Janacek: vita, opere, scritti.

For us Smetana was much more important! And Dvorak, how good he was! Janacek was just a lunatic! My husband used to say that even his pupils couldn't understand a word of his composition lessons. He wasn't a normal man.

Disarmingly, on the first page of his biography of Janacek, Franco Pulcini quotes as a typical Czech reaction to Janacek the comments of the widow of Bohumil Holub, the first interpreter of the organ part of the Glagolitic Mass. These disparaging remarks help to focus an extensive musing on the oddity of a composer not altogether accepted by the people of his small nation, and welcomed, though with some hesitation, by commentators as ideologically apart as Adorno and Stuckenschmidt. The problem is where to place him. There are so many contradictions, such as the fact that no other Czech composer has written so extensively on theoretical matters, and yet he is seen not as a safe pair of hands but as the wild man from Moravia. The elderly composer, a younger contemporary of Dvorak, found himself in the 1920s rubbing shoulders with the avant-gardists, where he defied classification both as a late Romantic (such as Strauss or Puccini) and as an anti-Romantic (such as Stravinsky or …