Bernardo Padrón is a saxophonist-composer who was born in Caracas, Venezuela. From the age of 5 until the age of 27 he lived in Canada, growing up in Ottawa, and studying in Toronto. He then returned to Venezuela, and lived in Caracas for the following 12 years. Now, since October 2003, although maintaining an active working base in Caracas, Bernardo has made Toronto, Ontario once again, his home.

After graduating from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music Performance program in 1986, Bernardo played tenor and alto sax in the Toronto Latin musical community, as well as recording with various local jazz projects (Don Valley Parkway, Mosaic) as a sideman.

In the spring of 1991, Bernardo travelled to Habana, Cuba to study Cuban percussion and arranging until February 1992. Upon arriving in Caracas in 1992, he was quickly integrated into the jazz scene, and began playing with Venezuela's top jazz artists (Biela DaCosta, El Gallo Velasquez, Jesús 'Chucho' Sanoja, and Martes 8:30, among others). During this time, Bernardo participated as tenor saxophonist on the following recordings: Biela DaCosta's  'Jazz and Blues' (1994), Andy Duran's 'Timeless' Vol.1 (1996), Ramón Carranza's 'Carranza Jazz' (1996), Martes 8:30's 'Ayer y Hoy' (1998), Gerardo Chacon's 'Espacial' (2000), and Frank Quintero's 'Celebración' (2003).

In the commercial-pop genre, Bernardo has toured with Venezuela's internationally acclaimed artists: Kiara (singer), Luz Marina (as musical director) and Frank Quintero.

From 1998 until early 2003, Bernardo divided his professional time equally in the areas of music production (for documentaries and television commercials) teaching and performing with his jazz group, with which he recorded his first Compact Disc as leader, composer, and producer: 'SEADANCE',  released in 2001 and distributed internationally by Latin World Entertainment.

Presently, Bernardo is concentrating on reintegrating himself into the Canadian jazz scene, and preparing for his next CD.

Discography
Seadance (2001)

External links
Official web site
Bernardo's AllAboutJazz Profile

Musicians from Caracas
Venezuelan musicians
Saxophonists
Living people
21st-century saxophonists
Year of birth missing (living people)

Bernardo Padrón


The Union Party was a short-lived political party in the United States, formed in 1936 by a coalition of radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, old-age pension advocate Francis Townsend, and Gerald L. K. Smith, who had taken control of Huey Long's Share Our Wealth (SOW) movement after Long's assassination in 1935. Each of those people hoped to channel their wide followings into support for the Union Party, which proposed a populist alternative to the New Deal reforms of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression.

The party nominated a ticket consisting of Republican Congressman William Lemke and labor attorney Thomas C. O'Brien in the 1936 presidential election. Running against Republican nominee Alf Landon, Roosevelt won a second term with over 60% of the popular vote, while Lemke won just under 2% of the popular vote. The Union Party collapsed after the 1936 elections. Lemke served as a Republican Congressman until his death in 1950, while Coughlin and Townsend receded from national politics. Smith later founded the Christian Nationalist Crusade and became a prominent proponent of Holocaust denial.

Background
Many observers at the time felt that there was a place for a party more radical than Roosevelt and the Democrats but still non-Marxist in the political spectrum of the time.

Newton Jenkins's campaign in the 1935 Chicago mayoral election acted as an informal test-run for the fledgling movement behind the Union Party.

Rumored political aspirations of Huey Long
Although many people expected Huey Long, the colorful Democratic senator from Louisiana, to run as a third-party candidate with his "Share Our Wealth" program as his platform, his bid was cut short when he was assassinated in September 1935.

Prior to Long's death, leading contenders for the role of the sacrificial 1936 candidate included Senators Burton K. Wheeler (D-Montana) and William E. Borah (R-Idaho), and Governor Floyd B. Olson (FL-Minnesota). After the assassination, however, the two senators lost interest in the idea (Borah ran as a Republican, garnering only a few delegates and losing the nomination to Kansas governor Alf Landon) and Olson was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer.

Problems and controversies
The Union Party suffered from a multiplicity of problems almost from the moment of its inception.  A primary one was that each of the party's three principal leaders seemingly saw himself, not its presidential nominee William Lemke, as the real power figure and natural leader of the party. His charisma attracted more people than did the other candidates.  Another was that each man's movement was largely held together by personality more than a truly cohesive ideology: in the case of Coughlin and Townsend their own personalities; in the case of Smith, the memory of the late Huey Long's charismatic personality. Smith himself was considered a far less charismatic figure. Some critics charged that the Union Party was in fact controlled by Father Coughlin, a former Roosevelt supporter who had broken with Roosevelt and by 1936 had become an antisemite. Smith had also turned to antisemitism, which was not consistent with the views of Long, Townsend, and Lemke, and reduced the appeal of the group among many progressives.

The Union Party attracted modest support from populists on both sides of the political spectrum who were unhappy with Roosevelt and from the remnants of earlier third parties such as the Farmer-Labor Party.  Others such as The Nation magazine were wary of the new party and backed Roosevelt.  Presaging more recent debates over the Reform Party, the Green Party, H. Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader, some falsely considered the party either a left-wing spoiler party which would hurt Roosevelt, or an unworkable alliance between left-wing and right-wing populists.  More traditional parties on the left such as the Socialist Party denounced the Union Party.

1936 presidential nominee
William Lemke, a U.S. Congressman from North Dakota, was chosen as the party's nominee for the 1936 presidential election.

The vice-presidential nominee was Thomas C. O'Brien, a labor lawyer from Boston.

Other notable candidates
Jacob S. Coxey of Coxey's Army fame, socialist leader and frequent independent candidate for the United States Congress, ran for Congress in 1936 on the Union Party ticket in Ohio's 16th District.  He received 2,384 votes or 1.6% of the vote (4th place).

Demise
The Union Party was disbanded shortly after the 1936 elections.  Presidential nominee Lemke continued to serve in Congress as a Republican, and died in office while serving an eighth term.  Father Coughlin announced his retirement from the airwaves immediately after the disappointing returns of the 1936 election, but returned to the air within a couple of months; upon U.S. entry into World War II, the Roman Catholic Church ordered Father Coughlin to retire from the airwaves and return to his duties as a parish priest, and he died in obscurity in 1979. Townsend, already quite elderly, saw his movement largely supplanted by the enactment of Social Security the next year and also largely became quite obscure afterwards, although he lived until 1960.  Smith became even more of a radical fringe figure who eventually became an early proponent of Holocaust denial. He died in 1976.

