In prearation for the Bard Music Festival, I studied Janacek's original manuscript of Osud at the archives in Brno. I also spent a weekend in Luhacovice where Janacek was first inspired to write this opera.
The photos here are from the Janacek archives, a statue of Janacek in Luhacovice, and a Moravian folk ensemble that was playing in a restaurant near Janacek's summer home in Luhacovice. The experience that May in Brno and Luhacovice was so enchanting that it will leave a lasting impression on my memories of Osud. This was also one of the reasons I later decided to move to Brno, and now I have an apartment just down the street from the archives where Janacek's manuscripts are stored! :-)
In regard to these manuscripts, this is what Sir Charles Mackerras has said: "Janacek would go through the neatly-copied score, cross, rub and scratch things out, insert new things and generally revise it. But he often failed to notice mistakes made by his copyists, which is a major headache for every Janacek scholar. Sometimes the original autograph provides the answer by proving that it was the copyist who had got it wrong in the first place. Not surprising when you consider the atrociously badly-written originals."
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