'I do not deliver up my feelings to the tender mercy of fools," composer Leos Janácek wrote in the last months of his life to to Kamilla Stösslová, the young wife and mother with whom he had been obsessed for a decade. He was referring to his decision to rename the string quartet she had inspired, at first nominated "Love letters", the slightly more reserved "Intimate letters".
The letters between the two have been prized since his death, and many of them were published in English in 1994. Janácek's first biographer, the Czech musicologist (and Terezin internee) Vladimír Helfert, sought in vain to acquire them for more than 10 years after Janácek's death. Their value was always recognised by the Stösslová family: Kamilla refused to sell to Helfert, her pragmatic husband priced them out of the academic market and then their son pawned a large collection for 20,000 crowns just before Czeckoslovakia was invaded by the German army. The price was cruelly matched by the anguish suffered by Janácek's wife as they were written, and then again as they were read by strangers. In her husband's lifetime she was forced to live with the letters, to beg forgiveness if ever she opened them, and to apologise to her rival if ever she (correctly) surmised that they were in fact love letters. I suppose there is still a mystery about them, because they were edited by the correspondents themselves, but the questions unanswered are more banal than compelling: did they have sexual relations, would he have been repelled by her character once their elopement turned into a marriage, were she and her husband after his money and prestige?
What can one know from the private correspondence of strangers, even if tenderness or mercy did guide judgment? How biographical are they, and how differently biographical than a string quartet called after them? I keep wondering: what is a "composer's life"?
Mirka Zemanová's new biography of Janácek benefits from her detailed knowledge of his correspondence, her clear understanding of Moravian history and society and of Czech nationalism, and her deep sympathy for his art.
She has paced her account simply and evenly, so that it is consistently interesting. Her musical analyses are stimulating and unpretentious: I had no layman's urge to skip any pages, and was moved to turn again to scores and recordings to follow the points she was making. It was gratifying to read her account of the composer's fascination with speech melody, which she clarifies has nothing to do with musical declamation or the imitation of speech and its intonation in vocal music. His rough treatment at the hands of imperceptive critics and his prolonged rejection by the musical establishment (in part caused by his own severe style of journalism) are instructive. Having been critically reprimanded in this country for having the temerity to produce three of his operas in English with OTC, I was delighted to read of his zeal for translations so that his work could be known internationally.
Zemanová is fascinating, too, on the ways in which musical expression was for a time a language of nationalism, with all its mixed outcomes. Best of all, her account of his personal life is not marred by conjecture; as she says in her introduction, she aims to tell people who know his music "something of his life and his background". I enjoyed reading it very much, even though the prose style is not always felicitous, and I found the transitions from "life" to "work" uninventive, and the chapter headings ("The Indian Summer Begins", "Crystallisation of Style", "The Unbending Spirit") not dissimilar to a modest textbook. I will take it off the shelf again, and I will cherish the comprehensive bibliography and copious notes.
It's not a book for the very meek. When I finished it I had the sense of knowing - or being told - somewhat more than I liked. However clear his own unhappiness, Janácek's determined courtship of a 14-year-old girl (who had been his gifted pupil at 12), his honeymoon disillusionment with her, and his persistent cruelty to her in the 48 years they were married, make tough reading. The death of their young son, and then of their 20-year-old daughter are terrible landmarks in their miserable relationship: but so too are his intolerance of her apparently generous, German-speaking family (Zdenka was required to speak no word of German in their married household, although it was the mother tongue she shared with all of bourgeois Brno), his early abandonment of wife and daughter, her anti-Semitic jibes about his last mistress, and his strange, forceful resumption of sexual relations with her when he was in between obsessions. I sense compassion turned to distaste when the writer says of the insights derived from Janácek's voluminous correspondence: "there is still much that we shall never know, and perhaps that is for the best". Thank goodness this book leads us back to the music, and the operas particularly, in which all the artist's feelings play, the least palatable as recognisable as the bravest, the finest.
James Conway is artistic director of Opera Theatre Company, and the general director of English Touring Opera
Janácek: A Composer's Life. By Mirka Zemanová. John Murray, 368 pp.
£25 sterling