They include operas such as Káťa Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen, the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, two string quartets, and other chamber works.

After his death in 1928, Janáček's work was heavily promoted on the world opera stage by the Australian conductor Charles Mackerras, who also restored some of his compositions to their original, unrevised forms.

Leoš Janáček, son of schoolmaster Jiří Janacek and Amalie (née Grulichová) Janáčková, was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire) on 3 July 1854.

[5] In 1865, young Janáček enrolled as a ward of the foundation of the St Thomas's Abbey, Brno, where he took part in choral singing under Pavel Křížkovský and occasionally played the organ.

[14] Dissatisfied with his teachers (among them Oscar Paul and Leo Grill), and denied a studentship with Camille Saint-Saëns in Paris, Janáček moved on to the Vienna Conservatory, where from April to June 1880, he studied composition with Franz Krenn.

In the early months of 1887, he sharply criticized the comic opera The Bridegrooms, by Czech composer Karel Kovařovic, in a Hudební listy journal review: "Which melody stuck in your mind?

[23][24] From the early 1890s, Janáček led the mainstream of folklorist activity in Moravia and Silesia, using a repertoire of folk songs and dances in orchestral and piano arrangements.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Janáček composed choral church music including Otčenáš (Our Father, 1901), Constitues (1903) and Ave Maria (1904).

[33] In 1905, Janáček attended a demonstration in support of a Czech university in Brno, where the violent death of František Pavlík, a young joiner, at the hands of the police inspired his piano sonata, 1.

[34] The incident led him to further promote the anti-German and anti-Austrian ethos of the Russian Circle, which he had co-founded in 1897[35] and which would be officially banned by the Austrian police in 1915.

[42][43] Following the Prague première, he began a relationship with singer Gabriela Horváthová, which led to his wife Zdenka's attempted suicide and their "informal" divorce.

[48] In the early 1920s, Janáček completed his opera The Cunning Little Vixen, which had been inspired by a serialized novella by Rudolf Těsnohlídek in the newspaper Lidové noviny.

[51] The world première of Janáček's lyrical Concertino for piano, two violins, viola, clarinet, French horn and bassoon took place in Brno in 1926.

[53] In 1927 – the year of the Sinfonietta's first performances in New York, Berlin and Brno – he began to compose his final operatic work, From the House of the Dead, the third act of which would be found on his desk after his death.

[59] His married life, settled and calm in its early years, became increasingly tense and difficult following the death of his daughter, Olga, in 1903.

His musical assimilation of the rhythm, pitch contour and inflections of normal Czech speech (specifically Moravian dialects) helped create the very distinctive vocal melodies of his opera Jenůfa (1904), whose 1916 success in Prague was the turning point in his career.

[69][70] Moravian folk songs, compared with their Bohemian counterparts, are much freer and more irregular in their metrical and rhythmic structure, and more varied in their melodic intervals.

Janáček profoundly admired Tchaikovsky, and particularly appreciated his highly developed musical thought in connection with the use of Russian folk motifs.

He composed the rhapsody Taras Bulba (1918) to Gogol's short story, and five years later, in 1923, completed his first string quartet, inspired by Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata.

Two of his later operas were based on Russian themes: Káťa Kabanová, composed in 1921 to Alexander Ostrovsky's play The Storm, and his last work, From the House of the Dead, which transformed Dostoevsky's vision of the world into an exciting collective drama.

His opera Destiny was a response to another significant and famous work in contemporary Bohemia – Louise, by the French composer Gustave Charpentier.

[78] In his essays and books, Janáček examined various musical topics, forms, melody and harmony theories, dyad and triad chords, counterpoint (or "opora", meaning "support") and devoted himself to the study of the mental composition.

[92] Another important Czech musicologist, Zdeněk Nejedlý, a great admirer of Smetana and later a communist Minister of Culture, condemned Janáček as an author who could accumulate a lot of material, but was unable to do anything with it.

[101] The operas of his mature period, Jenůfa (1904), Káťa Kabanová (1921), The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), The Makropulos Affair (1926) and From the House of the Dead (after a novel by Dostoevsky and premièred posthumously in 1930) are considered his finest works.

Among his notable pupils were Jan Kunc, Václav Kaprál, Vilém Petrželka, Jaroslav Kvapil, Osvald Chlubna, Břetislav Bakala and Pavel Haas.

[107] The French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, who interpreted Janáček's operas and orchestral works, called his music surprisingly modern and fresh: "Its repetitive pulse varies through changes in rhythm, tone and direction."

He described his opera From the House of the Dead as "primitive, in the best sense, but also extremely strong, like the paintings of Léger, where the rudimentary character allows a very vigorous kind of expression".

[108] The Czech conductor, composer and writer Jaroslav Vogel wrote what was for a long time considered the standard biography of Janáček in 1958.

An animated cartoon version of The Cunning Little Vixen was made in 2003 by the BBC, with music performed by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and conducted by Kent Nagano.

[113] A re-arrangement of the opening of the Sinfonietta was used by the progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer for the song "Knife-Edge" on their 1970 debut album.