Janáček’s Sinfonietta
by Nigel Simeone and Jiří Zahrádka
Published 2026
250 pages, hardback
ISBN: 9781837653300
Boydell Press
However well one may feel one knows a piece of music, there’s always more to learn. One of the joys of the various guides to compositions and composers that have been in currency over the last 50 years or so is that when done well they send you back to the music with renewed appreciation. That’s very much been my experience with this superb new book on the Sinfonietta of Leoš Janáček. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that my appreciation has been considerably augmented thanks to the perceptive approach and expertise of the book’s authors Nigel Simeone and Jiří Zahrádka. Both are Janáček experts. Music Web readers will have encountered Simeone many times I suspect as the author of some of the best booklet notes in the business. Zahrádka is Director of the Janáček Archive in Brno no less. What’s striking throughout the book though is the profoundly accessible way their knowledge is wielded, both in the deft way source material is used and how the narrative is structured.
This is evident from the start with an enlightening ‘Prologue’ on Janáček and the Orchestra, which reminds us how small Janáček’s output of purely orchestral music was when he was at the height of his powers (only four works for full orchestra before the Sinfonietta), but also how distinctive. That last characteristic is broken down by orchestral section in a way that really brought home to me what an innovator Janáček was. The section on his use of the timpani, for example, and how he often used it as a ‘protagonist’ of his musical argument was a revelation.
The insights provided in the Prologue prove to be essential background immediately. At the start of the story ‘proper’ in Chapter 1, we are at once able to observe how an occasion, Janáček’s perception of the key to commemorate it, and his strikingly individual and innovative compositional gifts came serendipitously together. The occasion was the Eighth All-Sokol Rally in Prague 1926. Originally conceived as a sporting celebration, the Sokol Rallies had taken on a more nationalistic and indeed military dimension by the 1920s. Although for the Eighth Rally there was no official compositional competition (Josef Suk’s march Towards a New Life was the winner for the Seventh Rally in 1920), Janáček was invited by the editorial staff of the newspaper Lidové noviny in February 1926 to write ‘some notes’ to commemorate it. Janáček saw immediately that the key to any such work was going to be military fanfares. From that insight and initially inspired by the fanfares he had heard played by military bands on his visits to Pisek, the ‘Military Sinfonietta’ as it was then called, took rapid shape within the space of a few weeks, so that the composer was able to offer it to the Sokol Rally organisers in April 1926.
Unsurprisingly, Janáček’s offer was taken up, but that was the start of a stressful series of events leading to the premiere, to be given by the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Václav Talich, centred around the apparent impossibility of Janáček and Talich being able to discuss the work because of their mutual commitments. However, Janáček was eventually able to attend most of the rehearsals and the successful world premiere performance itself (where it was entitled ‘Rally Sinfonietta’) where the famous Fanfares were played by military trumpeters. Simeone and Zahrádka recount all this in engaging detail: the personalities, the musical detail, the tensions and the logistics. On that last point for example, they detail the rather lovely coda to the premiere where the Fanfares were played again at the Rally’s closing event from Prague’s Týn Tower. A nice idea, but one which involved the non-trivial challenge of getting nine trumpets, two bass trumpets, two tubas, several timpani and the conductor to the top!
The genesis and first performance of the Sinfonietta are of course only the start of the story, and the remainder of the book develops it skilfully, not least the very next chapter which concerns performances of the Sinfonietta in Janáček’s lifetime. I found this riveting. 19 performances after the premiere are documented, in fascinating detail, including the programme for each concert. There are some famous names in the list of conductors for those early performances, none more so perhaps than Otto Klemperer, who conducted the second performance—the German premiere in Wiesbaden—followed in 1927 by the US premiere in Carnegie Hall and then the work’s first Berlin performance. Janáček attended this last concert and there’s much of interest in the account of his visit (including a photograph of him and Klemperer I’d never seen) and his conversations with Klemperer. I enjoyed the composer’s succinct description of the dress rehearsal, where Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite and Mozart’s K466 preceded the Sinfonietta: ‘Bach – shaky (3rd movement poor). Mozart – excellent – Schnabel. Conversation with him before his performance. Then my piece! – Superbly played!’
