What JanáĆek Knew about Opera

If, in the case of JanáĆek's interaction with Czech opera, the guiding interpretive assumption has been that he detached himself from national traditions after the war, the analagous assumption about his relationship with Western European opera is that he cannot have meaningfully engaged with music in styles that greatly differed from his own. The ways JanáĆek's interest in verismo opera have been the occasion of a delicate interpretive dance, in which the dramatic characteristics of verismo are carefully separated from its musical language, were alluded to in chapter 1. In general, it seems as if positing too strong a connection between JanáĆek and Puccini or Charpentier or, worse yet, a bond with Verdi or Gounod is too threatening to his status as an “old avant-gardist.” This chapter will use the tradition of the operatic love duet to suggest that JanáĆek learned much more from these composers than has been yet acknowledged.

Any examination of JanáĆek's relationships with operatic traditions must reckon in some way with his unusual and inconsistent engagement with operas by other composers. While it would certainly be a mistake to assume that JanáĆek, as a resident of relatively provincial Brno, would have been unfamiliar with the international operatic repertoire, it is nonetheless true both that there is no evidence that he knew some of the warhorses of the operatic canon and that a fair number of the operas he did see (including many Czech operas) are now obscure or forgotten. In general, JanáĆek could have known operas either by seeing them performed or by studying piano-vocal scores. The evidence that he encountered an opera could come from his own reviews, could come from mentions of operas in his correspondence or in accounts from his acquaintances, or could be deduced from the presence of scores, programs, and libretti in his library. Of course, merely determining that JanáĆek saw an opera or owned a score of it is no proof that he knew a work well or was infl uenced by it.

John Tyrrell's biography of JanáĆek contains a thorough survey of JanáĆek’s knowledge of opera, including tables listing every opera he is known to have encountered. Tyrrell divides his survey into three sections. The first takes JanáĆek up to 1888, when he orchestrated the first version of Šárka.