What you should know about Leoš Janáček

Leoš Janáček was a Czech composer, born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, in 1854, into a family that was musical but poor. Training as a chorister at a local monastery was followed by studies in Prague, Leipzig and Vienna. Janáček returned to Brno to work as a choirmaster, collect folk songs and develop his compositional style. Choral music and opera were his greatest enthusiasms, but he was also a composer of instrumental, chamber and orchestral music.

Janáček’s music was barely known outside of Moravia until his opera Jenůfa (1904) received a belated performance in Prague in 1916. From then on, his fortunes started to change, as his music began to attract attention in Germany and the US. Janáček wrote many of his most celebrated works, including Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass, the two string quartets and four major operas in the last decade of his life.

Janáček suffered personal sorrows: his marriage to Zdenka Schulzová was unhappy, and both his children died (his son in early childhood and his daughter as a young woman). In later life, he became infatuated with Kamila Stösslová, a happily married family friend, with whom he pursued a passionate, long-running correspondence. Janáček died in 1928, close to the village of his birth, after catching a chill when out walking.

The art of dramatic writing is to compose a melodic curve that will, as if by magic, reveal immediately a human being in one definite phase of his existence.
Leoš Janáček

Sinfonietta

Written for a gymnastics festival, Janáček’s is an unusual ‘little symphony’. With its expanded brass and percussion sections, showcased brilliantly in the opening ‘Fanfare’, the Sinfonietta (1926) celebrates military music. Janáček said he wanted to depict a ‘vision of vigour and freedom’, and he does this through using large blocks of sound and forceful melodic repetitions. He guides us around his native Brno in movements entitled ‘The Castle’, ‘The Queen’s Monastery’, ‘The Street’ and ‘The Town Hall’.

Katya Kabanova

Set in Russia beside the River Volga, this opera (1921) tells the story of a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage who has an affair, eventually confessing during a thunderstorm before drowning herself in the river. Janáček identified the heroine with Stösslová but also takes inspiration from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Scored for a large orchestra, this is Janáček’s most lyrical opera, and Katya’s ardent music contrasts with the more angular style used for Kabanicha, her domineering mother-in-law.

The Cunning Little Vixen

This opera, first performed in 1924, is a work of great charm, about a vixen cub who escapes from a gamekeeper and interacts with various animals on her quest for freedom and a mate. In order to evoke the natural world, Janáček uses extended passages of colourful orchestral writing, children’s voices and dance to give each animal a distinctive personality. The Cunning Little Vixen is surely the only opera to have been inspired by a newspaper comic strip.

It is likely that Janáček heard no opera before moving to Leipzig. However, in his thirties he became enthusiastically involved with the new opera theatre in Brno, reviewing performances and starting to write his own operas.

Janáček regarded himself an opera composer first and foremost, but only gained recognition as such relatively late in his career. Today, he is considered to be one of the most important and original opera composers of the twentieth century. He composed nine operas, in a mixture of genres, and latterly wrote his own libretti.

Janáček’s operas are quirky in subject matter. Some, such as Jenůfa and Katya Kabanova, are tragic works about the suffering of women: both feature controlling mother figures. The Makropoulos Affair is about a woman who has taken an elixir of life and lived for 300 years, and The Excursions of Mr. Brouček is a surreal work about a man who travels to the moon and back in time to the fifteenth century.

Janáček’s operatic style is highly individual. His works are intensely lyrical, but with vocal lines shaped by the natural rhythms of the Czech language, which gives them a ‘jagged’ quality. Janáček uses lush orchestration steeped in the traditions of the nineteenth century, but his operas have an added ‘spice’, thanks to his incorporation of Moravian folksong.

The Sinfonietta and the Glagolitic Mass have long been staples of the LSO repertoire, and the Orchestra has performed Janáček from time to time at the Proms. Since 2019, under Sir Simon Rattle, the LSO has performed a special series of Janáček operas in concert, and The Cunning Little Vixen and Katya Kabanova have been released as recordings on the LSO Live label. The latest opera to be performed, in May 2025, is the composer’s exuberant and surreal comedy, The Excursions of Mr Brouček.

Moravia, part of the present-day Czech Republic, was, for the early part of Janáček’s life, one of the northernmost regions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Janáček grew up during a period of intense Czech nationalism and was a fervent patriot, developing a keen interest in the folksong of his local region. Despite his studies in Germany and Austria, he inhabited a cultural milieu largely removed from the West European artistic mainstream, but was deeply interested in the wider Slavonic world. Janáček would witness the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, at which point Moravia became part of Czechoslovakia.

Janáček was a close contemporary of Puccini (1858-1924) and Elgar (1857-1934). In terms of ‘Czech’ music, Janáček sits chronologically between Dvořák (1841-1904) and Mahler (1860-1911), both of whom were born in Bohemia, a region to the west of Moravia, though Mahler’s family were German-speaking. The celebrated artist Alphonse Mucha, six years Janáček’s junior, famous for his stylised Art Nouveau theatrical posters, was a fellow Moravian.

Janáček could be outspoken at times. When studying in Prague, he wrote a critical review of a performance conducted by the headmaster of the Organ School where he was a student, leading to his temporary suspension. ‘I will remember this day for I was wronged for telling the truth’, he wrote in his school exercise book.