Max Brod prophetically wrote in his review of the world premiere performance, ‘I have a feeling that this work will make its way into the repertoire of the great symphony orchestras…’. The next two chapters testify to the work’s enduring attraction, detailing first how (shorn of the ‘Military’ epithet and requirement for a military band) it became part of the orchestral repertory in the 20 years after the first performance, and then its recorded legacy. The Chapter on recordings will be of especial interest to many readers I suspect, not least because again, some of the names will be unfamiliar or unexpected. There are two Klemperer recordings for example made in the 1950s, important documents given his connection with Janáček just mentioned and the fact that the composer thought that 1927 Berlin performance ‘unmatched’. Charles Mackerras features of course. The excellent Discography at the end of the book documents no fewer than six performances by him available on CD, perhaps the most notable being his first in 1959, and his 1981 account with the Vienna Philharmonic, where, amongst other things, he decided to restore the viola d’amore solo in the work’s third movement (Janáček changed his mind about this before the premiere, having tutti violas play the passage instead). This is one of the issues covered in a helpful concluding passage in the Chapter discussing what might constitute an ‘authentic’ text and the choices made on individual recordings. The most prominent of these is the use of wooden sticks for the timpani. Janáček had stipulated the use of hard sticks in the first and fifth movements, but this wasn’t documented in scores until editions published in 1980. So, some recordings made before then, with conductors unaware of Janáček’s prescription, use soft sticks (including Rafael Kubelik’s first two). Given that it makes a huge difference to the impact of the timpani it’s rather surprising that there are a number of post 1980 recordings that don’t use hard sticks, including Claudio Abbado’s 1997 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic.
One of the names which arises in the discussion of recordings is František Jílek, who made two, in 1978 and 1986. His name comes up again in Chapter 5 which is a conversation between Simeone and Jakub Hrůša. This Chapter be the pièce de résistance in what was already an excellent book. Hrůša (who also provides an engaging Preface) talks first about his own early experiences of the piece, and his connection to Jílek, a conductor he much admired, and one who had conducted virtually everything Janáček wrote. Hrůša’s first teacher of conducting was Evžen Holiš. Holiš had been Jílek’s assistant at the Brno National Theatre and so was able to provide Hrůša with an invaluable insight into Jílek’s approach, above all his command of Janáček’s architecture and structural coherence. This sort of link is always thrilling in musical terms, enthralling to read about, and for anyone who attended the Royal Opera House performances of The Makropulos Case a couple of months ago or heard the radio broadcast, very evident in Hrůša’s absolutely outstanding account of the score.
Simeone and Hrůša go on to talk about other recordings and conductors. Hrůša’s insights are absorbing. For example, he’s respectful but not uncritical of Mackerras and his influence: ‘[his] interpretative opinions dominated some of the editorial decision-making at Universal Edition – his personal solutions for certain problematic passages are printed as if they are the solutions for everyone – and I don’t always agree with those.’ Finally, they discuss editions and practical aspects of conducting the work, not least the many issues of balance a conductor must address. I’ve not read anything recently, or possibly at all, which gives such a brilliant and unpretentious account of what it’s like to prepare and conduct a piece.
That’s followed in Chapter 6 by a detailed musical commentary on the Sinfonietta. This is clearly and straightforwardly done with essential musical examples provided. It was a really enjoyable experience after reading the preceding chapters to study this, look at the score and listen to some of the recordings. I really felt at the end that I had a better practical understanding of how the piece works and why it works so well.
The commentary is the final chapter of the book, but the concluding sections are engrossing too: there’s one of the first programme notes in English written by the work’s dedicatee, Rosa Newmarch, which I thought might be an interesting curiosity but is genuinely insightful; descriptions of annotations to the conducting scores of František Neumann (who conducted the Brno premiere), Klemperer and Henry Wood (an early advocate for Janáček’s music in the UK and conductor of the British premiere), which, if you’ve read the various textual and interpretative discussions earlier, show fascinating individual perspectives; a magnificent Discography which includes official YouTube channels as well as ‘unofficial’ performances also found there (I’d particularly recommend a fantastic account by Mark Elder and the Hallé that I’d not previously heard) and tantalising records of unpublished performances; and a Bibliography which will keep even the most ardent Janáček admirer busy for some time to come.
There are a couple of other things I should mention. First, this has been a pleasurable reading experience stylistically. Apart from the Hrůša interview I don’t know how Simeone and Zahrádka decided to do the actual writing, but there’s no sense of two voices here, which is far harder to achieve than one might first think, and can be distractingly noticeable when less care is taken. Second, the book is beautifully produced and illustrated. I understand it’s the first in a new series from the Boydell Press on music of the 20th century, and it’s an auspicious start.
I mentioned above that one of the volume’s strengths is how the authors have marshalled existing materials. Their knowledge of Janáček’s writings for example proves a trump card again and again. I quoted the composer’s view of the Klemperer performance above, but I was also deeply struck by the poignancy of his account of the Brno premiere conducted by Neumann (poorly advertised and starting at 10 am), which was the last performance he heard: ‘A gala concert of the Sinfonietta, 56 audience members in the theatre!’ I hope it would be a comfort to him to know that it would be surprising indeed if any concert containing this masterpiece these days didn’t have many times that number attending.
Dominic Hartley
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