When the music gets angry

Besední dům changes the tone of the walk. In 1905 Janáček witnessed the violence surrounding demonstrations for a Czech university in Brno, during which the young worker František Pavlík was killed. The official Janáček portal connects the event directly with the piano work 1. X. 1905, 'From the Street'. That does not make the façade an illustration of the sonata. It makes the address a place where civic conflict entered Janáček's creative life. Pause here without turning the death into a dramatic prop. The useful question is simpler: what happens when a composer treats the sound and shock of his own city as material he cannot ignore?