Word: janacek
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...operatic stardom. Two years ago she was an offstage voice at the Berlin State Opera; she is now under contract with Berlin for two more seasons. She made her first successes as Princess Eboli in Verdi's Don Carlo, and the Sexton's Widow in Leos Janacek's Jenufa, made her debut at the Metropolitan last spring as Eboli, will return there for several guest appearances next season. In Europe she has been such a spectacular overnight success, notes one British critic, that "she has only to be announced to fill the house...
...There were others, e.g., Hungary's famed Count Geza Zichy (1849-1924), who wrote his own left-hand works; the modern Czechoslovakian Otakar Hollman, who commissioned Janacek's Capriccio...
...overture to the final hymn to freedom, and is even gripping in three long narratives by the prisoners against a background of unnerving orchestral fantasy. Over all hangs an eerie, Kafka-like haze that results partly from the use of exotic folk idiom, partly from acoustical theories that led Janacek to dispense with accepted harmonic transitions. Because of its static quality, Aus Einem Totenhaus has had few performances in the opera house. On records it is the score that counts, and the result is well worth a hearing...
Czech Composer Leos Janacek (Jenufa) was fascinated by Dostoevsky's autobiographical novel. From the House of the Dead, about life in a Siberian prison camp. In 1928, in the last year of his life but still at the peak of his powers. Janacek used the Dostoevsky work as the basis of a three-act opera. It had one of its rare performances last summer at the Holland Festival, where it was recorded by Phillips, and last week Aus Einem Totenhaus was released in the U.S. on two Epic...
What I tried to express was my belief that not all Czech music is great music. As a Czech, I could hardly dismiss such composers as Smetana, Dvorak, Janacek and Martinu...