Vegetable Market (Zelný trh) and Leoš Janáček

Janáček came here for musical instruments and inspiration

The lower part of the square is home to Reduta, the oldest theatre building in Central Europe. In 1767, a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart gave a concert there. One hundred years later, a young Leoš Janáček performed in operas with other boys from the Abbey of St Thomas. Later, Janáček would come to this busy marketplace to seek inspiration from the speech of the local stallholders. For many years, he wrote down excerpts from this speech together with scores, considering them ‘windows to the human soul’. He paid special attention to women from Líšeň (now one of Brno’s city districts), who sold mainly poultry. Their dialect inspired both him and Rudolf Těsnohlídek who used it in his famous Příhody lišky Bystroušky (The Cunning Little Vixen) stories.

In the upper part of the square, Josef Lídl’s company manufactured and sold musical instruments until 1904. As the director of an organ school, Janáček had his instruments manufactured there.