About
Leoš Janáček was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and other Slavic folk music to create an original, modern musical style.
"The laws of music exist in all living beings, in rhythm and in melody and by these rhythms we measure ourselves and the universe."
Although Janáček was born before late Romantic composers such as Mahler and Richard Strauss, most of his best-known and most distinctive music comes from the 1920s and sounds more like the contemporary work of younger musicians such as Kodály and Bartók. Earlier he wrote a prodigious amount of vocal and keyboard music centered on Moravian folk music, and he developed strong theories about the relationship of speech and melody. In everything, from string quartets to operas, Janácek was an intuitively dramatic composer of intense lyrical power.