Other namesakes

In the 1864 presidential election the Republican Party of incumbent President Abraham Lincoln ran as the "National Union Party" or "Union Party". The name was a reference to the Union faction of the American Civil War. Coughlin took the Union label for his own party, comparing the "financial slavery" of the 1930s to the "physical slavery" of the 1860s.

In the 1980 presidential election, John B. Anderson's independent bid for the presidency against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter was in many states run on the party ballot line of the "National Union Party". Anderson won 6.6% of the popular vote and no electoral votes.

References

Events Quarterly https://web.archive.org/web/20061112171139/http://www.eventsquarterly.com/7ed/15.html

Further reading

 Bennett, David Harry. Demagogues in the Depression;: American radicals and the Union Party, 1932-1936.  341 pages. Rutgers University Press. 1969. .
 Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression. 384 pages. Vintage. 1983. .
 Tull, C.J. Father Coughlin and the New Deal. Syracuse University Press. .
 Williams, T. Harry. Huey Long. 944 pages.  Vintage. 1981. .

Populism in the United States
Union Party
Political parties established in 1936
Non-interventionist parties
Political parties in the United States
Union Party (United States)
Charles Coughlin

Union Party (United States)


In Stormy Nights is the final studio album by the Japanese band Ghost. It was released by Drag City in 2007.

Track listing
The CD and LP releases of the album have slightly different track listings. These are as follows:

CD track listing

LP track listing
Side one
 "Hemicyclic Anthelion"
Side two
 "Water Door Yellow Gate"
 "Gareki No Toshi"
Side three
 "Caledonia"
 "Motherly Bluster"
 "Grisaille"
Side four
 "Caledonia (Sing Together Mix)" (bonus track, 45rpm)

Personnel
The following people contributed to In Stormy Nights:
Musicians
 Masaki Batoh – vocals, acoustic guitar, Springer
 Michio Kurihara – electric guitar
 Taishi Takizawa – saxophone, flute, vibraphone, etc.
 Kazuo Ogino – piano, analogue synthesizer, kaval, gaita, tenor recorder
 Takuyuki Moriya – contrabass
 Junzo Tateiwa – frame drums, cymbals, timpani, tabla, etc.
Technical
 Taishi Takizawa – producer
 Satoru Fujii – recording, mixing, mastering
 Michiru Tawa – assistant engineer

Reception

In Stormy Nights has received mostly positive reviews from critics. The album currently has a 76 out of 100 rating on the review aggregate site Metacritic, which indicates "generally favorable reviews."

Reviewer Matthew Murphy of Pitchfork Media gave the album an 8.0/10, writing "And though In Stormy Nights... can hardly be said to be a perfect work, one has to admire and celebrate Ghost's determination never to step in the same river twice." In another positive review, Allmusic's Thom Jurek called the album "A work of absolute beauty, chaos, seductive darkness and cosmic light." Andrew Gaerig of Stylus Magazine gave the album a B+, writing that In Stormy Nights "is easily their most unhinged, aggressive record; they make a show of steamrolling their subtler instincts."

Not all reviews were positive, though. Both Dusted Reviews' Matthew Wuethrich and Almost Cool's Aaron Coleman criticized the track "Hemicyclic Anthelion." Wuethrich called the track "bloated and forced," while Coleman wrote that the track "just completely derails what would otherwise be a fairly solid and concise album." In another negative review, Slant Magazine's Jimmy Newlin criticized In Stormy Nights for its lack of warmth, writing "Maybe pastiche is inevitable, even in the Japanese avant garde scene, but can't it at least be a little more fun?"

External links
 In Stormy Nights at Metacritic
 In Stormy Nights at CD Universe

References

2007 albums
Ghost (1984 band) albums
Drag City (record label) albums

In Stormy Nights


The CarterCopter is an experimental compound autogyro developed by Carter Aviation Technologies in the United States to demonstrate slowed rotor technology. On 17 June 2005, the CarterCopter became the first rotorcraft to achieve mu-1 (μ=1), an equal ratio of airspeed to rotor tip speed, but crashed on the next flight and has been inoperable since. It is being replaced by the Carter Personal Air Vehicle.

Design and development

The CarterCopter is a pusher configuration autogyro with wings and a twin boom tail, intended as a prototype and a technology demonstrator. The rotor is a two-bladed design weighted with  depleted uranium at each tip, and it is mounted on a tilting mast, allowing the wing to stay at optimum wing efficiency at all speeds.
It is an all-composite design with a hull pressurized up to
0.69 bar.

The tricycle undercarriage is retractable, and has a large travel to allow for landing at up to 20 ft/sec without bounce. The aircraft had been modified and rebuilt after an accident (a gear-up landing) in 2003.
NASA had funded $1 million of the development using three research grants, and the aircraft managed to accomplish at least one of NASA's five goals.

Concept
The CarterCopter concept is a gyrocopter with an unusually stiff, relatively heavy rotor, supplemented with conventional wings. At low speed, the vehicle flies as a gyrocopter, and can pre-spin the rotor for a vertical takeoff and very brief hover (about 5 seconds), and can land more or less vertically. Several technical challenges make flying a slow rotor difficult, but rotor stability is achieved through the combination of the rotor tip weights' location ahead of the blade center line (forward center of gravity) and the center of lift aft of the blade center line.
At high speed (above about 100 mph) the aircraft flies mostly using the fixed wings, with the rotor simply windmilling. The rotor spins with a tip speed below airspeed, which means that the retreating blade flies completely stalled. On a helicopter this would cause massive lift dissymmetry and insoluble control issues but the fixed wings keep the aircraft in the air and stable.

The low rotation speed and flat feathering of the rotor means that it causes little drag, and the company claims that the aircraft would be potentially able to leverage the advantages of fixed wings as well as gyrocopters, giving almost all the capabilities of helicopters (except hovering) but with a relatively simple mechanical system. Carter Aviation also claims the system is safer than a typical fixed-wing aircraft, and others have remarked that the design is much safer, much less complex and less expensive than a helicopter, a tilt-rotor or the Boeing X-50 Dragonfly Canard Rotor/Wing.  The CarterCopter should be capable of higher airspeeds now only achievable by fixed-wing aircraft, but also able to land like an autogyro in any small area in an emergency.

Takeoff
At takeoff the pilot angles the top rotor flat (zero angle of attack) and spins it to very high speed (between 365 and 425 rpm).  The rotor is then disconnected from the engine and the angle of attack of the main rotor blades is increased suddenly so that the vehicle leaps into the air. The aircraft's main rotor has enough momentum due to heavy counterweights in the tips that it can hover for a short time safely. The pilot then applies full power to the rear pusher propeller and the vehicle starts to move forwards. As it does so, air is forced through the main rotor, spinning it faster and generating more lift. The vehicle climbs into the air, flying as an autogyro.

