Janacek's Osud, or ''Fate'', has had an odd career, which is not surprising in view of the oddity of the opera. The plot moves in and out of reality, with episodes from Janacek's life and that of a woman he met in a spa town combining to form a curious amalgam of reality and fantasy; and the climax is the unfinished opera which the composer-hero is writing on the events that have taken place earlier, and which he is playing to his students. It sounds like material for a Hoffmann story; but the atmosphere could not be more different. Instead of a mysterious collusion between reality and fantasy, there is a somewhat jerky movement brought about by a mixture of an uncertain original idea and some muddled revisions. For years even the Czechs were baffled about what to do with the work. It was eventually given its first performance in Brno in 1958, in the course of a sequence of all Janacek's operas that was one of the most exciting musical experiences of my life. The version then devised involved some messing about with flashbacks; but whatever is done has to paper over some cracks. John Tyrrell is surely right, in his expert notes to the present set, to suggest that ''a recorded performance is probably the ideal way of enjoying some of Janacek's most incandescent music''.
Incandescent it certainly is, even by Janacek's standards. The opening scene shows a busy promenade, with students, schoolgirls, an old Slovak woman, a Major's wife, a poet, many others, passing to and fro and chattering among themselves. The band plays. They are happily enjoying the sunshine. It is, on the face of it, a conventional opening chorus setting a scene; but the force of Janacek's music lifts it on to the level of an ecstatic outburst in praise of sun and freedom and life and pleasure. It must be an extraordinarily hard section to play, especially with regard to balance; and it is much to the credit of Sir Charles Mackerras and the tactful engineers that this glorious opening sounds so natural. The orchestral playing is brilliant, and recorded brilliantly but without garishness; and the voices are placed so that all the words are clear (in a translation by Rodney Blumer that skilfully turns the problems of Czech accentuation to colloquial English effect).
The myriad small parts are vividly taken, building up the elaborate scenes of conversation or rehearsal or students gathered round a piano with an easy give and take that belies the care that has to go into such effects. Dominating the opera, of course, is the Janacek-figure of the composer Zivny (his name is connected to the Czech word for ''alive''). Philip Langridge handles with great sensitivity the long Act 1 monologue, and is in turn answered by beautiful singing from Helen Field, as Mila replies with her narrative of how she watched him adoringly and was forced to part from him. But this mood is skilfully sustained by both artists across the length of the opera; for Janacek, as it were, composes it out from the exultant start to the sorrowful ending. Langridge is not alone in making Janacek's tricky phrases sound like the natural flowering of speech into a lyrical expression of feeling; but he dominates the work by sheer artistry, as Zivny should.
As well as a helpful background note in English, French and German by Dr Tyrrell, who makes no bones about the opera's problems but warmly expounds its strengths, there is a trilingual synopsis and the complete English text. No one who loves Janacek's music should miss this splendid contribution from our English Janacekians, Sir Charles and Philip Langridge above all. I, for one, had quite forgotten what a strong piece Osud is, or can be when it is performed like this.'