Miloš Štědroň: Double Janáček?
Double Janáček?
An Attempt at the Briefest Biography
In Czech music, we can hardly find anyone whose creative development unfolded through such contradictory twists and turns as that of Leoš Janáček. A contemporary of Z. Fibich, S. Freud, T. G. Masaryk, and many others, Janáček initially emerges as a late National Revival figure with Moravian characteristics. From the 1890s, and particularly after 1900, he gradually transforms into a solitary figure, responding vividly to the impulses of European modernism. After 1918, with the establishment of Czechoslovakia, he gains the reputation of an avant-gardist in the whirlwind of 1920s modernism, despite being two generations older than the youngest participants of this movement. Simply put, Janáček’s development occurred in two distinct phases. At first, he was a conventional composer of his time, as well as a choirmaster, conductor, concert organizer, organist, pianist, music critic, and writer. From these activities, he founded the music journal Hudební listy and, through his pedagogical work, established an organ school that later became a conservatory during the First Republic. These endeavors intertwined, building upon and blending into one another in the Czech part of Brno. In the 1880s, he also became a folklorist and collector of folk songs.
As it later became clear, these activities radically altered Janáček’s creative profile and his previous artistic disposition. Janáček was not merely a collector of folklore. Instead of being a parlor folklorist working remotely, he spent decades immersing himself in the daily and festive life of rural communities, abandoning traditional compositional practices. Although his folklore work was initiated by František Bartoš, who expected him to specialize in northeastern Moravia, Janáček fell in love with Slovácko and its three regions—Podluží, Dolňácko, and especially Horňácko. As a folklorist, Janáček studied the lives of the people comprehensively, building on scientific positivism while pushing toward experimental approaches. Most importantly, Janáček and his team delved into every aspect of folk music and song. He did not idealize this world but instead uncovered its complexities. He had to respond immediately to emerging situations, which completely transformed his compositional style. The clear, playable notation learned from his monastic training became, within a decade, an unrecognizable shorthand of sketches capturing moments, impressions, and the expressivity of everyday life. As a composer, Janáček receded into the background, considering the essence of his existence and artistic credo to be what he captured in folk music. No other Czech musician “went among the people” so deeply, penetrated the life of regions, or understood the connection between human destinies and “living” song. Janáček had no microphone, camera, or tape recorder. Only after 1900 did he discover the significance of the phonograph and fully utilized it. By the time he approached his fifties, Prague had long ceased to regard him as a composer. After promising beginnings, he remained a local authority in Brno until the age of 62.
In his late forties, a new Janáček was born—a Janáček of rapid, speech-derived melodic phrases, sketches, and montages, who began combining what was previously incompatible.
After his first two operatic attempts, it became clear that the operatic stage would continually captivate him. His first opera, Šárka, was not permitted for performance by librettist Julius Zeyer, who had not been consulted and intended the subject for Dvořák. The second opera was more of a folkloric sequence tied by a plot. Only his third opera, Jenůfa, written before his fifties, became the hallmark of this rare transformation in music history—from a conventional, regional composer to a solitary eccentric and, eventually, one of the greatest musical geniuses of the 20th century. During this transformation, Janáček lost both of his children—his young son Vladimír and his daughter Olga, in whom he saw himself and instilled his love for everything dear to him, especially Russia, its language, and culture. Her death finalized the collapse of his family but also propelled Janáček toward composition as the sole justification for his existence. The first Janáček ended before his forties; the second Janáček began before his fifties. He started anew, as we might say today, from a blank slate, at a time when younger rebels like Suk, Novák, and Nedbal were gradually aging. After the Brno premiere of Jenůfa, the fifty-year-old Janáček began again with enthusiasm, filled with stylistic ambitions. His folkloristic decade had invigorated him; he did not age but rather grew younger, willing to take artistic risks when younger representatives of Czech modernism had settled and shunned experimentation. Thus began the second Janáček—the Janáček of speech melodies, montages, a verist, impressionist, expressionist, and, after 1918, an avant-gardist alongside Schoenberg, Berg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Křenek, and even Debussy. This is the Janáček of montage, logically evolved from his folkloristic rapid sketches, and the Janáček of speech melodies, which he systematically notated from age 43 until the end of his life. To understand Janáček, it is crucial to study both distinct phases of his creative development. The true, powerful Janáček begins with the cantata Amarus and his third opera, Jenůfa.
This project captures above all Janáček’s remarkable transformation, where a collector’s and folklorist’s efforts gave rise to something entirely new. Over more than a decade, the folklore of eastern Moravia transformed his standard compositional style into one of the most original musical expressions of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and its first three decades.
Prof. PhDr. Miloš Štědroň, PhD