Leoš Janáček
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Categories: Czech composers | 20th century classical composers | Opera composers | People from Austrian Silesia | Romantic composers | 1854 births | 1928 deaths
|
Image:Janacek with wife.jpg
Leoš Janáček with his wife
Leoš Janáček ([ˈlɛoʃ ˈjanaːtʃɛk] ) (July 3, 1854 – August 12, 1928), was a Czech composer. He is particularly remembered for his orchestral piece Sinfonietta and his operas, and is generally recognised as one of his country's foremost composers.
Life and workJanáček was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, (then part of the Austrian empire), the son of a schoolmaster. He sang as a boy in the choir of the Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno. He later went to Prague to study music and made a living as a music teacher. He also conducted various amateur choirs. In 1881 he moved back to Brno, and founded the Organ School there, which was later to become the Brno Conservatory. As a young man Janáček became friends with Antonín Dvořák, and began composing in a relatively traditional romantic style, but after his opera Šárka (1881), his style began to change. He made a study of Moravian and Slovak folk music and used elements of it in his own music. He especially focused on studying and reproducing the rhythm and the pitch contour and inflections of normal Czech speech, which helped in creating the very distinctive vocal melodies in his opera Jenůfa (1904). Going much farther than Modest Mussorgsky and anticipating the later work of Béla Bartók in such styles, Janáček made this a distinguishing feature of his vocal writing (Samson 1977). When Jenůfa was given in Prague in 1916 it was a great success, and brought Janáček real acclaim for the first time. He was 62 at the time. A year later he met Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman who was a profound inspiration to him for the remaining years of his life, and with whom he conducted an obsessive correspondence – passionate on his side at least. He is best-known for the music he wrote from this point to the end of his life. Although many consider his output from this period to mark his mature style, he had been writing in this fashion for quite a number of years but had simply not received wide public acclaim earlier. Much of Janáček's work displays great originality and individuality. His work is tonal, although it employs a vastly expanded view of tonality. He also uses unorthodox chord spacings and structures, often making use of modality: "there is no music without key. Atonality abolishes definite key, and thus tonal modulation....Folksong knows of no atonality." (Hollander 1963) He features accompaniment figures and patterns, with according to Jim Samson, "the on-going movement of his music...similarly achieved by unorthodox means—often a discourse of short, 'unfinished' phrases comprising constant repetitions of short motives which gather momentum in a cumulative manner." (Samson 1977) LegacyJanáček belongs to a wave of 20th century composers who were seeking greater realism and greater connection with everyday life, combined with a more all-encompassing use of musical resources. His operas in particular demonstrate the use of "speech"-derived melodic lines, folk and traditional material, and complex modal musical argument. Janáček's works are still regularly performed around the world, and are generally considered popular with audiences. He would also inspire later composers in his homeland, as well as music theorists, among them Jaroslav Volek to place modal development along side of harmony in importance in music. Many see the operas Káťa Kabanová (1921), The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), The Makropulos Affair (1926) and From the House of the Dead (after a novel by Dostoevsky, premiered in 1930, after his death) as his finest works. The conductor Sir Charles Mackerras has become particularly closely associated with them. His chamber music, while not especially voluminous, includes works which are generally considered to be "in the standard repertory" as 20th century classics, particularly his two string quartets: "The Kreutzer Sonata" and the Quartet No. 2 "Intimate Letters". At Frankfurt am Main modern music festival in 1926 Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová performed the world premiere of Janacek's Concertino (Czech premiere - February 16th 1926 in Brno). Other well known pieces by Janáček include the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass (the text written in Old Church Slavonic), Lachian Dances, and the rhapsody Taras Bulba. These pieces and the above mentioned four late operas were all written in the last decade of Janáček's life. He died in Ostrava. Janáček's operas
Janáček's music in filmA film that draws extensively from Janáček's (mostly non-vocal) music is The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) after a novel by Milan Kundera, whose father Ludvík (1891-1971), a pupil of the Leoš Janáček, was an important Czech musicologist and pianist, the head of the Brno Musical Academy between 1948 and 1961 [[1]]). This film quotes, amongst other pieces:
More on Janáček's music in film: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0418443/ In popular culture
Media
See also
External links
Sources
bg:Леош Яначек ca:Leóš Janáček cs:Leoš Janáček cy:Leoš Janáček da:Leoš Janáček de:Leoš Janáček es:Leoš Janáček eo:Leoš Janáček fr:Leoš Janáček ko:레오시 야나체크 hr:Leoš Janáček it:Leóš Janáček he:לאוש יאנאצ'ק hu:Leoš Janáček nl:Leoš Janáček ja:レオシュ・ヤナーチェク pl:Leoš Janáček pt:Leoš Janáček ru:Яначек, Леош simple:Leoš Janáček sk:Leoš Janáček sl:Leoš Janáček fi:Leoš Janáček sv:Leoš Janáček | ||||||||||
