Composer Profile
Leoš Janáček (1854 - 1928) by Kristin Rasmussen
Today, Leoš Janáček is regarded not only as one of the twentieth century's most significant and appealing opera composers, but also stands alongside Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana as one of the most significant Czech composers. Janáček produced a new and modern musical style, heavily influenced by his native Moravian folk music and a desire to infuse the rhythms and sounds of spoken word into his librettos.
Born into a family of teachers and musicians, Janáček exhibited musical talent at a young age. He began his focused musical education in Brno and returned to the Moravian city on a regular basis to carry on his family's teaching tradition while finishing his education in Prague, Leipzig and Vienna. Janáček founded Brno's organ school in 1881 and served as its director until it was reestablished as the Brno Conservatory in the early twentieth century. Janáček would also marry his young student, Zdenka Schulzová, this year. This would be a turbulent marriage, marred by their competing political ideas, the premature deaths of both of their children and Janáček’s love affairs. During the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, he focused primarily on his study of folk music. Primarily from his native Moravia, Janáček integrated Eastern European folk music and its songs and dances into orchestral and piano arrangements. Though most of his important contributions to the field were published at the end of the nineteenth century, his interest in folklore lasted throughout his life.
Though he is most recognized today for his operatic masterpieces, Janáček’s commitment to opera composition and success in the genre occurred in the latter decades of his life. Jenůfa, his first successful opera, was premiered initially in 1904 but did not achieve major success until a revised version was staged in Prague twelve years later. Following this, Janáček composed and premiered four operas between 1919 and 1928, including The Cunning Little Vixen (Příhody lišky Bystroušky). During this time, his operatic style became defined by his study of translating speech into melody, resulting in stylizations of irregular speech patterns into song, and his incorporation of folklore and folk music. Janáček was also willing and able to explore themes not typically explored by opera composers at the time, such as the complex legal case explored in The Makropulos Affair and the selection of Dostoyevsky's prison memoir as the subject of his final opera From the House of the Dead, which premiered two years after his death.
Upon his death, Janáček was given a large, public funeral, and, according to his wishes, the final scene of The Cunning Little Vixen was performed at the ceremony. His legacy has lived on worldwide in both his vast corpus of choral and instrumental works and his operas, and in his homeland, where he inspired a new generation of Czech composers. His operas were promoted heavily on the world stage by Australian conductor Charles Mackerras, who sought to restore the compositions to their original, unrevised forms, and by the end of the twentieth century, Janáček had become one of the most performed twentieth century opera composers in Europe and the United States.
DMMO is thrilled to bring Janáček back to the stage at the Blank Performing Arts Center with his joyful, witty, romantic and tragic opera, The Cunning Little Vixen.