Brno festival celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Opera "Jenufa"

The 100th anniversary of the premier of Leos Janacek's opera "Jenufa" is being celebrated at a Janacek festival in the Moravian city of Brno. One of those attending the festival is the Australian conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, who has done much to champion Janacek's music around the world. Sir Charles spoke to Radio Prague about why Janacek enjoys popularity abroad, but is less well liked at home.

Leos Janacek

"I played the oboe, and I played his composition Youth - Mladi - in Australia, when I was about 16. But the first time I met Janacek's great operas, which are really his greatest work, was in Prague, when I came in 1947 on a British Council scholarship, and I heard Vaclav Talich conducting Katya Kabanova. That really changed my life because I became a great studier of Janacek's music and everything about him."

"It is true that Janacek's operas are extremely popular in Britain, Germany, France, America and even Australia. I have often tried to find a reason for this, why the works of Janacek don't seem to be very popular in the Czech Republic. The only explanation I can ever find is that during the communist times, Janacek was a very popular composer with the communists. His general philosophy and so on did kind of agree with the communists."

Sir Charles Mackerras, photo: CTK

"I think maybe the Czech public was forced so often to accept the ideology of communist music and the fact Janacek was - in theory - near to that ideology, that now that communism is not popular in this country, people prefer the international repertoire, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Strauss and all that. I can understand that, because they never had that during the communist time."