Cruising
Once the CarterCopter gets up to a forward speed of about , its stubby, lightweight wings provide most of the lift. The pilot can then flatten the angle of attack of the main rotor so it produces very little lift, dramatically reducing the amount of induced drag created by the rotor. Although the rotor is unused at high speed, the rotor is kept spinning at about 80 RPM as the rotation keeps the rotor stretched, preventing excessive flapping.

Normally a helicopter or gyrocopter cannot fly forward at the same speed as or faster than its rotor tip speed. This is because the low airspeed of the retreating rotor blade would cause retreating blade stall, whilst the advancing rotor blade would be traveling at twice the speed of the aircraft, producing uncontrollable flight due to dissymmetry of lift.

However, with the CarterCopter, the fixed wings provide the lift required to remain aloft. Since the rotor is unloaded, the aerodynamic forces on the rotor are very minor. This means that a CarterCopter can theoretically fly much faster than the tip speed of the rotor. The rotors would still experience flapping as they rotate due to dissymmetry of lift between the two sides of the vehicle, but Carter Aviation claims this is manageable.

The claimed theoretical maximum speed of a CarterCopter type aircraft is around 500 mph (800 km/h), which would be about twice as  fast as the helicopter flight airspeed record.

Achievements

The prototype's engine was normally aspirated, and hence limited to just 320 hp (240 kW) and the aircraft went about 173 mph (270 km/h); which is still ~40% faster than a conventional autogyro but slower than gyrodynes of the 1950s. A custom gyroplane can go 168.29 km/h (104.6 mph), and Carter says the Carter Personal Air Vehicle goes .

At 4,000 lbs weight, the CCTD can climb 750 fpm.

From 1999 to 2001 there were 4 recorded instances of non-fatal crashes, while Carter claims 10 accidents over 7 years, all non-fatal.

Test pilot Larry Neal claimed that the CarterCopter is a challenge to fly because it is a combination of helicopter, autogyro and fixed-wing aircraft.

The CarterCopter achieved its maximum mu (mu is the ratio of airspeed to rotor tip speed) of 1.0 for a brief moment on June 17, 2005, the first time any rotary aircraft has reached this level. CarterCopter's pilot claimed that there was no great drama, and mu 1 was reached accidentally due to normal variations in rotor RPM (at 107 rpm) and vehicle airspeed; the pilot described it as 'smooth' with no significant vibration. The tests were performed under a US Army contract. Carter says they repeated mu-1 with the PAV in 2013.

However, on the next test flight the same day in 2005, the CarterCopter made a hard landing (crashed), causing significant damage, but the pilots were unhurt. The crash was caused by failing propeller bolts which damaged wires controlling the rotor. The propeller was designed by Carter, and was an 8 ft scimitar controllable-pitch propeller weighing 15 lbs and had a thrust of 1850 lbf. It was initially believed that the CarterCopter was unrepairable; later inspection showed that it could be repaired, but the company chose to work on a small open wingless autogyro demonstrator instead. Also later in 2005 and using lessons learned from the CarterCopter, design began on the subsequent compound aircraft, the Carter PAV, which flew in 2011.

The company claims that the testing indicated
that the vehicle architecture could potentially outperform helicopters on every dimension except sustained hover, and should be much cheaper to buy and maintain. The company also claims that it also very nearly matches the L/D of fixed wing General Aviation aeroplanes at cruise speed - but with near-vertical takeoff and landing. However, jump take-off ability using the stored rotor energy has never been shown to more than about 16 feet with the wing attached.

NASA has made computer models of the CarterCopter rotor above mu=1 and up to 400 knots airspeed.

Specifications

See also

References

External links
 Official website Carter Aviation Technologies
 PilotBug article
 Flight Journal article from 2002
 Fan site

2000s United States experimental aircraft
Autogyros
Wichita Falls, Texas
Pusher aircraft
Slowed rotor
Aircraft first flown in 1998

CarterCopter


High School Reunion is a reality television series chronicling real-life high school reunions. Premiering on The WB on January 5, 2003 and airing for two seasons between 2003 and 2005, the series featured reunions of classes after ten years. Filmed in Maui, the series featured documentary-style interviews with the classmates, who are assigned "labels" to describe their high school roles.

A revived version of the series began airing on TV Land on March 5, 2008, focusing on the 20-year reunion of the 1987 graduating class of J. J. Pearce High School in Richardson, Texas. The series returned to TV Land in February 2009 with members of the Class of 1988 of Chandler High School in Chandler, Arizona reuniting and the promise that one of them would reveal a major secret. Once again class members had labels such as "The Class Clown", "The Cowboy", etc. The series returned with its third season premiering on January 13, 2010. It follows the members of the Class of 1989 of Chaparral High School in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Series overview

1987 classmates

Lana and Mike were married after high school, but they later divorced. After the break-up, Lana had an affair with one of Mike's friends, Steve. Lana said in the first episode she came to the reunion to make peace with Mike. Meanwhile, DeAnna and Justin, Sean and Kirstin, and others, develop feelings for each other.

 DeAnna, the popular girl
 Justin, the pipsqueak
 Kat, the lesbian
 Sean, the millionaire
 Cheryl, the outsider
 Jason, the bully
 Yvette, the girl next door
 Matt, the jock
 Heather, the heart-breaker
 Steve, the backstabber
 Kirstin, the spoiled girl
 Glenn, the geek
 Lana, the drama queen
 Mike, the rebel
 Rob, the stud

1988 classmates

 Andrew, The Band Geek
 Chad Ramirez, The Cowboy
 Dennis, The Troublemaker
 Heather, The Preacher's Daughter
 Jenny LaFlesch, The Cheerleader
 Jessica Frantz Garvin, The Ugly Duckling
 Kara Hoffman Breeze, The Homecoming Queen
 Liz, The Wannabe
 Lynette, The Snob
 Manny, The Player
 Maricela Vallecillo, The Outcast
 Octavia, The Flirt
 Renee, The Goody Goody
 Scott Horne, The Loner
 Scott Schutkowski, The Class Clown
 Scott White, The Skate Punk
 Shalonda Warren Clark, The Pregnant Girl
 Tom Breeze, The Jock
 Tyrone, The All-Star

