3.7. 1854 Hukvaldy - 12. 8. 1928 Ostrava
He was born in the Lachian village of Hukvaldy in the province of Frýdek-Místek as the ninth child of thirteen to Jiří Janáček, a teacher, and his wife Amalie, nee Grulichová, who came from an old burgher family from the nearby town of Příbor. The Janáčeks moved to Hukvaldy in 1848 when a teaching position became available at the school in the village, and this post also meant that he was to provide the music for the local church. Leoš gained his first musical education from his father in his native Hukvaldy, which he left at the age of eleven to attend the foundation school at the Augustinian monastery in Old Brno.
The Old Brno foundation school was established in 1648 for poor, musically gifted boys, who formed a choir that was known in Brno as the “Blue Boys”. In return for food and housing the “Blue Boys” provided music for the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady in Old Brno and took part as choristers in various church and other ceremonial events in the city and elsewhere.
From his arrival at the monastery in 1865 Janáček’s life was formed in Brno: in 1869 he completed his basic education, following which he studied at the teaching institute (1869-72) and became employed as a classroom assistant. He brought with him from his native region an acute feeling of social position and nationality, which was strengthened in the industrial and bilingual city of Brno. In Brno the full weight of the poverty of his family fell hard upon him, and this was made worse by the death of his father in 1866.
Disputes between nationalities and late revivalist ideas, which were rife in Brno at the time, were Janáček’s strongest impressions of the city, and initially these seemed to him to be negative. His arrival in Brno brought about the end of his childhood, his father’s death took a long time to get over and this, combined with his family being in Hukvaldy, made the young Janáček feel lonely: They took me on as a chorister in Brno…My mother and I sleep in a sort of dark chamber – it was on Capuchin Square. I sleep with my eyes open. At the first glimpse of dawn we get out! Out! On the square in the monastery of Our Lady I walk with heavy footsteps, my mother too. Alone. Strange people, unfriendly; strange school, hard bed, harder bread. No love. O world of mine, only mine, has set great store by me.
On the basis of his first Brno life experiences, when as a pupil at the foundation school he came across purposeful work that led towards the serious fulfilment of his tasks, Janáček grew into an energetic organiser of the Brno musical scene and of musical education. He became a public cultural worker who acted as a critic and expert advisor on questions that concerned the musical and often also more general problems of cultural life in the Czech Brno. At the monastery in Old Brno under the leadership of Pavel Křížkovský, his natural musical talent grew and probably also unlocked his internal decision to dedicate his entire life to music. Křížkovský gave Janáček the post of director of the Old Brno choir on his departure from Brno and recommended that he should study at the Prague organ school, to where Janáček went from 1874-5 in order to complete his musical education. One year previously (1873) he had taken up the post of choirmaster of the Svatopluk craftsmen’s’ group, at whose meetings could be heard in public his first choral compositions that had been written for the requirements of the school. In 1876, after his return from Prague, he took on the directorship of the choir of the Czech meeting house in Brno, where he organised joint concerts and began to work towards the creation of an instrumental basis for the establishment of a symphonic orchestra in order that he may carry out large oratorical works. At the end of the 1870s he left for the last time on short study trips to the conservatoire in Leipzig (1879-80), and Vienna (1880), which capped his musical education.
In 1881 he married Zdeňka Schulzová, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the director of the teaching institute, and settled permanently in Brno.
It was on the impetus of Janáček that in 1881 the Union for the promotion of church music in Moravia was established, which ran an organ school in Brno. Janáček’s concept for this school provided a stand-in for a conservatoire education, which was not put into place in Brno until 1919, when the organ school was transformed into the state conservatoire. Three years later (1884) Janáček established the magazine (Musical papers), which was able to quickly react to the growth of the Czech theatre in Brno, and he himself contributed expert musical, historical and theoretical articles, and theatre and concert reviews. After the Hudební listy closed down he continued with his publicising in other periodicals, of which Lidové noviny forms a separate chapter in his literary activities.
Soon after the beginning of regular Czech performances at the Na Veveří theatre (6.12.1884) Janáček’s dramatic instinct soon kindled a plan to write his own musical dramatic works. As early as the beginning of January 1885 he wrote the scene play for a romantic opera according to Chateaubriand, but he never got round to composing music for the work. Two years later he completed the sketch for his first draft of his opera Šárka (performed in Brno after significant amendments in 1925), which opened up the way for a series of operatic works, thanks to which he is today one of the most popular writers of modern operatic theatre. The first Brno premiere to take place in Brno was the one-act opera The Beginning of a Romance which was performed on 10 February 1894 under the baton of the author himself. It was not for another ten years, however, that the Brno public were to be able to enjoy the work that placed Janáček amongst the leading world composers of the 20th century: Jenůfa, whose Brno premiere was one of the most memorable events in the history of Brno opera, despite the fact that it took another twelve years for the work to be properly appreciated and the path to be opened for the composer to world recognition. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918 the political prestige of the state grew, as did the social and cultural life of the city of Brno and Janáček’s creative activity. The Brno premiers of Katya Kabanova (1921), The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), The Macropoulos Affair (1926), From a Dead House (1930), the unconventional Glagolithic Mass (1927) and other works that were written in the last decade of Janáček’s life, were international cultural events, at which foreign critics, directors and composers from European orchestras and opera houses came together.
