Janacek (review)

In the introduction to her new biography of Leos Janácek, Mirka Zemanová states that she has three goals: (1) to describe Janácek's life for the general reader; (2) to lead the listener familiar with some of Janácek's output to additional works; and (3) to provide new material in English for scholars and serious students (p. 1). She has succeeded in each of these tasks. Zemanová's Janácek contains the most detailed account of Janácek's personal life available in English, and draws on many documents that are either unpublished or have not been previously published in English. Janácek, particularly as a young man, is vividly depicted, often in fresh anecdotes. The images of the composer as a student in Leipzig, pulling the petals from a cabbage rose sent by his fiancée Zdenka, counting the days until he would see her again (p. 35), or attending a masked ball dressed as Faust with Zdenka on his arm in the guise of Marguerite (pp. 41-42) are happy additions to the literature.

The standard biography of Janácek is Jaroslav Vogel's Janácek: A Biography, (rev. ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). Vogel's book is constructed around Janácek's works, containing detailed discussions of even minor or obscure compositions, and illustrated with many musical examples. Zemanová's book provides a welcome companion to Vogel's classic, both because she starts her inquiry from the life rather than from the works, and because she has had access to material about Janácek's life that was not available to Vogel.

Zemanová makes extensive use of Janácek's correspondence and of memoirs by people who knew Janácek well. In particular, she draws on the letters that the composer wrote to his future wife Zdenka while studying in Leipzig and Vienna, letters which have been published only in German (Jakob Knaus, ed., "Intime Briefe" 1879-80 aus Leipzig und Wien [Zurich: Leos Janácek Gesellschaft, 1985]), as well as Zdenka's memoirs, and the correspondence between Janácek and the muse of his last decade, Kamila Stösslová. Extensive and well annotated English translations of the latter two are available (John Tyrrell, ed. and trans., Intimate Letters: LeosJanácek to Kamila Stösslová [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984] and My Life with Janácek: The Memoirs of Zdenka Janácková [London: Faber & Faber, 1998]), but Zemanová, in addition to going back to the original Czech, quotes from letters and passages not contained in Tyrrell's selections. She also refers to the reminiscences of Marie Stejskalová, the Janáceks's servant, material which until this year had been available only in Czech (Marie Trkanova, U Janácku: podle vyprávení Marie Stejskalové [Brno: Simon Rysavy´, 1998]; At the Janáceks, trans. Eva Okestková-Pospisil [Grand Bend, Ont.: E. Okestková-Pospisil, 2002]). As suggested by this list, Zemanová is primarily interested in Janácek's relations with the women in his life. The picture that emerges may be disappointing to devotees of his music. The composer is only too convincingly portrayed as a selfish person who treated even those closest to him heartlessly. Even his passionate love for Stösslová seems not only to have been unrequited, but to have been tolerated largely because of Janácek's financial largesse to Stösslová's family (see index entries for Stösslová, Kamila, relationship with LJ, financial considerations, p. 351).

As she states in the introduction, Zemanová has no intention of providing detailed analyses of individual works. It might have been better, however, had she forsaken analytical comment altogether. Works are described in very general terms and with many similarities between the descriptions. She stresses Janácek's fondness for fourths, fifths, and seconds and points to wider intervals as indicating heightened emotional states. While it is certainly true that Janácek favored these intervals when constructing...