1989 classmates

 Antanus Pullum, The Ladies' Man
 Cyndi Ellis-Stueben, The Nerd
 Elena Machin, The Popular Girl (Summer Girl)
 Eric (Raven) Lowell, The Gay Guy
 Jodi McMillin Jorjorian, The Cheerleader
 Joe Basso, The Football Star
 John Mikolainis, The Troublemaker
 Justin Taggart, The Delinquent (Valley High)
 Lissette Jefferies-Waugh, The Hot Girl (Summer Girl)
 Lori Da Silva, The Party Girl
 Marcel Chevalier, The Prankster (Valley High)
 Mark Kasel, The Secret Admirer
 Rachelle Ramirez-Smith, The Late Bloomer
 Tracy Barkhuff, The Teacher's Pet
 Tracey Ealy, The Jock
 Treda Edwards Ealy, The Class Sweetheart

References

External links
 Official High School Reunion on TV Land (archived)

2003 American television series debuts
2010 American television series endings
2000s American high school television series
2010s American high school television series
2000s American reality television series
2010s American reality television series
English-language television shows
Television series by Warner Bros. Television Studios
Television shows set in Hawaii
TV Land original programming
The WB original programming
Television shows filmed in Hawaii
Television series by Warner Horizon Television

High School Reunion (TV series)


Richer Pérez Cobas (born 20 February 1986) is a Cuban long-distance runner who specialises in the marathon. He was the gold medallist at the 2015 Pan American Games and the 2014 Central American and Caribbean Games.

From Havana, Pérez first established himself nationally at the 2007 Barrientos Memorial meet in Havana, winning the 10,000 metres. At the 2011 meet he set new personal bests when he won the 10,000 m in a time of 29:56.32 minutes and was runner-up in the 5000 metres, behind Mexico's Sergio Pedraza. Later that year he won the half marathon section of the Marabana, then claimed victory on his marathon debut at the Panama City Marathon with a time of 2:25:48 hours.

He competed only domestically over the next two years, continuing with two further wins at the Marabana Half Marathon and back-to-back titles in the Cuban Independence Anniversary Half Marathon. He also won a track title over 10,000 m at the Copa de Cuba in 2012. He repeated that feat in 2014 and also won a distance double at the Barrientos Memorial. After a fourth straight win at the Marabana Half marathon he was chosen to represent Cuba internationally for the first time at the 2014 Central American and Caribbean Games. There he was the gold medallist in the marathon with a personal best time of 2:19:13 hours. This made him the first Cuban to win a marathon at that competition, which was first held in 1938.

At the start of the 2015 season, he upheld his place as the country's top distance runner with a track double at the Copa de Cuba and a 10,000 m win at the Barrientos Memorial. He surprised on his second international performance at the 2015 Pan American Games: entering only his third marathon, he defeated the more favoured Raúl Pacheco (a Peruvian Olympian) to maintain his undefeated streak at the distance. His finishing time of 2:17:04 hours was a personal best and also reached his objective of running a qualifying time for the 2015 World Championships in Athletics.

Personal bests
5000 metres – 14:25.33 min (2011)
10,000 metres – 29:56.32 min (2011)
Half marathon – 1:05:21 (2013)
Marathon – 2:17:04 (2015)

International competitions

References

External links

Living people
1986 births
Athletes from Havana
Cuban male long-distance runners
Cuban male marathon runners
Pan American Games gold medalists for Cuba
Pan American Games medalists in athletics (track and field)
Athletes (track and field) at the 2015 Pan American Games
World Athletics Championships athletes for Cuba
Central American and Caribbean Games gold medalists for Cuba
Competitors at the 2014 Central American and Caribbean Games
Central American and Caribbean Games medalists in athletics
Medalists at the 2015 Pan American Games
21st-century Cuban people

Richer Pérez


Leoš Janáček (, 3 July 1854 – 12 August 1928) was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist, and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and other Slavic music, including Eastern European folk music, to create an original, modern musical style.

Born in Hukvaldy, Janáček demonstrated musical talent at an early age and was educated in Brno, Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna. He then returned to live in Brno, where he married his pupil Zdenka Schulzová and devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research. His earlier musical output was influenced by contemporaries such as Antonín Dvořák, but around the turn of the century he began to incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music, as well as his transcriptions of "speech melodies" of spoken language, to create a modern, highly original synthesis. The death of his daughter Olga in 1903 had a profound effect on his musical output; these notable transformations were first evident in the opera Jenůfa (often called the "Moravian national opera"), which premiered in 1904 in Brno.

In the following years, Janáček became frustrated with a lack of recognition from Prague, but this was finally relieved by the success of a revised edition of Jenůfa at the National Theatre in 1916, which gave Janáček access to the world's great opera stages. Janáček's later works are his most celebrated. They include operas such as Káťa Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen, the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, two string quartets, and other chamber works. Many of Janáček's later works were influenced by Czech and Russian literature, his pan-Slavist sentiments, and his infatuation with Kamila Stösslová.

After his death in 1928, Janáček's work was heavily promoted on the world opera stage by the Australian conductor Charles Mackerras, who also restored some of his compositions to their original, unrevised forms. In his homeland he inspired a new generation of Czech composers including several of his students. Today he is considered one of the most important Czech composers, along with Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana.

Biography

1854–1864: Early life and family

Leoš Janáček, son of schoolmaster Jiří Janacek (1815–1866) and Amalie (née Grulichová) Janáčková (1819–1884), was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire) on 3 July 1854. He was born with six surviving siblings, and baptised as Leo Eugen. He was a gifted child in a family of limited means, and showed an early musical talent in choral singing. His father wanted him to follow the family tradition and become a teacher, but he deferred to Janáček's obvious musical abilities.

1865–1880: Education and early teaching career
In 1865, young Janáček enrolled as a ward of the foundation of the St Thomas's Abbey, Brno, where he took part in choral singing under Pavel Křížkovský and occasionally played the organ. One of his classmates, František Neumann, later described Janáček as an "excellent pianist, who played Beethoven symphonies perfectly in a piano duet with a classmate, under Křížkovský's supervision". Křížkovský found him a problematic and wayward student but recommended his entry to the Prague Organ School. Janáček later remembered Křížkovský as a great conductor and teacher.

Janáček originally intended to study piano and organ but eventually devoted himself to composition. He wrote his first vocal compositions while choirmaster of the Svatopluk Artisan's Association (1873–76). In 1874, he enrolled at the Prague organ school, under František Skuherský and František Blažek.

