Janacek: Years of a Life Volume 1 (1854-1914)

Book excerpt: John Tyrrell's biography of the Leos Janácek is the culmination of a life's work in the field. It stands upon his existing documentary studies of Janácek's operas and translations of other key sources and his examination of thousands of still unpublished letters and other documents in the Janácek archive in Brno. Altogether it provides the most detailed account of Janácek's life in any language and offers new views of Janácek as composer, writer, thinker and human being. Volume 1, which goes up to the outbreak of the First World War and Janácek's sixtieth birthday in the summer of 1914, consists of chronological chapters providing a straightforward account of Janácek's life year by year and another forty contextual chapters. Topics include on-going sequences ('Music as autobiography I', etc.; 'Janácek's knowledge of opera I', etc.) and individual chapters on Janácek as a teacher, as a theorist, as an music ethnographer, on his speech-melody theory, his relationship to particularly influential operas (Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, Charpentier's Louise), on his mentors (such as Antonín Dvorák) and his bêtes noires (such as Karel Kovarovic). A particular feature are the specially commissioned chapters on Janácek's health by Dr Stephen Lock (one of the editors of the Oxford Illustrated Companion to Medicine, OUP 1994 and 2001, editor of the British Medical Journal, 1975-91, and a Janácek enthusiast since the early postwar broadasts on the Third Programme), and on Janácek's earnings and finances by Dr Jirí Zahrádka (curator of the Janácek archive in Brno, and editor of authentic editions of Sárka and The Excursions of Mr Broucek).