair: “Abandoned, silent. I looked at Leoš. He sat in front of me, destroyed, thin, grey-haired.” He dedicated Jenůfa to his daughter’s memory. Although the opera premiered in 1904, it wasn’t until it was finally performed in Prague in 1916 that it became acclaimed, launching a flood of late, great works. 

There were two major sources of inspiration behind Janáček’s Indian summer. Russia was one, with several works based on Russian literature, such as Taras Bulba (Gogol), Kátya Kabanová (Ostrovsky) and From the House of the Dead (Dostoevsky), while his First String Quartet was subtitled after Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata. 

The other major influence was Kamila Stösslová, a married woman several decades Janáček’s junior. Janáček became completely infatuated with her. Although his love was unrequited, the two nevertheless exchanged letters – Janáček wrote over 700 of them! – and Kamila was truly his muse. “In my compositions warmed by pure sentiment, honesty, the search for truth, you are there,” wrote the 73-year old composer in 1927. “My tender melodies come from you… if the thread that binds me to you were to break, it would also break the thread of my life.” Janáček died the following year. 

1Jenůfa

Based on Gabriela Preissová’s play Její pastorkyňa (Her Stepdaughter), Jenůfa was one of the first operas written in prose, the composer penning the libretto himself. It tells the story of Jenůfa, who is in love with Števa and secretly pregnant with his child. In a violent outburst, the jealous Laca slashes her cheek to disfigure her. Števa abandons Jenůfa, the child is born and Jenůfa’s stepmother, the Kostelnička, fearing that Jenůfa’s reputation will be destroyed, takes the drastic step of drowning the baby in the icy river. She tells Jenůfa that he died while she was in a fever. The remorseful Laca marries Jenůfa but, on their wedding day, the baby’s body is discovered… It’s a harrowing plot, but Janáček makes his characters so believable and the ending has incredible redemptive power. 

2Sinfonietta

The Sinfonietta is the last of Janáček’s orchestral works (1926) and his most beloved. This rapturous work stemmed from the composer’s happy memories of brass fanfares played by a military band in Písek, where he was accompanied by Kamila. Dedicated to the Czechoslovak Armed Forces, it requires an extended brass section in the opening fanfare, which returns at the work’s conclusion. The movements bear titles relating to Brno – The Castle, The Queen’s Monastery, The Street and The Town Hall – and have a vigorous feeling of the great outdoors. 

3The Cunning Little Vixen

Many operas are based on plays or novels, but The Cunning Little Vixen – or Příhody lišky Bystroušky (Tales of Vixen Sharp-Ears) – is based on a cartoon strip in the Lidové noviny, a Prague daily newspaper that Janáček used to read. It follows the tales of a vixen from being caught by a forester as a cub to her escape, and raising her own cubs before she meets her death at the hands of a poacher. The score teems with the rustle of nature, with many roles taken by children – fox cubs, cricket, frog, grasshopper. The finale, where the Forester is reassured by nature turning full cycle, is hugely uplifting. 

4Kátya Kabanová

Another work inspired by Kamila, Kátya Kabanová is based on Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The Storm. It takes place in a repressive Russian village on the Volga. Katya is trapped in an unhappy marriage to Tichon, dominated by her controlling mother-in-law, Kabanicha. While her husband is away on business, Katya begins a passionate affair with Boris, but when her husband returns (during a wild storm – deemed as a divine punishment) she confesses and runs out into the storm. Abandoned by Boris, she drowns herself in the river.  

5String Quartet no. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata” 

Janáček’s First String Quartet was inspired by Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata, in which a tormented husband, jealous that his wife has taken a liking to a violinist as the two perform Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, kills her (and is acquitted of murder on account of his wife’s apparent adultery). Writing to Kamila, Janáček described his string quartet, written in just nine days: “I was imagining a pitiable woman, tormented and run down, just like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata.” There are no further clues as to the work’s meaning, but it is psychologically complex and impassioned. The third movement opens with a canon whose theme is derived from Beethoven’s sonata. 

6Glagolitic Mass

Completed in 1926, the Glagolitic Mass is an unusual work, composed to a text in Old Church Slavonic, the original words dating back to the 9th Century. The Mass was written for patriotic, rather than religious, reasons (the composer being very much against organised religion): “I wanted to perpetuate faith in the immutable permanence of the nation. Not on a religious basis but on a rock-bottom ethical basis, which calls God to witness.” Janáček described the work as “festive, life-affirming, pantheistic, with little of what we could call the ecclesiastical.” Before the closing Intrada, Janáček throws in an unruly organ solo. 

7The Diary of One Who Disappeared

It was the Lidové noviny (source of Vixen, see above) that also inspired Janáček’s song cycle. In 1916, it published a series of poems, claimed to be written by a self-taught farmer’s son who had “disappeared”, eloping with a gypsy girl, Zefka. (It wasn’t until 1997 that they were proved to be a literary hoax.) In the summer of 1917, Janáček took the newspaper cuttings on holiday with him… that same summer he met Kamila Stösslová. In his song cycle, Janáček identifies with the young man in the poems, desperate to elope with Kamila. “And that black Gypsy girl in my Diary,” he wrote to her, “that was especially you. That’s why there’s such emotional heat in these works.” 

8Taras Bulba

Another work of Russian literature set by Janáček was Nikolai Gogol’s romanticised novella Taras Bulba, which he turned into a symphonic rhapsody in three movements. It depicts episodes from a 1628 war between the Poles and the Cossacks, who are led by the elderly Taras Bulba. The opening two movements depict the deaths of his two sons, Andrei and Ostap, while the third centres on Taras, who is captured in battle by the River Dnieper and burned to death by the Poles, but not before issuing a prophecy: “There is no fire nor suffering in the whole world which can break the strength of the Russian people.” 

9String Quartet no. 2, “Intimate Letters” 

Following the Kreutzer, Janáček’s Second String Quartet reflected his intense feelings for Kamila even more directly. “Now I’ve begun to write something nice,” he wrote to her. “Our life will be in it. It will be called ‘Love Letters’. There have already been so many of those dear adventures of ours, haven’t there? They’ll be little fires in my soul and they’ll set it ablaze with the most beautiful melodies.” He eventually changed the title to “Intimate Letters” and composed it in the winter of 1928. In it, the viola represents the figure of Kamila. The quartet is full of yearning, soaring emotions and – in the finale – a driving sense of fear, perhaps Janáček’s realisation that his true love remains unattainable. 

10Mládí 

It was at a contemporary music festival in Salzburg in 1923 that Janáček heard Albert Roussel’s Divertimento for winds and resolved to write his own work for woodwind ensemble, written for flute (doubling piccolo), oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, horn and bassoon. Mládí – meaning Youth – is the 70-year old composer looking back to his student days. It opens in jaunty, pugnacious fashion, followed by a sober slow movement. The Scherzo contains a perky tune for piccolo taken from Janácek’s March of the Blue-Boys, who sang and whistled as they marched, before a finale brings things to an exuberant close.  

This article was sponsored by the Year of Czech Music.