Janáček's musical style began to acquire a distinctive character only in the 1890s, when he was already in his forties. Despite its unique and sometimes unconventional nature, it developed from a traditional and established musical language in which Janáček was trained from his youth. This chapter looks at several of his nineteenth-century compositions to examine the traditional basis that gives his music its solid foundation. These pieces precede Janáček's rigorous involvement with folk music and his discovery of speech motives; thus his approach to composition is relatively traditional. However, some of the characteristics of these works always remained part of his musical language. The analyses vary in their focus to introduce the breadth of structural issues found in Janáček's compositions. The chronological presentation is interspersed with biographical details.

Early Choruses

Choral music was Janáček's first focus as well as a lifelong habit; he contin-ued writing choruses at irregular intervals throughout his career. The initial impetus came from his first important musical influence, his teacher at the Augustinian monastery in Brno, Pavel Křížkovský (1820–85). As the leading Moravian composer of the pre-Smetana period, Křížkovský is generally considered the founder of the Czech choral style. He expressed his ardent nationalism through choruses based on folk melodies and folk texts taken from Moravian national songs. In 1872 Janáček was appointed Křížkovský's deputy choirmaster in Old Brno; his first compositions were choruses patterned on those of his teacher. Some are based on folk songs; others use folk texts set to original melodies. As in much folk music, the subject matter of these choruses deals with everyday concerns of ordinary people; they may be described as artistically stylized pictures of country life. Musically they are relatively simple, displaying little evidence of nineteenth-century chromaticism. They do show, however, musical thought and a solid compositional technique. Perhaps more important, they also show various departures from compositional conventions.

Janáček's first extant choral work is the men's chorus Ploughing (Orání), written in 1873 (ex. 3.1). It is a charming piece; Tyrrell notes that “it was encored at its first performance and received more subsequent performances than any other of his early choruses.” Based on a folk text, it is almost entirely diatonic, with traditional voice leading. Its relative simplicity may be a consequence of the intended performing group, the craftsmen's choral society Svatopluk, which Janáček conducted and which consisted of men of limited musical and cultural background.