Leos Janácek was a maverick of a composer whose history in many ways resembles that of his near contemporary, Sibelius. Both were nationalists who outstripped their countries' nationalist musical idioms; both drew upon but stood apart from the various schools of compositional thought that dominated European music in their day; and both wrote music that combined rich romantic emotion with stark modern asperity. Sibelius's works, however, enjoyed worldwide popularity within their creator's lifetime but lost ground - undeservedly - in the following decades, whereas most of Janácek's music, especially the operas, only began to achieve international recognition 30 to 40 years after his death.

Janácek came from a family of teachers and musicians. His father was a schoolmaster in the village of Hukvaldy, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), where Leos was born on 3 July 1854. At the age of 11 he was sent to a church-run choir school in Brno. By his late teens he was teaching and directing a choral society in the town, but at 20 he managed, despite his extreme poverty, to further his musical studies at the Prague Organ School. He later studied, although not with great enthusiasm, at the Leipzig and Vienna conservatories, and he returned to Brno as a full-fledged music teacher. In 1881, shortly after his marriage to a not-yet-16-year-old former pupil, he founded an organ school in the town, and in the following years he conducted various choral and instrumental ensembles, interested himself in Moravian folk music, wrote music criticism and composed. But not until Jenufa, his first significant opera, did he find his own creative voice. By the time it was completed, revised and published, he was in his mid-50s. Janácek's lifelong interest in Russian literature, together with his pro-Russian, anti-Austro-German sentiments during the First World War, inspired him to write Taras Bulba (1915-18), which he described as a rhapsody for orchestra, and which was among the principal works of the decade that followed the publication of Jenufa. The rhapsody is really a three-movement symphonic poem based on a Gogol novella set during the 16th- and 17th-century Ukrainian rebellion against Polish dominion.

After the war, Janácek, who was well past 60, experienced a creative rebirth, thanks not only to his joy over the establishment of the Czechoslovak nation but also to his love for Kamila Stösslová, a married woman 38 years his junior. Although Janácek never abandoned his wife and probably never consummated his passion for Kamila (who seems to have been indifferent to him), his feelings for her set him writing most of the masterpieces for which he is now best known - especially the magnificent operas Kát'a Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Affair and From the House of the Dead; the inspiring Glagolitic (or Slavonic) Mass, and much orchestral and chamber music. By the 1920s, he was indisputably his country's leading composer, and by the end of his life his works were finally beginning to attract attention abroad.

In July 1928, Kamila Stösslová visited him at the cottage he had bought in Hukvaldy, his native village. While searching for her 11-year-old son, who had become lost on one of their expeditions, Janácek caught a chill. It turned into pneumonia, and on 12 August he died, at the age of 72.

Harvey Sachs

Biographical notes (c) 1996, reprinted by permission of Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg

A selection of major works:

Orchestral: Capriccio (piano and chamber ensemble), Lachian Dances, Sinfonietta, Taras Bulba, Violin Concerto "Pilgrimage of the Soul".

Chamber: Concertino, Mládí, 2 String Quartets (No. 1 "The Kreutzer Sonata"; No. 2 "Intimate Letters"), Violin Sonata.

Instrumental solo: Along an Overgrown Path, In the Mists, Sonata 1.X.1905 "From the Street", Thema con variazione "Zdenka".

Vocal: Songs.

Choral: Glagolitic Mass.

Stage works: Operas: Jenufa, The Cunning Little Vixen, Kát'a Kabanová, The Makropoulos Affair, From the House of the Dead.