Leoš Janáček
“Lašské tance” (Lachian Dances)

“Beautiful is the landscape, gentle its people, and their dialect sounds soft as butter.” Leoš Janáček loved his native Moravia, the eastern part of today’s Czech Republic – a region long regarded, in contrast to the Austrian-bordering Bohemia, as particularly Slavic. Janáček was born in the northernmost corner of Moravia, in Lachia – just a few kilometres from Příbor (Freiberg), where Sigmund Freud was born two years later.

To recover from his work as a conductor and music teacher in Brno and Prague, Janáček would take long hikes through Moravian Slovakia, where he heard the songs and dances of the local people in their authentic setting. In the early 1880s, while still in his mid-thirties, he began to study folk music from a theoretical perspective as well. As Béla Bartók later did in Hungary and Romania, Janáček started to collect traditional peasant music systematically – and soon this began to colour his own compositions. The best-known work from this early period is Lašské tance (Lachian Dances), composed between 1889 and 1893. The premiere did not take place until 1924, and it was another four years before Janáček decided to publish the dances: “In praise of my homeland, my Lachia, this score full of nimble notes, full of playful, talkative and dreamy melodies, shall go out into the world.” With this, Janáček also created a memorial to the people who had accompanied him through that part of his life: “No witness of that summer night of wild dancing is alive today.”

Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances provided an unmistakable model in their spirited string rhythms and the lilting, folk-like charm of the woodwinds. Yet what distinguishes the young Janáček from the older Bohemian master is his passion – at times an almost nervous, feverish intensity – which he would later heighten in his operas to the point of dramatic agitation. Already, Janáček reveals himself as a born man of the theatre, giving his Lachian Dances the vivid atmosphere of a village tavern, which he recalled shortly before his death: “The room packed with girls, young lads, women holding their children in their arms. Body against body. The passion of the dance. The air oppressive and damp with fumes. Swift movements, faces sticky with sweat, shouting, whooping, the musicians’ sonorous frenzy.”

This physical, sensual energy pulses through Janáček’s transformation of Moravian wedding and work songs – especially in No. 3 (Dymák), the “Blacksmith’s Dance”, which sparks like glowing iron. The exuberant finale, the “Saw Dance” with its racing scales, is likewise driven by a whirl of motion. In this way, the Lachian Dances offer a striking foretaste of Janáček’s later, seething orchestral language – the same vivid sound world that would animate works such as Taras Bulba and his Sinfonietta.