His student days in Prague were impoverished; with no piano in his room, he had to make do with a keyboard drawn on his tabletop. His criticism of Skuherský's performance of the Gregorian mass was published in the March 1875 edition of the journal Cecilie and led to his expulsion from the school, but Skuherský relented, and on 24 July 1875 Janáček graduated with the best results in his class.

On his return to Brno he earned a living as a music teacher, and conducted various amateur choirs. From 1876 he taught music at Brno's Teachers' Institute. Among his pupils there was Zdenka Schulzová, daughter of Emilian Schulz, the Institute director. She was later to be Janáček's wife. In 1876, he also became a piano student of Amálie Wickenhauserová-Nerudová, with whom he co-organized chamber concertos and performed in concerts over the following two years. In February 1876, he was voted Choirmaster of the Beseda brněnská Philharmonic Society. Apart from an interruption from 1879 to 1881, he remained its choirmaster and conductor until 1888.

From October 1879 to February 1880, he studied piano, organ, and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory. While there, he composed Thema con variazioni for piano in B-flat, subtitled Zdenka's Variations. Dissatisfied with his teachers (among them Oscar Paul and Leo Grill), and denied a studentship with Camille Saint-Saëns in Paris, Janáček moved on to the Vienna Conservatory, where from April to June 1880, he studied composition with Franz Krenn. He concealed his opposition to Krenn's neo-romanticism, but he quit Josef Dachs's classes and further piano study after he was criticised for his piano style and technique. He submitted a violin sonata (now lost) to a Vienna Conservatory competition, but the judges rejected it as being "too academic". Janáček left the conservatory in June 1880, disappointed despite Franz Krenn's very complimentary personal report.

1881–1899: Folkloristic work and early compositions

He returned to Brno where, on 13 July 1881, he married his young pupil, Zdenka Schulzová.

In 1881, Janáček founded and was appointed director of the organ school, and held this post until 1919, when the school became the Brno Conservatory. In the mid-1880s, Janáček began composing more systematically. Among other works, he created the Four male-voice choruses (1886), dedicated to Antonín Dvořák, and his first opera, Šárka (1887–88). During this period he began to collect and study folk music, songs and dances. In the early months of 1887, he sharply criticized the comic opera The Bridegrooms, by Czech composer Karel Kovařovic, in a Hudební listy journal review: "Which melody stuck in your mind? Which motif? Is this dramatic opera? No, I would write on the poster: 'Comedy performed together with music', since the music and the libretto aren't connected to each other". Janáček's review apparently led to mutual dislike and later professional difficulties when Kovařovic, as director of the National Theatre in Prague, refused to stage Janáček's opera Jenůfa.

From the early 1890s, Janáček led the mainstream of folklorist activity in Moravia and Silesia, using a repertoire of folk songs and dances in orchestral and piano arrangements. Many of the tunes he used had been recorded by him but a second source was Xavera Běhálková who sent him 70 to 100 tunes that she had gathered from around the Haná region of central Moravia.

Most of his achievements in this field were published in 1899–1901 though his interest in folklore would be lifelong. His compositional work was still influenced by the declamatory, dramatic style of Smetana and Dvořák. He expressed very negative opinions on German neo-classicism and especially on Wagner in the Hudební listy journal, which he founded in 1884. The death of his second child, Vladimír, in 1890 was followed by an attempted opera, Beginning of the Romance (1891) and the cantata Amarus (1897).

1900–1915: Difficult years

In the first decade of the 20th century, Janáček composed choral church music including Otčenáš (Our Father, 1901), Constitues (1903) and Ave Maria (1904). In 1901, the first part of his piano cycle On an Overgrown Path was published and gradually became one of his most frequently-performed works. In 1902, Janáček visited Russia twice. On the first occasion he took his daughter Olga to Saint Petersburg, where she stayed to study Russian. Only three months later, he returned to Saint Petersburg with his wife because Olga had become very ill. They took her back to Brno, but her health worsened.

Janáček expressed his painful feelings for his daughter in a new work, his opera Jenůfa, in which the suffering of his daughter had transfigured into Jenůfa's. When Olga died in February 1903, Janáček dedicated Jenůfa to her memory. The opera was performed in Brno in 1904, with reasonable success, but Janáček felt this was no more than a provincial achievement. He aspired to recognition by the more influential Prague opera, but Jenůfa was refused there (twelve years passed before its first performance in Prague). Dejected and emotionally exhausted, Janáček went to Luhačovice spa to recover. There he met Kamila Urválková, whose love story supplied the theme for his next opera, Osud (Destiny).

In 1905, Janáček attended a demonstration in support of a Czech university in Brno, where the violent death of František Pavlík, a young joiner, at the hands of the police inspired his piano sonata, 1. X. 1905 (From The Street). The incident led him to further promote the anti-German and anti-Austrian ethos of the Russian Circle, which he had co-founded in 1897 and which would be officially banned by the Austrian police in 1915. In 1906, he approached the Czech poet Petr Bezruč, with whom he later collaborated, composing several choral works based on Bezruč's poetry. These included Kantor Halfar (1906), Maryčka Magdónova (1908), and 70.000 (1909).

Janáček's life in the first decade of the 20th century was complicated by personal and professional difficulties. He still yearned for artistic recognition from Prague. He destroyed some of his works, others remained unfinished. Nevertheless, he continued composing, and would create several remarkable choral, chamber, orchestral and operatic works, the most notable being the 1914 cantata, Věčné evangelium (The Eternal Gospel), Pohádka (Fairy tale) for 'cello and piano (1910), the 1912 piano cycle V mlhách (In the Mists), his violin sonata, and his first symphonic poem Šumařovo dítě (A Fiddler's Child). His fifth opera, Výlet pana Broučka do měsíce, composed from 1908 to 1917, has been characterized as the most "purely Czech in subject and treatment" of all of Janáček's operas.

1916–1928: Breakthrough and masterworks

In 1916, he started a long professional and personal relationship with theatre critic, dramatist and translator Max Brod. In the same year, Jenůfa, revised by Kovařovic, was finally accepted by the National Theatre. Its performance in Prague in 1916 was a great success, and brought Janáček his first acclaim.

Following the Prague première, he began a relationship with singer Gabriela Horváthová, which led to his wife Zdenka's attempted suicide and their "informal" divorce. A year later (1917), he met Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman 38 years his junior, who was to inspire him for the remaining years of his life. He conducted an obsessive and (on his side at least) passionate correspondence with her, of nearly 730 letters. From 1917 to 1919, deeply inspired by Stösslová, he composed The Diary of One Who Disappeared. As he completed its final revision, he began his next 'Kamila' work, the opera Káťa Kabanová.

