Leos Janácek

Leoš Janáček (, 3 July 1854 – 12 August 1928) was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist, and teacher.

He was inspired by Moravian and other Slavic music, including Eastern European folk music, to create an original, modern musical style.

Born in Hukvaldy, Janáček demonstrated musical talent at an early age and was educated in Brno, Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna.

He then returned to live in Brno, where he married his pupil Zdenka Schulzová and devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research.

His earlier musical output was influenced by contemporaries such as Antonín Dvořák, but around the turn of the century he began to incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music, as well as his transcriptions of "speech melodies" of spoken language, to create a modern, highly original synthesis.

Leoš Janáček, son of schoolmaster Jiří Janacek (1815–1866) and Amalie (née Grulichová) Janáčková (1819–1884), was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire) on 3 July 1854.

He was born with six surviving siblings, and baptised as Leo Eugen.

He was a gifted child in a family of limited means, and showed an early musical talent in choral singing.

His father wanted him to follow the family tradition and become a teacher, but he deferred to Janáček's obvious musical abilities.

In 1865, young Janáček enrolled as a ward of the foundation of the St Thomas's Abbey, Brno, where he took part in choral singing under Pavel Křížkovský and occasionally played the organ.

One of his classmates, František Neumann, later described Janáček as an "excellent pianist, who played Beethoven symphonies perfectly in a piano duet with a classmate, under Křížkovský's supervision".

Křížkovský found him a problematic and wayward student but recommended his entry to the Prague Organ School.

Janáček later remembered Křížkovský as a great conductor and teacher.

Janáček originally intended to study piano and organ but eventually devoted himself to composition.

He wrote his first vocal compositions while choirmaster of the Svatopluk Artisan's Association (1873–76).

In 1874, he enrolled at the Prague organ school, under František Skuherský and František Blažek.

His student days in Prague were impoverished; with no piano in his room, he had to make do with a keyboard drawn on his tabletop.

His criticism of Skuherský's performance of the Gregorian mass was published in the March 1875 edition of the journal Cecilie and led to his expulsion from the school, but Skuherský relented, and on 24 July 1875 Janáček graduated with the best results in his class.

On his return to Brno he earned a living as a music teacher, and conducted various amateur choirs.

From 1876 he taught music at Brno's Teachers' Institute.

Among his pupils there was Zdenka Schulzová, daughter of Emilian Schulz, the Institute director.

She was later to be Janáček's wife.

In 1876, he also became a piano student of Amálie Wickenhauserová-Nerudová, with whom he co-organized chamber concertos and performed in concerts over the following two years.

In February 1876, he was voted Choirmaster of the Beseda brněnská Philharmonic Society.

Apart from an interruption from 1879 to 1881, he remained its choirmaster and conductor until 1888.

From October 1879 to February 1880, he studied piano, organ, and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory.

While there, he composed Thema con variazioni for piano in B-flat, subtitled Zdenka's Variations.

Dissatisfied with his teachers (among them Oscar Paul and Leo Grill), and denied a studentship with Camille Saint-Saëns in Paris, Janáček moved on to the Vienna Conservatory, where from April to June 1880, he studied composition with Franz Krenn.

He concealed his opposition to Krenn's neo-romanticism, but he quit Josef Dachs's classes and further piano study after he was criticised for his piano style and technique.

He submitted a violin sonata (now lost) to a Vienna Conservatory competition, but the judges rejected it as being "too academic".

Janáček left the conservatory in June 1880, disappointed despite Franz Krenn's very complimentary personal report.

He returned to Brno where, on 13 July 1881, he married his young pupil, Zdenka Schulzová.

The death of his daughter Olga in 1903 had a profound effect on his musical output; these notable transformations were first evident in the opera Jenůfa (often called the "Moravian national opera"), which premiered in 1904 in Brno.

In the following years, Janáček became frustrated with a lack of recognition from Prague, but this was finally relieved by the success of a revised edition of Jenůfa at the National Theatre in 1916, which gave Janáček access to the world's great opera stages.

Janáček's later works are his most celebrated.

They include operas such as Káťa Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen, the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, two string quartets, and other chamber works.

Many of Janáček's later works were influenced by Czech and Russian literature, his pan-Slavist sentiments, and his infatuation with Kamila Stösslová.

After his death in 1928, Janáček's work was heavily promoted on the world opera stage by the Australian conductor Charles Mackerras, who also restored some of his compositions to their original, unrevised forms.

In his homeland he inspired a new generation of Czech composers including several of his students.

Today he is considered one of the most important Czech composers, along with Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana.