Leoš Janáček was born on July 3, 1854. Janáček began composing in his late teens, but most of his major works were composed in the last decade of his life.
Janáček was born in Hukvaldy, a small village in Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire, now part of the Czech Republic). His father was a schoolteacher who hoped that Janáček would follow in his footsteps, but it soon became clear that young Leoš was unusually talented in music. He spent his teenage years as a ward of the Catholic Church in Brno, studying singing, organ, and piano. As a young man, Janáček moved to Prague to further his studies; unable to afford a piano, he drew a keyboard on his desk and practiced there.
Janáček returned to Brno in 1876. He would continue his studies sporadically over the next decade, supporting himself as a music teacher and choral conductor. By the mid-1880s, Janáček had begun to focus seriously on composition. He also took a serious interest in studying and collecting Czech folk music. That research was important enough to him that he eventually purchased an early Edison phonograph, which he used to record the songs and stories that were shared with him.
Janáček's first real success as a composer came in 1904, with the premiere of his opera Jenůfa. It was performed in Brno, but Janáček was frustrated that he could not get a performance in Prague, where he hoped the piece might get more international attention. Prague would not get to hear the opera until 1916, and it was as well received as Janáček had hoped it would be.
Janáček's romantic life would be an important part of his final years. He and his wife, Zdenka, never had a very happy marriage, and it was even tenser after the death in 1903 of their daughter, Olga. In 1916, after Janáček's indiscreet flirtation with a young soprano, Zdenka attempted suicide. Janáček asked for a divorce; Zdenka wanted to avoid the public scandal and convinced him to accept an "informal" divorce. From that point on, the couple shared a home, but lived essentially separate lives.
In 1917, Janáček met Kamila Stösslová. She was already married, 40 years younger than he, and showed no romantic interest in him at all, but he fell in love with her so intensely as to border on obsession. Over the last decade of his life, he wrote more than 700 letters to Stösslová; they are filled with an intense passion that is entirely absent from the surviving letters between Janáček and his wife.
And in that same decade, Janáček would write most of the masterpieces for which he is best known today. He identified Stösslová as the inspiration for the heroines of three of his operas – Katya Kabanova (1921), The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), and The Makropoulos Affair (1926) – and for his second string quartet, "Intimate Letters," which Janáček described as his "manifesto on love."
Another important influence on Janáček's music in his final decade was his love of Russian literature. His orchestral rhapsody Taras Bulba (1918) was inspired by Nikolai Gogol's novel (e-book | print); the opera From the House of the Dead (1927) was based on the Dostoevsky novel (e-book | print); and his first string quartet, "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1923), was inspired by Tolstoy's novella (e-book | print).
Other important works from Janáček's final decade are his festive orchestral Sinfonietta (1926) and the large choral work Glagolitic Mass (1926), written in Old Church Slavonic, an ancient language which bears somewhat the same relationship to Russian, Czech and other modern Slavic languages that Latin does to English, German and other modern Indo-European languages.
Janáček's style is strongly influenced by his interest in Czech folk music, his meters and rhythms tend to be jagged and irregular, especially in his operas, where he attempts to make his characters' singing match the rhythms of spoken Czech. His music often includes repeated, short accompaniment motifs; the conductor and Janáček scholar Charles Mackerras has referred to him as "the first minimalist composer." He often combines instruments in unexpected ways, so much so that much of his work was re-orchestrated by conductors who thought he must have made mistakes, and not heard as Janáček intended it until the original versions were restored by music historians in the second half of the 20th century. You get a sense of Janáček's unusual instrumentation in his Capriccio, a chamber work for piano left hand, flute, two trumpets, three trombones, and tenor tuba.
In addition to the pieces linked above, more of Janáček's music is available for streaming at Freegal and Hoopla.