Biography
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), born in Hukvaldy in Moravia, was the third great Czech composer after Smetana and Dvořák and found his fully mature voice only after the age of fifty. Janáček spent most of his life as a music professor in Brno, collecting Moravian folk songs and studying the rhythms of Czech speech. His operas from Jenůfa (1904) through Káťa Kabanová (1921), The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), The Makropulos Affair (1926), and From the House of the Dead (1930, posthumous) are each among the masterpieces of twentieth-century opera. His Sinfonietta (1926) and Glagolitic Mass (1927) brought his style to concert audiences. A late love affair with the much younger Kamila Stösslová inspired his most ecstatic final works, including the String Quartet No. 2 'Intimate Letters'. Janáček died in Ostrava in 1928 from pneumonia caught while walking in cold weather.
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