Zápisník zmizelého (1920)

In the introduction to his analysis of the Diary, Vogel briefly examines the content and characteristics of the text that inspired Janáček to put it to music. Vogel describes how Janáček seemed to have identified with the hero's youthful crisis after his first erotic experience. The composer appreciated the story's emotional power and immediacy, its psychological veracity, the story's setting in Valachia, and finally the whole mystery surrounding the narrator and perhaps hero of the poem. In his book, Vogel did not seriously question the poems' authenticity as a true story, or its attribution in Lidové noviny to an unknown and unspecified J.D., although for the sake of thoroughness Vogel mentions the theory of František Trávníček that the author might have been Jan Misárek-Slavičinský. Other names that would appear later in that regard were unknown to Vogel. Today, however, on the basis of evidence presented in Mikeska's biography of Kalda, we can consider the mystery of the story's author to have been solved. Vogel was correct in reporting that Janáček believed in the story of the disappearance of the village youth J.D., and thus the folk origin of the text. The balladic aspect of the story, its poetic metaphors, and its brevity are quite characteristic of folk poetry. The mix of dialect and colloquial Czech, occurring as a result of urban influences on rural speech, was a common phenomenon also observed by Janáček himself in his ethnographic research; it was used, for example, by librettists Gabriela Preissová in Jenůfa and Rudolf Těsnohlídek in Liška Bystrouška/The Cunning Little Vixen. The fact that Janáček was also deceived as to the origin of the text tends to be confirmed as he changed the title of the piece, originally Z péra samoukova (From the Pen of a Self-Taught Man), which carried the impression of having been supplied by its publisher, to Zápisník zmizelého/The Diary of One Who Disappeared. (According to Janáček, the composition was originally called Zápisník zmizelého a nezvěstného/The Diary of One Who Disappeared and Never Heard of Again, and it probably premiered under this title.) Now that the real author has been discovered, we know it was not in fact the "true story" of Janíček D., and its folk origin must be considered a myth. This would seem to mitigate a couple of Janáček's motivations for putting the piece to music (i.e., truthfulness and the author's anonymity), but the power and poetic beauty of the text and of its musical adaptation remain undiminished.