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conducted a programme of choral and orchestral works with the Brno Beseda which
included one of the most celebrated musical representations of the Dance of Death,
Camille Saint-Saëns’s symphonic poem Danse macabre, op. 40 (1874). This
orchestral showpiece is mentioned several times in Janáček’s later writings, 24 and
although he seems to have been most taken with the solo violin’s depiction of the
cockerel, the skeletal tones of Saint-Saëns’s xylophone must surely have informed the
background to his choice of the instrument in Jenůfa — the first time he used it in one
of his own works.
In addition to these wider representational and associative dimensions,
Janáček’s use of the xylophone in Jenůfa presents a practical problem: what sort of
sound did he want, or expect, and what sort of sound would he have got? As
mentioned above, Tyrrell notes the ‘exceptionally low tessitura’ — so low, in fact,
that all the pitches employed can be written, as they are in ŠFS and the present edition,
in the bass clef. The register used by Janáček is by no means unique (Ravel used the
bass clef for the xylophone in his orchestration of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an
Exhibition), but his writing for the instrument in his later operas tends to favour the
more normal treble register. 25 However, its fleeting, four-bar appearance towards the
end of Act 2 of Káťa Kabanová bears some similarity to the writing in Jenůfa, with
the same repeated cb's of Jenůfa’s opening resolving to bb as Varvara remarks to
Kudrjáš ‘If only we could make out what time it is!’:
24 Dřevo [Wood], XV/234; Kohoutek [The cockerel], XV/243; [Naturalismus], XV/340; [Formace
hudební], XV/363.
25 The xylophone is used in all Janáček’s subsequent operas, from Osud to Z mrtvého domu. Its only
other appearance in his works is in Ballada blanická [The ballad of Blanik], VI/16.
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