Leoš Janáček

Leoš Janáček was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, in July 1854, the son of a village schoolmaster. He was sent at eleven to be a chorister at the Augustinian monastery in Brno, and trained as a teacher and church musician before brief periods of further study at the conservatories of Leipzig and Vienna in 1879–80. He returned to Brno permanently in 1881 and spent the rest of his life there, founding the Brno Organ School (later the Brno Conservatory) and editing collections of Moravian folk music.

His distinctive compositional voice — built on what he called *speech-melody*, the contours of spoken Czech mapped into musical line — emerged slowly. *Jenůfa*, completed in 1903, attracted little attention outside Brno until its 1916 Prague revival, when Janáček was sixty-two. The decade and a half that followed produced *Káťa Kabanová* (1921), *The Cunning Little Vixen* (1924), *The Makropulos Affair* (1926), *From the House of the Dead* (1928), the *Glagolitic Mass* (1926), and the two string quartets — an unparalleled late flowering. His passion for Kamila Stösslová, a married woman thirty-eight years his junior, fuelled much of the late work.

Janáček died in Ostrava in August 1928 of pneumonia after a chill caught while searching for Kamila’s lost son. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his operatic and chamber work, with particular depth in the British performance history under Sir Charles Mackerras.