A late and furious flowering

Sceptical readers will immediately wonder whether 14 years of any composer’s life really deserve over 1,000 pages of biographical examination. The second volume of John Tyrell’s Janacek certainly goes into events in extraordinary detail — I had a definite sense of foreboding of things to come when, on page 361, it is reported that in December 1919, ‘a button flew off [Janacek’s] fur coat so that he had to have another sewn on’. If we agree that the significance of the life dictates the substance of the biography, however, it seems perfectly reasonable. The last decade of Janacek’s life is truly one of the most astonishing and important periods in musical history. There is nothing that prepares us for it, and we are still coming to terms with it.

Reviewing the first volume of Tyrell’s biography, I said that it really was very much like the life of a small-town music teacher of no particular interest.