Janáček’s relationship to the city which he had chosen as his home could not exhaust the number of works that he wrote in Brno. It was possible to see him in the Lužánky park, where he wrote down the notes of birdsong and to follow him down the streets of the city where he would take an interest in overhearing the words of his fellow citizens. We could look through the back issues of Lidové noviny, of which he had been an avid reader for many years and in which he found themes for his vocal cycle Zápisník zmizelého, and for the opera The Cunning Little Vixen and Říkadla. One cannot overlook works which are linked directly with Brno with their theme: the oldest of these is the cantata Amarus, which suggestively describes the sombre atmosphere of the monastery. Vrchlický’s poem awakened reminiscences in the composer after many years of the feelings of a young chorister confined by the strict monastery rules while he was a pupil at the foundation school. An important document on his rapid reaction to an actual event on the streets of Brno was the fragment of a piano sonata, called From the Street 1.X.1905. This sonata is dedicated to the memory of the worker František Pavlík, whose tragic death during demonstrations for a Czech university greatly upset Janáček.
On the occasion of his seventieth birthday he wrote a humorous work for the Mládí wind sextet, in the third movement of which there is a motif entitled The March of the Blue Boys, which was written as a jolly memory of the composer’s Brno beginnings. Janáček’s most important orchestral work, his Sinfonietta, was written in 1926 as a tribute to the city. The ideas behind the work, framed by ceremonial fanfares, are given by the author in the feuilleton My City:
I once here beheld the city in a miraculous transformation.
My disgust for the gloomy town hall, and hate for the hill in whose bowels once I screamed with pain disappeared,
My disgust for the street and that which went on there
Over the city there is a bewitching halo of freedom, reborn on 28 October 1918
I looked into it, I belonged to it.
And the sound of victorious car horns
A glorious quiet from the monastery in Úvoz
The night shadows and the breath of the green mountains
And the dream of a certain expansion and size of the city was born
In my sinfonietta from knowing this
From my city of Brno!
In the 1880s and 1890s Janáček intensively dedicated himself to musical folklore work, and this made him one of the greatest experts on Moravian folk songs. Some of his key works are the lightly autobiographical opera Osud (Fate) and the satirical opera Výlety páně Broučkovy (The Excursions of Mr. Brouček), the orchestral rhapsody Taras Bulba, the cantata Věčné evangelium (Eternal Gospel), the Bezruč male chorals Kantor Halfar, Maryčka Magdónova, Sedmdesát tisíc (Seventy thousand) and the avant-garde choral Potulný šílenec (The Wandering Madman) to Thákur’s text, the piano cycles Po zarostlém chodníčku (Along an Overgrown Footpath) and V mlhách (In the Mist), the chamber Concertino for piano and the instrumental work and avant-garde piano Capriccio, violin sonata, the violoncello Pohádka (Fairy Tale) and two string quartets, which are part of the repertoire of all world quartets.
Janáček’s estate, consisting of the hand-written versions of the majority of his works, documents, correspondence, notes, private library and other documents related to his life and works, is kept in the Department of Music History in the Moravian Regional Library in Brno www.mzm.cz/mzm/hudeb.htm. This department also looks after the memorial to Leoš Janáček in the garden house in Smetanova Street, in which the composer lived from 1910 until his death, and which is at present a popular place to visit for visitors from all over the world.
Other information on the composer’s life and works can be found on the pages of the Leoš Janáček foundation www.janacek-nadace.cz and the Moravian Regional Museum www.mzm.cz/mzm/jan.htm.
Janáček’s name is carried by other institutions in Brno, such as the Janáček Academy of Musical Arts www.jamu.cz and the Janáček Opera of the National Theatre in Brno www.ndbrno.cz.
List of attachments (from the archive of the Department of Music History of the Moravian Regional Museum in Brno):
Leoš Janáček with Zdeňka (photograph from 1881)
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Leoš Janáček (photograph from 1904)
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Leoš Janáček (photograph from 1928)
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Theatre sign – premiere of Jenůfa (1904)
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Concert program – premiere of Glagolithic Mass (1927)
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Hnad-written score by L. Janáček – Fanfares from Sinfonietta (1926)
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Hand-written score by L. Janáček – White Marble (1924)
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Hand-written score by L. Janáček – Words from the street (1926)
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