Although the quality of Janáček's earlier compositions is high, they do not yet possess a distinct personality. His unique compositional style begins to emerge only in the late 1890s, primarily as a consequence of three factors: Janáček's discovery of speech melodies, his attention to folk music, and his encounter with Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades. Attention to speech melodies began his turning away from traditional designs and toward freer construction. It also altered and intensified the motivic basis of his works. Folk music prompted him to more frequent use of modes, ostinati, pedals, and static harmonic blocks; it represented freedom from tradition. And the encounter with The Queen of Spades affected his handling of motives, musical structure, and operatic conventions. We can sense the effect of these three factors immediately in compositions such as the opera Jenůfa (1894–1903), the cantata Amarus (1897), the Moravian choruses (1900–1906), and several pieces from the piano cycle On the Overgrown Path (1900–1911). Here Janáček found his direction, an individual style that would endure until his latest works. After the turn of the century he began to rely more on motives to guide his compositions’ structure and to provide unity to a style that was beginning to abandon some of the traditional structural principles. Typical Janáčekian structures feature brevity of ideas, rhythmic vitality, and varied orchestral colors, set in a musical language that fuses the classical and folk idioms. Further growth and development in his late works result primarily from his use of twentieth-century compositional techniques.

This chapter looks at several pivotal scenes from Jenůfa to illustrate his changing style. I focus on the function of the primary motives and consider their role in smaller and larger structures, explaining their relationship to the text when appropriate. My discussion includes a summary of the action to place the theoretical observations in a context.

Melodic Motives

On January 16, 1896, Janáček attended a performance of The Queen of Spades. Its effect on him was profound. He had already completed act 1 of Jenůfa but now stopped for several years and rethought his approach to opera composition.