Leoš Janáček - www.foto-face.com
Leoš Janáček – www.foto-face.com
* July 3rd 1854, Hoshwald – † August 12th 1928, Moravska
Leos Janacek was a Czech composer, who is remembered mainly for his operas and his orchestral piece: Sinfonietta. 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. 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. When Jenůfa was given in Prague in 1916 it was a great success, and brought Janáček real acclaim for the first 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. He is generally recognized as one of his country’s foremost composers.
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