The forgotten correspondence between two friends: Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) and Emerik Beran (1868-1940)

Abstract

Bohemia and Moravia were sending their musically talented sons into the world for nearly three hundred years thereby earning the title of Europe's conservatorium. A wave of Czech musicians also reached Slovenia in the second half of the 19th century, where they decisively contributed to the growth of the young Slovene musical culture as composers, music performers and music pedagogues and thereby, to the passage from the musically-inspired dilettantism into a gradual high quality and quantity increase in the musical work in Slovenia. One of the latter is certainly Emerik Beran, who maintained close and friendly contacts with his former professor at the Brno Organ School, Leoš Janáček, through letters of correspondence of a private nature, even after moving from his birth town Brno in Moravia to Maribor in Slovenia in 1898. The correspondence between Janáček and Beran gives us valuable insight into their musical ambitions, relations to other colleagues, the functioning of musical institutions and the cultural and political climate of those times. Janáček and Beran maintained very good relations throughout their letter-exchange period (from 1890 to 1928) and their correspondence provides evidence of several instances of mutual generosity as they helped each other in their careers.