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Janacek Day - 4 July 2004 |
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Janacek in Brno The largest city in Moravia was Janacek 's adopted home town. Sent there age eleven to study at a monastery choir school, he stayed for the rest of his life; and for most of his adult years he was the epicentre of Brno musical life.   1/5View of Brno's cathedral from the castle hill. In the Czech-speaking community, that is: under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the majority of Brno was German-speaking, and the Czechs often had a hard time of it. Janacek's piano sonata was inspired by the death of a worker in a demonstration calling for a Czech university in Brno; the composer refused to travel on the trams because they were German-owned, and he forbade his wife Zdenka to speak anything but Czech (German was her first language). He'd fallen for Zdenka when she was a pretty 14-year-old piano pupil of his, he married her before she was sixteen, and they lived more-or-less unhappily ever after. They weren't suited; the deaths of their two children can't have helped; and as Janacek increasingly played away from home (or tried to) the marriage degenerated into a kind of semi-divorce - though they always lived together, and Zdenka seems always to have stayed in love with her husband. After he'd written his famous Sinfonietta , Janacek said that the different movements were inspired by different places in Brno - but that he'd only come to love the city since 1918, when Czechoslovakia won her independence from the Habsburg Empire, and the Czechs became the dominant community. They even took over the opulent city theatre built by the German speakers - which meant Janacek 's later operas could be premiered with slightly more appropriate forces than the ragged orchestra of (at most) 29 which had introduced his first masterpiece Jenufa to a cheering Brno Czech audience back in 1904. Modern-day Brno does Janacek proud. His house is a museum. The Organ School which he founded is now the Janacek Archive. There's an impressive modern opera house named after the composer, and there are frequent Janacek Festivals. The one in January and February 2004 celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Jenufa premiere with a new production by David Pountney which, for the first time since World War 1, used Janacek 's own version of the work. Map of Bohemia/Moravia Full schedule for Janacek Day |
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Schedule Map of Bohemia/Moravia Bratislava Brno Hukvaldy Luhacovice Ostrava Pisek Prague Pribor Stramberk Strbske Pleso Velka Vienna Janacek Day: full playlist Related Links on radio 3 on bbc.co.uk on the web www.janacek.co.uk Janacek Archive & Museum Classical Music Pages Museum in Janacek's house, Hukvaldy The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites. |
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Opening fanfare from Sinfonietta
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