Date of composition: 1903-1905
Premiere: 13 March 1934 incomplete radio broadcast, 18 September 1934 complete radio broadcast by Radio Brno, Czech Republic; 25 October 1958 staged premiere in Brno, conductor: František Jílek
Duration: 20 minutes
Leoš Janáček is one of the most original innovators of early modernism. His operas are staged at all the world’s major theatres. However, the man from Moravia left behind remarkably little orchestral music. The suite from Osud (Fate) thus remedies a lack. Yet it remains known only to insiders, perhaps because the opera itself is generally considered a stepchild among Janáček’s creations. Written between 1903 and 1907, Osud was originally to be premiered in Brno, but the composer preferred a production in Prague. When this did not materialise, the work – deemed theatrically unviable – was buried in a drawer. In 1934, the first two acts were performed in concert on Brno Radio, but it was not until 1958 that the opera saw its staged premieres in Brno and Stuttgart.
For those occasions, František Jílek (1913–1993), the conductor of the Czech production, made relatively drastic changes to the chronology of the action. His selection of striking musical passages for a compact suite retains the revised sequence. The score thus begins with the prelude to the third act of the opera and links its sections in the style of a free fantasy. Turbulent waltzes, rustic Moravian folk melodies and yearning, sweeping ariosi combine in what the French conductor Sylvain Cambreling has called an “operetta style à la Janáček”, which in his view characterises the entire opera. The composer’s bold approach to instrumentation is particularly evident in the way he shifts between highly dense and almost sparse textures.
The plot and background of Osud are somewhat eccentric. Janáček found inspiration for his opera in an encounter at the Moravian spa town of Luhačovice in the summer of 1903. Kamila Urválková, a long-married woman, complained to him that her former lover, the composer Ludvik Čelanský, had portrayed her unfavourably in an opera entitled Kamila. Janáček promised his new acquaintance some form of redress: taking her experiences as a basis, he sketched a plot, and the schoolteacher Fedora Bartošová wrote the libretto. The protagonist of Osud is the composer Živný, who transforms his own tragic love story into an opera. The first act is set in the park of a spa town, where Živný meets his former lover Mila again and learns that she has a young son by him. Years earlier, the couple had been separated by an intrigue instigated by Mila’s mother. In the second act, Mila and Živný have been married for four years, and Živný is working on his opera. But Mila’s mother, now mentally deranged, once again comes between them: in a struggle, she and her daughter fall to their deaths from a balcony. The third act takes place during rehearsals for Živný’s opera. Gradually, the performers realise that the supposedly fictional plot of the piece mirrors the actual life of its creator.