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to use the four-row instrument well into the twentieth century) 18 than it did to the
instrument’s growing popularity during the nineteenth century. This trend can largely
be credited to Michał Józef Guzikow (1806–1837), a Polish Jew who had the
distinction of being the first acknowledged xylophone virtuoso, touring Europe and
impressing the likes of Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt. 19 He not only raised the
instrument’s profile within the world of art music, but reinforced a perception of it as
a typically Slavic instrument. 20 In one of the chief Czech reference books of the early
twentieth century, Otto’s Encyclopedia, the xylophone (listed as Slamozvuk, literally
‘straw noise’) is described as
a musical instrument of the Russians, Cossacks, Tartars and Poles, also particularly
the Carpathian and Ural highlanders, and lastly favoured by Tyrolean singers and
called by them Strohfiedel, also Holzharmonika, Gige-lyra, hölzernes Gelächter. It is
made of 16–20 tuned sticks of fir wood, semi-cylindrical in shape [i.e. convex],
resting on straw ropes or on long wooden rods wound with rope, the notes are
produced by two wooden beaters. 21
Although this description seems to be of the even older one-row diatonic xylophone
(which pre-dated Guzikow and was described, as the author of Otto’s entry points out,
by Agricola), the instrument’s Slavic roots, attested to in other sources of the time,
may well have appealed to Janáček’s wider pan-Slavic sentiments, notwithstanding
18 In Russian orchestras the four-row xylophone was in use until the later twentieth century; see Baines
1992, 384.
19 Irena Poniatowska, ‘Guzikow, Michał Józef’, NG2, vii, 608–9; James Blades/James Holland,
‘Xylophone, §2: Europe’, NG2, xxvii, 619.
20 This was undoubtedly emphasised by his appearance in folk costume at his concerts; see AmZ no. 36
(September 1835).
21 OSN xxiii (1905), 334.
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