Janáček: Years of a Life
Volume 1 (1854–1914)
The Lonely Blackbird
by John Tyrrell
Faber and Faber, London, 2006
xxxii, 971pp
ISBN-10: 0-571-17538-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-571-17538-3

John Tyrrell's biography of the Czech composer Leoš Janáček is the culmination of a life's work in the field. It stands upon his existing documentary studies of Janáček's operas and translations of other key sources and his examination of thousands of still unpublished letters and other documents in the Janáček archive in Brno. Altogether it provides the most detailed account of Janáček's life in any language and offers new views of Janáček as composer, writer, thinker and human being.

Volume 1, which goes up to the outbreak of the First World War and Janáček's sixtieth birthday in the summer of 1914, consists of twenty-nine chapters providing a straightforward chronological account of Janáček's life, and forty contextual chapters. These include chapters on Janáček as a teacher, theorist and ethnographer, and on his knowledge of opera and his relationship to influential works such as Charpentier's Louise and Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades. A special feature are the specially commissioned chapters on Janáček's health by Stephen Lock and on Janáček's finances by Jiří Zahrádka.