Paul Mitchinson writes:

Born in 1854, Janácek has walked a long and unlikely road to respectability. As late as his 60th birthday, he might well have been seen as a failure. He had published fewer than thirty works, and was writing only one new piece a year. Almost none of his music had been performed outside Moravia, where he was the head of the Brno Organ School. His operas had been abandoned before completion, rejected for performance, or at best performed badly in Brno. His life changed when, in 1916, his decade-old opera Jenufa – a sordid tale of Moravian village life – was performed in Prague, and Vienna and Berlin clamoured to stage it in their turn. Janácek retired from the organ school soon afterwards and, enjoying his new-found celebrity, wrote five operas, a song cycle, a string quartet and dozens of other works. Nearly all of them remain in the repertoire.

(LRB 4 December 2008)

Faber | hardback 971 pp. |ISBN: 9780571175383