Diary of One Who Vanished. A Song Cycle by Leoš Janáček.

First edition thus. Thin 8vo. Pp. [viii] + xxii. Bound in plain, stapled green card wraps in a bright yellow dustjacket, printed in red and black.

Signed to title page by Seamus Heaney.

Commissioned by the English National Opera, the text is a translation of Leos Janácek's song-cycle Zápisník zmizelého (1921), which was inspired by Ozef Kalda's folk-poems about a haunted farmer's boy who runs after a dark-eyed gypsy girl. Premiered at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on the 5th of October 1999, in a production by Deborah Warner, with tenor Ian Bostridge in the role of the smitten young man. Heaney's two-page introduction records his pleasure in completing the collaborative work: "the fine tuning began, the trading of rhymes and syllables, the give of speech and the take of song."

[Brandes & Durkan A73a]