Janacek: Years of a Life Volume 1 (1854-1914)

John Tyrrell's biography of the Leos Jan�cek is the culmination of a life's work in the field. It stands upon his existing documentary studies of Jan�cek's operas and translations of other key sources and his examination of thousands of still unpublished letters and other documents in the Jan�cek archive in Brno. Altogether it provides the most detailed account of Jan�cek's life in any language and offers new views of Jan�cek as composer, writer, thinker and human being. Volume 1, which goes up to the outbreak of the First World War and Jan�cek's sixtieth birthday in the summer of 1914, consists of chronological chapters providing a straightforward account of Jan�cek's life year by year and another forty contextual chapters. Topics include on-going sequences ('Music as autobiography I', etc.; 'Jan�cek's knowledge of opera I', etc.) and individual chapters on Jan�cek as a teacher, as a theorist, as an music ethnographer, on his speech-melody theory, his relationship to particularly influential operas (Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, Charpentier's Louise), on his mentors (such as Anton�n Dvor�k) and his b�tes noires (such as Karel Kovarovic). A particular feature are the specially commissioned chapters on Jan�cek's health by Dr Stephen Lock (one of the editors of the Oxford Illustrated Companion to Medicine, OUP 1994 and 2001, editor of the British Medical Journal, 1975-91, and a Jan�cek enthusiast since the early postwar broadasts on the Third Programme), and on Jan�cek's earnings and finances by Dr Jir� Zahr�dka (curator of the Jan�cek archive in Brno, and editor of authentic editions of S�rka and The Excursions of Mr Broucek).