In 1920, Janáček retired from his post as director of the Brno Conservatory but continued to teach until 1925. In 1921, he attended a lecture by the Indian philosopher-poet Rabindranath Tagore and used a Tagore poem as the basis for the chorus The Wandering Madman (1922).  In the early 1920s, Janáček completed his opera The Cunning Little Vixen, which had been inspired by a serialized novella by Rudolf Těsnohlídek in the newspaper Lidové noviny.

In Janáček's 70th year (1924), his biography was published by Max Brod, and he was interviewed by Olin Downes for The New York Times. In 1925, he retired from teaching but continued composing and was awarded the first honorary doctorate to be given by Masaryk University in Brno. In the spring of 1926, he created his Sinfonietta, a monumental orchestral work, which rapidly gained wide critical acclaim. In the same year, he went to England at the invitation of Rosa Newmarch. A number of his works were performed in London, including his first string quartet, the wind sextet Youth, and his violin sonata. Shortly after, and still in 1926, he started to compose a setting to an Old Church Slavonic text. The result was the large-scale orchestral Glagolitic Mass.

The world première of Janáček's lyrical Concertino for piano, two violins, viola, clarinet, French horn and bassoon took place in Brno in 1926. Around the same time, Janáček began work on a comparable chamber work for an even more unusual set of instruments, the Capriccio for piano left hand, flute, two trumpets, three trombones and tenor tuba, was written for pianist Otakar Hollmann, who lost the use of his right hand during World War I. It premièred in Prague on 2 March 1928.

In 1927 – the year of the Sinfonietta's first performances in New York, Berlin and Brno – he began to compose his final operatic work, From the House of the Dead, the third act of which would be found on his desk after his death. In January 1928, he began his second string quartet, the Intimate Letters, his "manifesto on love". Meanwhile, the Sinfonietta was performed in London, Vienna and Dresden. In his later years, Janáček became an international celebrity. He became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1927, along with Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith.

Death and funeral

In August 1928, he took an excursion to Štramberk with Kamila Stösslová and her son Otto, but caught a chill which developed into pneumonia. He died on 12 August 1928 in Ostrava, at the sanatorium of Dr. L. Klein, at the age of 74. He was given a large public funeral that included music from the last scene of his Cunning Little Vixen. He was buried in the Field of Honour at the Central Cemetery, Brno.

Personality

Janáček worked tirelessly throughout his life. He led the organ school, was a professor at the teachers institute and gymnasium in Brno, and collected transcriptions of folk songs, conversations and animal vocalisations, all while composing. From an early age, he presented himself as an individualist and his firmly formulated opinions often led to conflict. He unhesitatingly criticized his teachers, who considered him a defiant and anti-authoritarian student, yet his own students found him to be strict and uncompromising. Vilém Tauský, one of his pupils, described his encounters with Janáček as somewhat distressing for someone unused to his personality and noted that Janáček's characteristically staccato speech rhythms were reproduced in some of his operatic characters. In 1881, Janáček gave up his leading role with the Beseda brněnská, as a response to criticism, but a rapid decline in Beseda's performance quality led to his recall in 1882.

His married life, settled and calm in its early years, became increasingly tense and difficult following the death of his daughter, Olga, in 1903. Years of effort in obscurity took their toll, and almost ended his ambitions as a composer: "I was beaten down", he wrote later, "My own students gave me advice – how to compose, how to speak through the orchestra". Success in 1916 – when Karel Kovařovic finally decided to perform Jenůfa in Prague – brought its own problems. Janáček grudgingly resigned himself to the changes forced upon his work. Its success brought him into Prague's music scene and the attentions of soprano , who guided him through Prague society. Janáček was enchanted by her. On his return to Brno, he appears not to have concealed his new passion from Zdenka, who responded by attempting suicide. That Christmas, after Janáček suspected Zdenka of sending Horvátová an anonymous letter, Zdenka tried to instigate a divorce, but the couple agreed to settle for an "informal" divorce. From then on, until Janáček's death, they lived separate lives in the same household. Eventually Janáček lost interest in Horvátová.

In 1917, he began his lifelong, inspirational and unrequited passion for Kamila Stösslová, who neither sought nor rejected his devotion. Janáček pleaded for first-name terms in their correspondence. In 1927, she finally agreed and signed herself "" (Your Kamila) in a letter, which Zdenka found. This revelation provoked a furious quarrel between Zdenka and Janáček, though their living arrangements did not change – Janáček seems to have persuaded her to stay. In 1928, the year of his death, Janáček confessed his intention to publicize his feelings for Stösslová. Max Brod had to dissuade him. Janáček's contemporaries and collaborators described him as mistrustful and reserved, but capable of obsessive passion for those he loved. His overwhelming passion for Stösslová was sincere but verged upon self-destruction. Their letters remain an important source for Janáček's artistic intentions and inspiration. His letters to his long-suffering wife are, by contrast, mundanely descriptive. Zdenka seems to have destroyed all hers to Janáček. Only a few postcards survive.

Style

In 1874, Janáček became friends with Antonín Dvořák, and began composing in a relatively traditional Romantic style. After his opera Šárka (1887–1888), his style absorbed elements of Moravian and Slovak folk music.

His musical assimilation of the rhythm, pitch contour and inflections of normal Czech speech (specifically Moravian dialects) helped create the very distinctive vocal melodies of his opera Jenůfa (1904), whose 1916 success in Prague was the turning point in his career. In Jenůfa, Janáček developed and applied the concept of "speech melodies" () to build a unique musical and dramatic style quite independent of "Wagnerian" dramatic method. He studied the circumstances in which "speech melodies" changed, the psychology and temperament of speakers and the coherence within speech, all of which helped render the dramatically truthful roles of his mature operas, and became one of the most significant markers of his style. Janáček took these stylistic principles much farther in his vocal writing than Modest Mussorgsky, and thus anticipates the later work of Béla Bartók. The stylistic basis for his later works originates in the period of 1904–1918, but Janáček composed most of his output – and his best known works – in the last decade of his life.

Much of Janáček's work displays great originality and individuality. It employs a vastly expanded view of tonality, uses unorthodox chord spacings and structures, and often, modality: "there is no music without key. Atonality abolishes definite key, and thus tonal modulation.... Folksong knows of no atonality." Janáček features accompaniment figures and patterns, with (according to Jim Samson) "the on-going movement of his music...similarly achieved by unorthodox means; often a discourse of short, 'unfinished' phrases comprising constant repetitions of short motifs which gather momentum in a cumulative manner." Janáček named these motifs "" (singular ) in his theoretical works. "" has no strict English equivalent, but John Tyrrell, a leading specialist on Janáček's music, describes it as "a little flash of time, almost a kind of musical capsule, which Janáček often used in slow music as tiny swift motifs with remarkably characteristic rhythms that are supposed to pepper the musical flow." Janáček's use of these repeated motifs demonstrates a remote similarity to minimalist composers (Sir Charles Mackerras called Janáček "the first minimalist composer").

