This contextual study of Janácek's operas reveals the composer's creative responses to a wide range of Czech and non-Czech traditions.

The first thorough theoretical study of Janácek's compositions, focusing on motivic and rhythmic structure and identifying elements that give the music coherence, character, and interest.

In the last decade of his life, starting when he was a sixty-two-year old curmudgeon in a backwater Slavic country, Czech composer Leo Jancek produced operas and chamber music that would stun the music world, one masterpiece on top of another. In Janceks Eternal Love, author George M. Cummins III presents a biography focusing on the life of Jancek (1854-1928) based on original Czech sources, with special attention to detailed analysis of the last four operas and biographical focus on the composers relationship with his muse, Kamila Stsslov. In 1916, Jancek was known only as a local ethnographer specializing in folk music, but he acquired international fame with the operas and chamber pieces he composed after the age of sixty-two until his death at seventy-four. Cumminswith both a personal and scholarly knowledge of Czech language, history, and culturenarrates a personal biography that includes detailed, insightful descriptions of Janceks compositions.

Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s most famous opera, Jenůfa is a harrowing tale of forbidden love, abandonment, hypocrisy, desperation, and tragic infanticide. As today’s second most frequently performed Czech opera (following Dvorák’s Rusalka), Jenůfa holds a prominent place in international opera repertoire and continues to draw the attention of new audiences. Drawing on both scholarly studies and production experience, Timothy Cheek presents an original English-language translation of the original Czech libretto. As with the first two books in the Janáček Opera Libretti series (Příhody lišky Bystroušky, The Cunning Little Vixen and Kát’a Kabanová), this volume consists of two parts. Part One gives background on the opera, a discussion about the various voice types and roles, Janáček’s style and Czech performance traditions, Czech folk costumes, and a summary of Czech pronunciation and inflection. Part Two provides the original Czech libretto, word-for-word English translations, idiomatic English translations, IPA for pronunciation of the Czech, translations of the stage directions, and notes about certain words in Czech dialect. As a valuable resource not only for performers and directors, but also historians and opera lovers, this book brings new accessibility to a beloved and timeless opera.

Demonstrates the profound impact of The Poems of Ossian on composers of the Romantic Era and later: Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Massenet, and many others. Beyond Fingal's Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination is the first study in English of musical compositions inspired by the poems published in the 1760s and attributed to a purported ancient Scottish bard named Ossian. From around 1780 onwards, the poems stimulated poets, artists, and composers in Europe as well as North America to break away from the formality of the Enlightenment. The admiration for Ossian's poems -shared by Napoleon, Goethe, and Thomas Jefferson - was an important stimulus in the development of Romanticism and the music that was a central part of it. More important still was the view of the German cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who saw past the controversy over the poems' authenticity to the traditional elements in these heroic poems and their mood of lament. James Porter's long-awaited book traces the traditional sources used by James Macpherson for his epoch-making prose poems and examines crucial works by composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Massenet. Many other relatively unknown composers were also moved to write operas, cantatas, songs, and instrumental pieces, some of which have proven to be powerfully evocative and well worth performing and recording.

As waves of composers migrated from Russia in the 20th century, they grappled with the complex struggle between their own traditions and those of their adopted homes. Russian Composers Abroad explores the self-identity of these émigrés, especially those who left from the 1970s on, and how aspects of their diasporic identities played out in their music. Elena Dubinets provides a journey through the complexities of identity formation and cultural production under globalization and migration, elucidating sociological perspectives of the post-Soviet world that have caused changes in composers' outlooks, strategies, and rankings. Russian Composers Abroad is an illuminating study of creative ideas that are often shaped by the exigencies of financing and advancement rather than just by the vision of the creators and the demands of the public.

Timothy Cheek’s revised edition of Singing in Czech: A Guide to Czech Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire, with its accompanying audio accessible online, builds on the original pioneering work of 2001 that set “a new and very welcome high standard for teaching lyric diction,” according to Notes: The Journal of the Music Library Association. It offers users updated information, important clarifications, and expanded repertoire in a more accessible, easier to use format. Singing in Czech is divided into two parts. Using IPA, the first part takes the reader systematically through each sound of the Czech language, enhanced by recordings of native Czech opera singers. Chapters cover the Czech vowels, consonants, rules of assimilation, approaches to singing double consonants, stress and length, Moravian dialect, and an introduction to singing in Slovak. Fine points of formal pronunciation have been clarified in this revised edition. In the second part, Cheek offers a thorough overview of Czech art song, expanded from the first edition. Texts to major song literature and opera excerpts by Smetana, Dvořák, Janáček, Martinů, and Haas, with timings, editions, word-for-word translations, idiomatic translations, and IPA transcriptions follow. In this revision, Cheek has included additional cycles by Dvořák and Martinů, and two new chapters on Czech female composers Vítězslava Kaprálová and Sylvie Bodorová. This revised edition of Singing in Czech is useful for all those who are interested and engaged in the performance of the rich Czech vocal repertoire.