Janacek, by Mirka Zemanova

An impossible genius who gave a nation its voice

To understand Janacek's musical genius, a grasp of his background is crucial. This biography supplies it well. The composer's native Moravia, with other Czech lands, had been under Austrian domination since 1620. For generations before Hitler, the Austrians and Germans regarded the Czechs as Untermenschen. Written Czech had largely disappeared, with peasant speech and folksong the chief channel for creativity. By Janacek's time, even well-to-do Czechs spoke Czech only to their servants, but patriotic choral societies gave underlying strength to the national spirit. Music was the key.

Janacek was born in 1854 into the poor family of a village schoolmaster. It had a strong musical tradition but his studies in Leipzig and Vienna discouraged him. Too poor to hire a piano, he would practise Bach on a keyboard drawn in chalk on a table. Back in Brno, he found scraps of work conducting and teaching, and in his loneliness fell in love with a pupil, Zdenka Schultz. He married her just before her 16th birthday, thereafter treating her with a total lack of consideration.

But his reputation as a conductor, reviewer and, more slowly, a composer began to grow. He collected folk songs but when he began writing opera in the 1880s, he tackled the great themes: passion, betrayal, false pride, guilt and, in Jenufa, reconciliation. His male characters were often wimpish, the females overbearing. His chief concerns were, first, with "speech melody" – the alignment of melodies with speech, and their emotional variations – and second, an intense devotion to the despised Czech language, which shows how obstinately suppressed nations of Europe retained their individuality. Janacek refused to use the trams in Brno because they were owned by a German firm.

After the harrowing death of their 16-year-old daughter in 1903, Janacek and Zdenka had little in common except her loyal admiration. When Jenufa was produced in Prague in 1916, Janacek had a passionate affair with the star, Gabriela Horvatova, and forced poor Zdenka to accept her visits. Zdenka first tried to kill herself, then accepted a humiliating modus vivendi.

Jenufa was a resounding success in Europe, though in New York the great critic Ernest Newman commented that "a more complete collection of incredibles and undesirables has never before appeared in opera". A big claim, one might think.

In 1917 Janacek formed an (unconsummated) obsession with Kamila Stosslova. He was 63, she 25, and happily married with two children. Inspired by Kamila, he produced most of his greatest work: the purely tragic Katya Kabanova, The Makropoulos Case, the fresh and charming fable The Cunning Little Vixen and the frantic Glagolitic Mass. By his 70th birthday in 1924, he was triumphantly fêted in Berlin as well as Vienna, and in the new republic of Czechoslovakia the cultural significance was paramount.

Zemanova's book is meticulously based on primary sources, some not used before. But her style is pedestrian, and her narrative sometimes reads more like a court report than the dramatic life of an impossible genius. Great musician, horrible man.