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his earliest notations of speech melodies (1897 onwards). 11 And the idea of the
composer actually noting down the noise of the mill-wheel, which might otherwise
seem fanciful, is lent at least some credence by the composer’s own words in his
unpublished 1924 sketch on naturalism (XV/340): ‘The “wailing wind” plays the
piccolo. The clatter of the mill — the xylophone.’ 12
However, just as the mill-wheel itself can take on broader, symbolic
resonances in the context of the unfolding action (as a ‘wheel of fate’), so too the
xylophone has wider significance than its immediately apparent naturalistic
association with the mill, a significance bound up with the history of the instrument
itself. To appreciate this, one needs to consider the type of instrument that Janáček
was probably writing for. In his introduction to UE 1996, Tyrrell looks into the
terminology of some of Janáček’s percussion instruments, notably the ‘lyra’ (a lyre-
shaped portable glockenspiel used in military bands) and the ‘zvonky’ (a Czech term
meaning ‘little bells’). 13 His comments on the xylophone, however, are restricted to
noting its association with the mill-wheel, which ‘perhaps explains the exceptionally
low tessitura’. 14 But, at just the time that Jenůfa was being composed and first
performed, the xylophone itself was going through an important stage in its
organological development. The ‘modern’ orchestral xylophone, with its keyboard-
style layout of wooden bars, emerged only in the late 1880s in the United States, where
11 See JYL, 339–54 and 477–89.
12 ‘„Meluzina“ hraje picolou. „Klepot mlýna“ – xylofon.’, LD I/1 -2 , 173; English translation in
Beckerman 2003, 295.
13 Tyrrell 1996, xvii–xviii. These terms are explored in greater detail in JaWo, xx–xxii; for their
interpretation in the context of the present reconstruction of the 1904 Jenůfa, see CHAPTER 2, §2.4.
14 Tyrrell 1996, xviii.
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