To the East

The standard narratives of JanáĆek's compositional career tend to stress the astonishing fecundity of its last decade. Between 1918 and his death in 1928, JanáĆek wrote nearly all the major works for which he is now known, including both string quartets, the song cycle The Diary of One Who Vanished, the Concertino, the Capriccio, the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass, and the operas Káťa Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Case, and From the House of the Dead. This outpouring of masterworks is generally attributed to a coincidence of professional, personal, and political factors in JanáĆek's life in the years 1916 to 1918, coalescing around three events.

The first of these events was the 1916 Prague production of Jenůfa. This longdelayed staging was the pivotal moment in JanáĆek's transformation from a provincial teacher to an internationally known opera composer. Not only was it the first production of a JanáĆek opera outside Brno, it was also the beginning of JanáĆek's associations with both Max Brod and Universal Edition, leading to the German translations and publications that would expose his later operas beyond the Czech lands.

The next event was JanáĆek's first encounter with Kamila Stösslová at the LuhaĆovice spa in July 1917. Stösslová would be the muse of JanáĆek's last decade. Although JanáĆek's affection was largely unreciprocated and his fantasies of intimacy and parenthood were never realized, he claimed Stösslová as the inspiration for many of his late works, seeing her in characters from his operas and songs and weaving his imaginary life with her into instrumental works.

The third event was the establishment of an independent Czecho-Slovak state on October 28, 1918. Of the three, this event remains the least examined. While there is a general assumption that the founding of the First Republic spurred JanáĆek's creativity, either through an overfl ow of patriotic sentiment or by freeing him from nationalist concerns and allowing him to address issues of broader human import, little attention has been given to JanáĆek's specific reactions to events of World War I. His output during the war years does, though, seem to suggest meaningful connections to current events. Both JanáĆek's choices of subjects and the musical details of many works composed during and immediately after the war show him responding to changing political and military circumstances.