John Tyrrell
Musicologist who worked with Charles Mackerras to revive interest in the works of Leos Janácek
JOHN TYRRELL, who has died aged 76, was a musicologist whose work on Leos Janácek helped to bring the Czech composer’s music to the attention of anglophone audiences; he was also executive editor of the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001), the 29-volume encyclopedia of all things related to classical music.
Tyrrell was particularly associated with Janácek’s operas, tracing the autographed manuscripts and unravelling the many ways in which they had been “corrected” since the composer’s death in 1928. He worked closely with the conductor Charles Mackerras, a great champion of Janácek, writing the notes for Mackerras’s recordings of the operas.
There were two exhaustive volumes of biography, telling the reader everything from how Janácek got into trouble by mistakenly occupying a first-class railway compartment to explaining the astonishing surge in creativity that marked his seventh decade. Reviewing the second volume (subtitled Tsar of the Forests) in Opera magazine, David Pountney claimed that “it is and will surely remain for many years the bible on the 20th century’s greatest opera composer.”
Tyrrell also examined the role of women in Janácek’s life, notably Zdenka, his long-suffering wife, and Kamila Stösslová, the woman 40 years his junior with whom the composer became infatuated in his later years. His edited collection of Janácek’s letters to Stösslová, published in 2005, is entitled Intimate Letters, the subtitle of Janácek’s second string quartet.
Seven years earlier Tyrrell had edited Zdenka’s memoirs, which are unusual in that few composers’ widows write a memoir, a notable exception being Cosima Wagner’s adoring recollections of Richard that are in stark contrast with Zdenka’s harsh treatment of her husband. My Life with Janácek offered a fascinating insight into the composer’s change in attitude towards his wife after their marriage in 1881, particularly his flirtations with other women that caused her so much distress.
The memoir had been compiled by Marie Trkanová, Zdenka’s secretary, and two copies were languishing in the Janácek archive in Brno. Tyrrell explained in his introduction how the work landed in his hands after he met an English antiquarian book dealer who had in his possession a carbon copy of the original. “Although the copies in the Janácek archive had apparently been acquired with the condition that they should not be published, this did not apply to the copy I owned,” he recalled.
John Tyrrell was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, on August 17 1942, and studied for his Bmus at the university of Cape Town. There he had a Czech acquaintance who introduced him to the language. He came to Britain in 1964 and that summer saw his first performance of Janácek’s last opera, From the House of the Dead, given by the Prague National Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival. “It gripped me by the throat and has done ever since,” he recalled, adding that a year later he saw it again at Sadler’s Wells conducted by Mackerras.
At Oxford in the mid-1960s his doctoral study on Janácek’s stylistic development as an operatic composer was supervised by Edmund Rubbra. During that time he spent an extensive period at the Janácek archive, editing the composer’s operas including Jenufa and Kát’a Kabanová. He discovered how the composer had drawn his own staves on plain paper rather than using printed manuscript paper, possibly to remove the temptation to fill in empty lines with too much music.
He was associate editor at The Musical Times and had an early stint working on Grove before joining the University of Nottingham in 1976 as a lecturer. He was appointed professor in 1996, the same year in which he returned to Grove as deputy editor, becoming executive editor in 1997. Having seen that work through to publication he was appointed to a research fellowship at Cardiff University in 2000. When that ended he became once again a full-time professor.
Although Tyrrell said, in a typically quirky mixed metaphor, that he would “hang up his computer” after completing the Janácek biography, he did nothing of the sort. There was a critical edition of From the House of the Dead, which was performed by Welsh National Opera a year ago. Meanwhile, in 2015 Tyrrell and his fellow musicologist Nigel Simeone collaborated on a memorial volume for Mackerras, who had died in 2010.
John Tyrrell is survived by his partner, Jim Friedman, who is credited in many of Tyrrell’s books for his “constant support”. John Tyrrell, born August 17 1942, died October 4 2018