JanáĆek and Czech Opera

Chapters 2 and 3 attempted to apply critical pressure to two central assumptions of JanáĆek reception: that the infl ections of Czech speech were a significant infl uence on his compositional practices and that the founding of an independent Czechoslovak state in 1918 marked a turning point in his compositional career. Similarly, this chapter will deal with another facet of JanáĆek's passionate but problematic relationship with Czech culture and with the ways the contours of his career were shaped by the materialization of a Czech nation. In this case, the relationship to be problematized is that between JanáĆek's operas and earlier Czech operas. While accounts of JanáĆek's life and works inevitably foreground his national and regional identities—whether manifested through his belligerent allegiance to the Czech language in his youth, his fondness for Moravian costume, his collaboration with nationalistic gymnastics organizations, or his researches into speech melody and folksong—his connection to Czech opera traditions tends to remain subsidiary.

As a man who came of age in the second half of the nineteenth century, JanáĆek's cultural politics were shaped by the Czech National Rebirth, and, not surprisingly (as discussed in chapter 3), national and regional identities play prominent roles in his biography. As a composer, though, he blossomed after the successful culmination of the National Rebirth project in an independent Czech state, and his best-known works, especially the mature operas, are not obviously connected to prewar cultural ideologies. Perhaps because of this, JanáĆek's connections to nineteenth-century Czech operatic traditions have not received the same attention as his fascination with speech melodies and folk culture. That is, while it is generally assumed that JanáĆek's musical language was inextricably tied to language and folksong until the end of his life, it is also assumed that the subjects of his postwar operas transcend local concerns.

This view of JanáĆek's postwar operas as existing in some sense outside of a tradition of Czech opera that extended from the 1862 opening of the Prague Provisional Theater to the foundation of a Czech state in 1918 is neatly encapsulated in John Tyrrell's preface to his Czech Opera. Tyrrell points out that the opening of the Provisional Theater allowed “a continuous tradition of writing and performing opera in Czech to fl ourish” and that the growth and maturation of this tradition coincided roughly with the development of the National Rebirth movement.