Janacek.(Book Review)(Brief Article)

by Mirka Zemanova Northeastern University Press, 368 pp. $35

Mirka Zemanova, a London-based Czech musicologist, denies, in her introduction, that this English-language volume is a "standard life-and-works," but the lady protests too much. It's definitely a standard-as-possible treatment of a composer whose life and music wore their unconventionality with pride. Like the general run of such books, Zemanova's Janacek goes from ancestry, birth and childhood through training and gradual maturity, concludes with mastery, fame and death, and it chronologically and closely describes the operas and concert music of all sizes along the way.

The author acknowledges that unsurpassed landmark, Jaroslav Vogel's 1961 critical biography, which got a posthumous second revised edition with a new English translation by Karol Janovicky in 1981 (Norton). Charles Mackerras, the present day's preeminent Janacek conductor and editor, has called Vogel's work his "Janacek bible."

Yet Zemanova's new book, while not faultless, does have a convincing reason to exist, even in Vogel's shadow. Since 1981, much intimate detail of the composer's private life has surfaced through Czech and non-Czech research and publication of biographical reminiscences ...