AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

First performed on 21 January 1904 in Brno, Jenůfa was later revised and in 1916 received its first performance in Prague under the direction of Karel Kovarovic. He only agreed to direct the opera after submitting to persuasive pressure from friends and colleagues, but he also insisted on making changes to the orchestration. Kovarovic’s revised Jenůfa became the accepted ...

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

Kátya belongs to the final decade of Janáček’s work and was inspired by his muse, Kamila Stösslova. She was the magnificent obsession who received a steady stream of letters from the composer up until his death, some of them confirming that Kátya was written for her. The opera was based on Ostrovsky’s drama The Storm, which concerns a ...

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

First performed in Brno on 6 November 1924, this opera, based on a story by Rudolf Tešnohlídek, centres around a little vixen known as ‘Sharp-ears’. Janáček’s music is colourful, evocative, playful, full of Moravian folk references and often very moving, combining ballet, mime, vocalization without text, orchestral interludes, a chorus ...

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

Janáček referred to this opera’s protagonist, Emilia Marty, as ‘the icy one’. Perhaps he was thinking of Kamila Stösslová, the opera singer in Capek’s comedy who so fascinated Janáček that he immediately requested the rights for a libretto. Capek was sceptical that the elderly composer could understand his play, yet the final result was superlative and Capek had ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(La’-osh Ya’-na-chek) 1854–1928 Czech composer Janáček came from a teaching family and initially followed that calling, though he later studied music in Prague, Leipzig and Vienna. He made his mark by fostering musical life in the Moravian capital Brno as teacher and conductor, and by collecting and publishing folksong. His musical voice crystallized in the realist opera Jenůfa ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1854–1928, Czech Undoubtedly the greatest of all Czech opera composers, and perhaps one of the true geniuses of the opera world, Janáček utilized music and theatre to maximum effect. Born in Moravia, his national style was evident in all his scores, and he was particularly adept at listening and adapting. Having spent plenty of time in ...

• Instruments
• Woodwind

Unusually among musical instruments, a specific date has been posited for the invention of the clarinet. Johann Christoph Denner of Nuremberg has been claimed as the man who, in 1700, devised and built the first of these instruments. Like all the best stories, however, the history of the clarinet is shrouded in mystery. The instrument attributed ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical
• Instrumentalist

b. 1953 Hungarian-British pianist Schiff studied at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest, before winning prizes at both the Moscow Tchaikovsky (1974) and Leeds (1975) piano competitions. Having appeared with most of the world’s major orchestras, he has focused increasingly on chamber and solo repertoire, recording the keyboard works of Bach (on the piano), the Mozart and Schubert ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Conductor
• Contemporary Classical

1925–2010 Australian conductor Mackerras began his career as an oboist in Australia before coming to Europe to study conducting. In Prague he became interested in Czech music, particularly Janáček, whose operas he championed through definitive recordings and performing editions. He was music director of Sadler’s Wells (later English National) Opera 1970–77, Welsh National Opera 1987–92, and later ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

(Be’-der-zhikh Sma’-ta-na) 1824–84 Czech Composer Smetana was the founding father of the Czech national musical revival. Born to middle-class parents on 2 March 1824, he showed considerable talent as a pianist by the time he was six. He went to study in Prague in 1839, subsequently making a living as a teacher and player. In 1848 he opened a music ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1890–1938, Czech Czechoslovakia’s most important playwright, novelist and essayist before the Second World War, Capek is probably best remembered for his satirical play R.U.R. (‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’, 1920). Aside from introducing ‘robot’ into the English language (courtesy of his brother Josef), this caused an international sensation by depicting the replacement of man by machine in modern ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Twentieth Century

By the turn of the twentieth century, Western classical music seemed to have reached a crisis in language. Tonality had become enfeebled by its own progressive tendency, via increasing chromaticism, toward subtler and more complex forms of expression. European society had become similarly enervated by the familiar comforts of a bourgeois existence. In many quarters across the Continent ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

The Modern Age was characterized by rapid and radical change and political turmoil. By 1918 the Russian tsar, the Habsburg emperor and the German kaiser had lost their thrones. The two Russian revolutions of 1917 resulted in a Communist government led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was fragmented to allow self-determination to the newly formed countries of Czechoslovakia ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

The opera house and, more specifically, opera audiences, were among the last to be receptive to the new musical language that developed during the twentieth century. Slow, as well as reluctant to vary their traditional musical tastes, perceptions and expectations, many viewed the opera house with nostalgia; as a symbol of the establishment, holding ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

Nineteenth-century music had developed with an unprecedented awareness of its own history, and by 1900 the European musical legacy seemed as permanent and unshakeable as the institutions – the opera houses, concert halls and conservatories – that nurtured it. Above all, classical tonality and its associated forms and genres, now the everyday stuff of textbooks, had ...