Inspiration

Folklore
Janáček was deeply influenced by folklore and Eastern European folk music, and by Moravian folk music in particular, but not by the pervasive, idealized 19th century romantic folklore variant. He took a realistic, descriptive and analytic approach to the material. Moravian folk songs, compared with their Bohemian counterparts, are much freer and more irregular in their metrical and rhythmic structure, and more varied in their melodic intervals. In his study of Moravian modes, Janáček found that the peasant musicians did not know the names of the modes and had their own ways of referring to them. He used the term "Moravian modulation" to describe the harmonic progression I–VII, which he considered a general characteristic of this region's folk music.

Janáček partly composed the original piano accompaniments to more than 150 folk songs, respectful of their original function and context, and partly used folk inspiration in his own works, especially in his mature compositions. His work in this area was not stylistically imitative; instead, he developed a new and original musical aesthetic based on a deep study of the fundamentals of folk music.

Russia
Janáček's deep and lifelong affection for Russia and Russian culture represents another important element of his musical inspiration. In 1888 he attended the Prague performance of Tchaikovsky's music, and met the older composer. Janáček profoundly admired Tchaikovsky, and particularly appreciated his highly developed musical thought in connection with the use of Russian folk motifs. Janáček's Russian inspiration is especially apparent in his later chamber, symphonic and operatic output. He closely followed developments in Russian music from his early years, and in 1896, following his first visit to Russia, he founded a Russian Circle in Brno. Janáček read Russian authors in their original language. Their literature offered him an enormous and reliable source of inspiration, though this did not blind him to the problems of Russian society. He was twenty-two years old when he wrote his first composition based on a Russian theme: a melodrama, Death, set to Lermontov's poem. In his later works, he often used literary models with sharply contoured plots. In 1910 Zhukovsky's Tale of Tsar Berendei inspired him to write the Fairy Tale for Cello and Piano. He composed the rhapsody Taras Bulba (1918) to Gogol's short story, and five years later, in 1923, completed his first string quartet, inspired by Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata. Two of his later operas were based on Russian themes: Káťa Kabanová, composed in 1921 to Alexander Ostrovsky's play The Storm, and his last work, From the House of the Dead, which transformed Dostoevsky's vision of the world into an exciting collective drama.

Other composers
One of Janáček's early influences was Antonín Dvořák, whom he always deeply admired and to whom he dedicated some of his works. He rearranged part of Dvořák's Moravian Duets for mixed choir with original piano accompaniment. In the early years of the 20th century, Janáček became increasingly interested in the music of other European composers. His opera Destiny was a response to another significant and famous work in contemporary Bohemia – Louise, by the French composer Gustave Charpentier. The influence of Giacomo Puccini is apparent particularly in Janáček's later works, for example in his opera Káťa Kabanová. Although he carefully observed developments in European music, his operas remained firmly connected with Czech and Slavic themes.

Publications

Janáček published music theory works, essays and articles over a period of fifty years, from 1877 to 1927. He wrote and edited the  journal, and contributed to many specialist music journals, such as Cecílie, Hlídka and Dalibor. He also completed several extensive studies, as  (The Complete Harmony Theory),  (On the Construction of Chords and Their Connections) and  (Basics of Musical Sčasování). In his essays and books, Janáček examined various musical topics, forms, melody and harmony theories, dyad and triad chords, counterpoint (or "opora", meaning "support") and devoted himself to the study of the mental composition. His theoretical works stress the Czech term "sčasování", Janáček's specific word for rhythm, which has relation to time ( in Czech), and the handling of time in music composition. He distinguished several types of rhythm (sčasovka): "" (sounding) – meaning any rhythm, "" (counting) – meaning smaller units measuring the course of rhythm; and "" (summing) – a long value comprising the length of a rhythmical unit. Janáček used the combination of their mutual action widely in his own works.

As well as his contributions to music journals, Janáček also wrote essays, reports, reviews, feuilletons, articles and books, regularly contributing such content to local newspapers in Brno. His work in this area comprises around 380 individual items. Janáček's literary legacy represents an important illustration of his life, public work and art.

Selected writings

A selection of Janáček's many publications is given below.

 (On the Perfect Image of the Dyad Chord) (1885–1886)
 (Bedřich Smetana: On Musical Forms) (1886)
 (On the Idea of Key) (1886–1887)
 (On the Scientificity of Harmony Theories) (1887)
 (On the Triad) (1887–1888)
 (A Word on Counterpoint) (1888)
 (A New Trend in Music Theory) (1894)
 (On the Construction of Chords and Their Progressions) (1896)
 (Modern Harmonic Music) (1907)
 (My Opinion of "sčasování" (Rhythm)) (1907)
 (On "sčasování" From practice) (1908)
 (The Weight of Real Motifs) (1910)
 (On the Course of Mental Compositional Work) (1916)
 (A Complete Theory of Harmony) (1920)

Folk music research

Janáček came from a region characterized by its deeply rooted folk culture, which he explored as a young student under Pavel Křížkovský. His meeting with the folklorist and dialectologist František Bartoš (1837–1906) was decisive in his own development as a folklorist and composer, and led to their collaborative and systematic collections of folk songs. Janáček became an important collector in his own right, especially of Lachian, Moravian Slovakian, Moravian Wallachian and Slovakian songs. From 1879, his collections included transcribed speech intonations. He was one of the organizers of the Czech-Slavic Folklore Exhibition, an important event in Czech culture at the end of 19th century. From 1905 he was President of the newly instituted Working Committee for Czech National Folksong in Moravia and Silesia, a branch of the Austrian institute Das Volkslied in Österreich (Folksong in Austria), which was established in 1902 by the Viennese publishing house Universal Edition. Janáček was a pioneer and propagator of ethnographic photography in Moravia and Silesia. In October 1909 he acquired an Edison phonograph and became one of the first to use phonographic recording as a folklore research tool. Several of these recording sessions have been preserved, and were reissued in 1998.

