Czech composer Leoš Janáček was known for writing music inspired by Moravian and Slavic folk themes. Fascinatingly, however, Janáček couples these leanings with a preoccupation with rather sinister themes. A significant body of his work is built around grisly themes – death, betrayal and oppression being among them. We thought we’d take a deep dive into five works that show Janáček at his most ominous. It’s a Janáček darkest works top five!
Janáček: his darkest and most sinister works
1. Káťa Kabanová (1921)
Even though Janáček was 67 when he wrote Káťa Kabanová, it is widely considered to be his first mature opera. It tells the story of a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage and surrounded by stifling social conventions: Káťa’s controlling mother-in-law keeps an oppressively close watch on her.
In her husband’s absence Káťa embarks on a brief affair, but soon confesses upon his return. Racked with guilt, she throws herself into the sea during a violent storm.
Janáček dedicated the work to his unrequited love Kamila Stösslová. The opera’s short, intense scenes are an outpouring of Janáček-style passion in a largely one-sided affair.
2. Jenůfa (1896-1902)
Janáček wrote his own libretto for this opera, one of the first to be written entirely in prose. It is based on Gabriella Preissova’s realist play Her Stepdaughter. A harrowing tale of infanticide and domestic violence, the opera sees Jenůfa transform from the most beautiful girl in her village to a disfigured mother left to raise her baby alone.
The perpetrator of her disfigurement is Laca, motivated by jealousy of her love for Števa. After Števa flees, the girl’s stepmother worries that she will never marry so lies to Laca that the baby is dead. When Laca agrees to marry Jenůfa the stepmother is faced with the consequences of her lie and the final act reveals the body of a baby in the melting snow.
3. Taras Bulba (1915-18)
Janáček based this programmatic rhapsody for orchestra on three episodes from Nikolai Gogol’s novel of the same name. The story follows the death of the Ukrainian Cossack leader Taras Bulba and his two sons, during a war against neighbouring Poland in 1628.
The turbulent score features a violent battle scene and a merciless execution, ending with a rousing passage for brass, organ and bells that represents the eponymous character being led away to be burnt to death. The work, composed between 1915-1918, was inspired in part by the huge loss of life during World War One.
More darkest works by Janáček
4. String Quartet No.1, Kreutzer Sonata (1923)
In a letter to his beloved Kamila Stösslová, Janáček revealed that he was inspired to imagine ‘a poor woman, tormented and run down’ – like the one from Tolstoy’s dark and disturbing novella, The Kreutzer Sonata – when composing his first string quartet.
The music is unsettled, with choppy melodic lines imitating violent outbursts of dialogue spoken by the novel’s jealous husband. Janáček developed his technique of ‘speech melody’ towards the end of his career, a technique in which he transcribes passages of speech into musical notation.
What’s in the name Kreutzer Sonata, by the way? The string quartet was inspired, like others in thei list, by Russian literature. In this case, by Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata, itself inspired by Beethoven‘s Violin Sonata No. 9, more widely known as the ‘Kreutzer’ after its dedicatee Rodolphe Kreutzer.
5. From the House of the Dead (1927)
Janáček‘s final opera, From the House of the Dead, is set in a bleak Siberian prison and is full of themes of loneliness and isolation. Adapted from the novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the opera follows the lives and experiences of the prisoners, who each have their own tragic stories.
From the House of the Dead doesn’t really have a traditional, linear narrative. Rather, it’s a series of episodes revealing the prisoners’ various pasts. And these pasts tend towards the dark, with tales of violence, love and loss, as well as the brutality of life in a prison setting.
The music, like the plot, is innovative, deploying folk music rhythms, speech-like melodies, and dissonant harmonies. To reflect its somewhat bleak setting, the opera’s orchestration is relatively sparse. There’s a raw intensity to the work, something quite far removed from the lush, widescreen Romanticism of a more traditional opera. It does, however, end on a hopeful note: an injured eagle that has been tended at the prison is released, a potent symbol of the opportunity for renewal and freedom.
The composer had developed a tendency of modelling characters around his life-long love Kamilla Stösslová. In this opera, however, there is only one female part – perhaps in acknowledgment of Kamilla’s indifference to the composer’s feelings. An alternative ending was written posthumously by two of Janáček’s pupils to reduce the bleakness of the story.
Anya Hancock