A late and furious flowering

Sceptical readers will immediately wonder whether 14 years of any composer’s life really deserve over 1,000 pages of biographical examination. The second volume of John Tyrell’s Janacek certainly goes into events in extraordinary detail — I had a definite sense of foreboding of things to come when, on page 361, it is reported that in December 1919, ‘a button flew off [Janacek’s] fur coat so that he had to have another sewn on’. If we agree that the significance of the life dictates the substance of the biography, however, it seems perfectly reasonable. The last decade of Janacek’s life is truly one of the most astonishing and important periods in musical history. There is nothing that prepares us for it, and we are still coming to terms with it.

Reviewing the first volume of Tyrell’s biography, I said that it really was very much like the life of a small-town music teacher of no particular interest. Janacek’s contemporaries thought not much of the music he wrote in the first 60 years of his life, and, with the exception of Jenufa and a couple of small pieces, posterity has largely concurred. He was a man of exceptional conceit, regarding his lack of success in the larger world and limited success even in Brno as the product of conspiracies against him. In some cases, he was right. There were conspiracies against him. But all the same little of his early music commanded attention then or subsequently. Something happened after 1918, and, with amazement, the reader sees his achievement matching and even surpassing his estimate of his own merits.

There is barely a work after 1918 which isn’t a masterpiece, forged in a musical language of revolutionary power: four stunning operas, the Glagolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta, a group of propulsive chamber pieces and more.