Leos Janacek

I took down a box of “The Best of Czech Classics”: eight Czech string quartets played by three different Czech string quartets. Two quartets by Janacek, two by Smetana, one by Novak, and three by Dvorak. Needless to say, the quartets that spoke to me best were the two by Leos Janacek. I have been a Janaceck fan ever since the 1950s, when I acquired a 10” CD of the Diary of a Young Man who Disappeared (sung in German) quickly followed by the Glagolitic Mass, and the Sinfonietta. I never ventured into Janacek's many operas, but I greatly enjoy his sonata for violin and piano. There is something about Janaceck's laconic, fragmented and emotional music that greatly appeals to me, and always has. His is a very individual voice. Never been a Dvorak fan, however.

As a footnote: Janacek was not technically Czech, since he was born in Moravia. Just as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (aka Joseph Stalin) and Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria were not really Russians, but Georgians, and Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev were not really Russians, but Ukrainians. In that part of Europe, your current nationality often depended on the month, and the year. Probably still does.