Criticism

Czech musicology at the beginning of the 20th century was strongly influenced by Romanticism, in particular by the styles of Wagner and Smetana. Performance practices were conservative, and actively resistant to stylistic innovation. During his lifetime, Janáček reluctantly conceded to Karel Kovařovic's instrumental rearrangement of Jenůfa, most noticeably in the finale, in which Kovařovic added a more "festive" sound of trumpets and French horns, and doubled some instruments to support Janáček's "poor" instrumentation. The score of Jenůfa was later restored by Charles Mackerras, and is now performed according to Janáček's original intentions.

Another important Czech musicologist, Zdeněk Nejedlý, a great admirer of Smetana and later a communist Minister of Culture, condemned Janáček as an author who could accumulate a lot of material, but was unable to do anything with it. He called Janáček's style "unanimated", and his operatic duets "only speech melodies", without polyphonic strength. Nejedlý considered Janáček rather an amateurish composer, whose music did not conform to the style of Smetana. According to Charles Mackerras, he tried to destroy Janáček professionally. In 2006 Josef Bartoš, the Czech aesthetician and music critic, described Janáček as a "musical eccentric" who clung tenaciously to an imperfect, improvising style, but Bartoš appreciated some elements of Janáček's works and judged him more positively than Nejedlý.

Janáček's friend and collaborator Václav Talich, former chief-conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, sometimes adjusted Janáček's scores, mainly for their instrumentation and dynamics; some critics sharply attacked him for doing so. Talich re-orchestrated Taras Bulba and the Suite from Cunning Little Vixen justifying the latter with the claim that "it was not possible to perform it in the Prague National Theatre unless it was entirely re-orchestrated". Talich's rearrangement rather emasculated the specific sounds and contrasts of Janáček's original, but was the standard version for many years. Charles Mackerras started to research Janáček's music in the 1960s, and gradually restored the composer's distinctive scoring. The critical edition of Janáček's scores is published by the Czech Editio Janáček.

Legacy
Janáček belongs to a wave of twentieth-century composers who sought greater realism and greater connection with everyday life, combined with a more all-encompassing use of musical resources. His operas, in particular, demonstrate the use of "speech"-derived melodic lines, folk and traditional material, and complex modal musical argument. He would also inspire music theorists (among them Jaroslav Volek) to place modal development at the same level of importance as harmony in music. Along with Dvořák and Smetana, he is generally considered one of the most important Czech composers.

The operas of his mature period, Jenůfa (1904), Káťa Kabanová (1921), The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), The Makropulos Affair (1926) and From the House of the Dead (after a novel by Dostoevsky and premièred posthumously in 1930) are considered his finest works. The Australian conductor Sir Charles Mackerras became very closely associated with Janáček's operas.

Janáček's chamber music, while not especially voluminous, includes works which are widely considered twentieth-century classics, particularly his two string quartets: Quartet No. 1, "The Kreutzer Sonata" inspired by the Tolstoy novel, and the Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters". Milan Kundera called these compositions the peak of Janáček's output.

Janáček established a school of composition in Brno. Among his notable pupils were Jan Kunc, Václav Kaprál, Vilém Petrželka, Jaroslav Kvapil, Osvald Chlubna, Břetislav Bakala and Pavel Haas. Most of his students neither imitated nor developed Janáček's style, which left him no direct stylistic descendants. According to Milan Kundera, Janáček developed a personal, modern style in relative isolation from contemporary modernist movements but was in close contact with developments in modern European music. His path towards the innovative "modernism" of his later years was long and solitary, and he achieved true individuation as a composer around his 50th year.

Sir Charles Mackerras, the Australian conductor who helped promote Janáček's works on the world's opera stages, described his style as "... completely new and original, different from anything else ... and impossible to pin down to any one style". According to Mackerras, Janáček's use of whole-tone scale differs from that of Debussy, his folk music inspiration is absolutely dissimilar from Dvořák's and Smetana's, and his characteristically complex rhythms differ from the techniques of the young Stravinsky.

The French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, who interpreted Janáček's operas and orchestral works, called his music surprisingly modern and fresh: "Its repetitive pulse varies through changes in rhythm, tone and direction." He described his opera From the House of the Dead as "primitive, in the best sense, but also extremely strong, like the paintings of Léger, where the rudimentary character allows a very vigorous kind of expression".

The Czech conductor, composer and writer Jaroslav Vogel wrote what was for a long time considered the standard biography of Janáček in 1958. It first appeared in German translation, and in the Czech original in 1963. The first English translation came out in 1962 and it was later re-issued, in a version revised by Karel Janovický, in 1981. Charles Mackerras regarded it as his "Janáček bible".

Janáček's life has been featured in several films. In 1974 Eva Marie Kaňková made a short documentary Fotograf a muzika (The Photographer and the Music) about the Czech photographer Josef Sudek and his relationship to Janáček's work. In 1983 the Brothers Quay produced a stop motion animated film, Leoš Janáček: Intimate Excursions, about Janáček's life and work, and in 1986 the Czech director Jaromil Jireš made Lev s bílou hřívou (Lion with the White Mane), which showed the amorous inspiration behind Janáček's works. In Search of Janáček is a Czech documentary directed in 2004 by Petr Kaňka, made to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Janáček's birth. An animated cartoon version of The Cunning Little Vixen was made in 2003 by the BBC, with music performed by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and conducted by Kent Nagano. A re-arrangement of the opening of the Sinfonietta was used by the progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer for the song "Knife-Edge" on their 1970 debut album.

The Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra was established in 1954. Today the 116-piece ensemble is associated with mostly contemporary music but also regularly performs works from the classical repertoire. The orchestra is resident at the House of Culture Vítkovice (Dům kultury Vítkovice) in Ostrava, Czech Republic. The orchestra tours extensively and has performed in Europe, the U.S., Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Asteroid 2073 Janáček, discovered in 1974 by Luboš Kohoutek, is named in his honor. The Haruki Murakami novel 1Q84 (2009/2010) uses Janáček's Sinfonietta as a recurring plot point. Ostrava's international airport was renamed after Janáček in November 2006.

References

Sources

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 ISMN M-2601-0365-8

Further reading

 Štědroň, Miloš (1998). Leoš Janáček a hudba 20. století. Brno: Nadace Universitas Masarykiana. .

External links

 A detailed site on Leoš Janáček by Brno Tourist Information Office
 Leoš Janáček at Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music
 My Life with Janáček: the Memoirs of Zdenka Janáčková (translated and edited by John Tyrrell) – a 1999 review by Thomas D. Svatos in The Prague Post
 , Hradec Králové Philharmonic, conducted by Paul Mauffray, 26 November 2014

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19th-century classical composers
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Leoš Janáček