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Collection / Songbook - Sheet Music

SKU: PA.H07977

Composed by Svatava Pribánová. Book. With Publication language: Czech. Editio Baerenreiter Praha #H07977. Published by Editio Baerenreiter Praha (PA.H07977).

ISBN 9788086385365. 20.7 x 12.5 cm inches.

This edition of family correspondence between Leos Janacek and his wife Zdenka and daughter Olga contains 627 letters, correspondence cards, postcards and telegrams. These do not include the letters in German which Janacek wrote to young Zdenka Schulzova while he was studying in Leipzig and Vienna in the years 1879 to 1880 (these were published by Supraphon back in 1968 under the title Letters to Zdenka). The letters therefore begin with the year 1893, other earlier letters did not survive. The letters appeared chronologically, and are thus also numbered. The edition reprints correspondence from the collection in the Janacek archive in the music history department of the Moravian Regional Museum where unfortunately (probably the result of measures taken by Janacek's wife herself) all of Zdenka's letters are missing, except for those written for her by her brother Leo Schulz during the period of her illness in 1909, and postcards. This collection of written communications - the majority published for the first time - contains, apart from transcriptions of their texts, editor's notes explaining lesser known facts relating to their content, also brief biographies of all persons mentioned in the correspondence, translations of passages in other languages (Janacek often wrote in Russian, especially to his daughter Olga), bibliographical information about deposited materials and, of course, indexes of names and Janacek's works. His compositional endeavours, his musical world, concerts, operas, problems with publishers, his spa treatments, journeys, pupils, colleagues, siblings, personal details, Hukvaldy - all these have survived in correspondence as an authentic testimony of Janacek's life. A testimony such as this can be confronted with everything contained in the memoirs and recollections of others, including literature concerning Janacek himself.