Janácek composed his great wind sextet Mladi in 1924 in the month of his 70th birthday. Also referred to as the youth sextet, the work figured into the period between the Piano Concertino and the orchestral Danube.

This was clearly a splendid time in the life of the composer. With many recent successes, a celebration was held in Janácek's honor to crown the septuagenarian's accomplishments. Performances of his music were undertaken. Even a bust of the composer was unveiled in his native Moravia. Having thus achieved a sort of celebrity status, Janácek produced the highly original sextet for winds best known as Mladi, Youth, a term that has been taken different ways.

Youth, as Janácek defined it (in this context), referred to childhood memories, with particular emphasis on the third movement of the sextet which recalls a tune the composer heard as a boy. A broader meaning of youth in a discussion about Janácek refers us to the last 10 or so years of the composer's life, wherein his most inspired and youthfully inspired work unfolded.

Clearly one of his finest chamber works, the score of Mladi bubbles forth with great enthusiasm and fresh ideas. Interestingly, when Janácek was working on the sextet, he was also at work on The Makropoulos Case, an opera that features a young-looking but chronologically ancient heroine. So, the theme of youth and regeneration appears to figure in Janácek's work, either as a programmatic aside or as a central theme, as in one of his stage productions.

The sextet was arranged for the usual woodwind quintet, but with the bass clarinet added. There are four contrasting movements. In the third movement (con moto), the flute player switches over to the piccolo and plays the March of the Blueboys. Janácek had originally sketched this movement out several weeks before tackling the sextet, having arranged it for piccolo and piano. The origin of this march is uncertain. Biographer Malcolm Rayment once wrote that the term blue boys referred to a group of boy choristers at a monastery in Brno, a monastery the young Janácek sang at. Guy Erismann, in writing on Mladi, reported that the march has its origin with a Prussian Army band. Apparently, the Prussians had occupied Brno in 1866; Janácek would have been twelve years old at the time, old enough to remember the melody.

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