sources - Nottingham eTheses - The University of Nottingham

genre might offer in his own quest to ‘compose the truth’. 61 Beginning to learn the
lessons from his studies of speech melodies, he was able to address many of the issues
highlighted by early criticisms of the work, and in so doing began to develop a
distinctive and ultimately radical approach not just to declamation but also to his
musical language in general.
Richard Taruskin has suggested that Janáček might justly be described as ‘the
oldest twentieth-century composer’, 62 a neat way of observing that, though born in the
middle of the nineteenth century, musically he became unmistakably a creature and —
even more importantly from our point of view — a creator of the twentieth. That the
transition was not made without the expense of considerable effort and application on
Janáček’s part is everywhere evident in the revisions he made to Jenůfa, many of
which can be seen in a new and also more nuanced light by means of the availability
of the 1904 version. And the fact that the transitional route taken by the score of
Jenůfa comes at this particular historical juncture allows it to stand not just as an
illuminating operatic subject in its own right, but also as an emblem for the
transformational course of Janáček’s own development, and for that of early twentieth
opera in general.
61 See JYL i, 383 and JYL ii, 43.
62 Taruskin 2005, 421.
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