Opera died with Puccini, people used to say – and it is certainly true that the great river of populist Italian works that had flowed for 300-odd years dried up suddenly with Puccini’s final works, Il Trittico of 1918 and Turandot, in 1924. Classical music was fragmenting – slipping from popular consciousness, never to return. And yet, even as Puccini fell silent, an elderly musician in distant Moravia in the new Czechoslovakia was getting into his stride as a creator of music dramas that, wholly new in conception, blended modernist intellect and fervidly romantic sensibility in music that was stunningly attractive in an entirely accessible way. The final years of the life of Leos Janacek (1854-1928) produced four operas written after the age of 65 – operas that, t