JANÁCEK, Leoš.

Zápisník zmizelého. Složil pro tenor, alt a tri ženské hlasy s pruvodem piana [The Diary of One Who Disappeared. For tenor and alto soli, and three women's voices, with piano accompaniment] ...

Brno, Pazdírek, 1921. 4to, pp. 59, [1], with 6 pp. libretto, in Czech, German (tr. Max Brod), and French; inscribed by Janácek on the title; musical MS additions in pencil to pp. 58–9 and on the final blank (dated 1932); contemporary cloth, spine lettered gilt, extremities rubbed, spine worn at foot, original illustrated wrapper laid down to front cover. First edition of the song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared, inscribed apparently on the day of publication by the composer. The work was inspired by Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman who infatuated the 63-year-old composer after he met her on holiday in the summer of 1917. The text itself, Seamus Heaney writes, is ‘a sequence of poems which the composer had encountered the previous year in Lidové noviny (“People’s Paper”, a daily published in the town of Brno where Janácek lived and taught). The poems have recently been identified as the work of Ozef Kalda, but they first appeared “From the Pen of a Self-Taught Man” and told a story of sexual infatuation, a dark-eyed gypsy and a haunted farmer’s boy, the standard fare of folk song. When, however, Kamila entered the field of musical force, a personal intensity began to give power from below the surface’ (introduction to Diary of One Who Vanished: a song cycle by Leoš Janácek in a new version by Seamus Heaney, 1999, translated for a new production by English National Opera). The female figure on the front cover of Zápisník zmizelého is meant as a likeness of Kamila, in accordance with Janácek’s wishes.The German translation of the poems appended to the score is by Max Brod, without whom ‘Janácek could never have achieved anything more than a local provincial reputation … Brod’s translations provided the channel for the international recognition of Janácek’s operas, because most of the important opera houses between the two world wars were German’ (Sir Charles Mackerras, foreward to Charles Susskind, Janácek and Brod, 1985). It is Brod’s second piece of translation for Janácek.Rare: OCLC locates 3 copies (Oxford, Columbia, Minneapolis Public Library). The work was issued concurrently as a miniature score.

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• ordernr.: F1050

• bookseller: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)