Leos Janacek: A Master Czech Composer
Thomas J. Pniewski
One of the most surprising figures of twentieth-century music is the Czech composer Leos Janacek. At the 1916 premiere of his opera Jenufa in Prague, he was known--if at all--as a friendly teacher, organist, and choir director in Brno. The Prague audience was pleased by the unconventional music and awaited the bow of the young composer--and was astonished when a 62-year-old with a bush of gray hair appeared on the stage.
It was the beginning of a brilliant but brief career, stamped by a nearly mystical nationalism and inner discipline. Janacek produced a series of large-scaled musical masterpieces in a career essentially compressed into a dozen years. Born 150 years ago, Janacek worked long and hard, in obscurity for decades, before winning his rightful place alongside Dvorak and Smetana as a master creator of Czech music.
Janacek's home background would seem to have prepared him more for a career as a town musician than a major composer. The ninth of thirteen children, he was born on July 3, 1854, in the village of Hukvaldy to poor schoolteacher parents. His father taught him voice and piano, and, at ten years of age, he was sent to a monastery in Brno, the region's second-largest city, 150 miles from Prague. There he sang in the choir while acquiring his basic education. In his teens, when his voice changed and he left the monastery, he went to study for two years at the Prague Organ School. It was about this time that he met Dvorak, the preeminent figure in Czech music, who encouraged the young composer of some short organ and choir pieces. He spent a year of rigorous composition classes in Leipzig and a few months at the Vienna Conservatory before returning to Brno, where he would make his home for the rest of his life.
In 1881, he married one of his pupils, Zdenka Schulzova, only 15 years old at the time. Their marriage was not to be a happy one, and both their children died young. (This would doubtless be a factor in Janacek's late-life affair with Kamila Stasslova).
Janacek's Czechoslovakia, and the region of Moravia, was a part of the Austro- Hungarian empire, whose capital was the Vienna of Emperor Franz Josef (1830-1916). Franz Josef was crowned in 1848, the very year when revolutions rocked much of Europe; he saw the empire lose its holdings in Germany and Italy, and was determined to strengthen his control over what remained. German was the official language of government, higher education, and serious publishing, and political activism was suppressed. Nevertheless, the emperor was forced to make concessions to avoid bloody confrontations.
In the 1880s, the Czech language was introduced into schools, and the first national theater and museum were built. Franz Josef's own son, the Crown Prince Rudolf, was a liberal intent on modernizing the empire and who wrote activist newspaper articles under a pen name. Hopes for liberalization died, however, when Rudolf killed his young mistress and himself at Mayerling in 1889. Thereafter, only troubles beset Franz Josef as the empire unraveled. His wife was assassinated in 1897, and the remaining heir to the throne, Archduke Ferdinand, was assassinated in 1914, precipitating World War I. Franz Josef died in 1916, having outlived them all to witness the end of an era.
Janacek was an ardent nationalist, devoted to his language and culture, although an opposition to the empire's restrictions expressed itself in an interest in Russian music and literature. He had a familiarity with Western European music from his training as an organist and choir director, and from his regular opera reviews in Hudebni Listy, a music journal he founded. A colleague introduced him to Moravian folk music, and Janacek became fascinated with its melodies and language. Like Bartok--but decades earlier--he set about collecting and studying folk music, and began carrying a notebook in which he notated and analyzed the rhythms and inflections of Moravian peasant speech. Independently, he developed a theory that folk song originated from language itself. He articulated this theory in a preface to a collection of folk songs published in 1901.
The melodic curves of speech, he opined, are an expression of the complete organism and of all phases of its spiritual activities. They demonstrate whether a man is stupid or intelligent, sleepy or awake, tired or alert. They tell us whether he is a child or an old man, whether it is morning or evening, light or darkness, heat or frost, and disclose whether a person is alone or in company. The art of dramatic writing is to compose a melodic curve that will, as if by magic, reveal immediately a human being in one definite phase of his existence.
He began to carry a notebook, to jot down not just musical themes but also turns of phrase and expressive words. Below is an observation he made at a train station, with an analysis that is nearly rhapsodic, showing his identification with the Czech language.
"I envision a Czech name in its Czech version next to its German one. That was how the guard called out the name of the railway station.
(music example--station call)
How the different spirit of both languages shone through here. Our version is ranged in notes of a warm triad, D-flat/F/A-flat. The German version cut harshly and roughly in the same triad, with a dissonance of a seventh; it has crushed the third syllable and torn off the last one; it has ground into grumbling the sweetness of the first two. In the Czech version, you hear a song that winds along in equal lengths within a rainbow of colours; o-a-a-y ... "
In the following decade, he established himself as a teacher, choral conductor, and writer in the Brno region but also became interested in composition. He had already written an orchestral suite of dances based on folk song, and even an early opera, Sarka, which he was dissatisfied with and withdrew. Janacek wanted to combine his urge to compose with his interest in the Czech language and folk music, and determined to write operas that would reflect their national origin. Familiar with the "number opera," of narrative and arias (as in Mozart's Magic Flute), he abandoned it to create a more continuous musical texture. He integrated folk song and "speech melody" based on the natural rhythms and cadences of the Czech language.
From 1894, he worked at a new opera, Jenufa, which took him nearly a decade to complete as he struggled to create this new form. The final result proved quite successful in Brno, and he and his supporters lobbied to have it produced at the National Theater in Prague. The director refused, citing its unsavory plot, in line with the "social realism" of contemporary literature and drama. In it, a young girl, unmarried and abandoned, gives birth to a child whom her stepmother drowns. But politics were also at work; years earlier, Janacek had written a critical review of an opera by the National Theater's chief conductor. After a dozen years, in May 1916, Jenufa was finally produced in Prague. It created a sensation, breaking with the tradition established by Smetana fifty years earlier with his Bartered Bride (1866).
The resounding success of Jenufa was to change Janacek's life profoundly. The opera's triumph established him overnight as a celebrity, and an international composer. It also marked the beginning of his involvement with Kamila Stosslova, whom he met at a resort during a holiday trip. Kamilla was a vivacious Jewess with two sons who was locked in a loveless marriage; Janacek was 63, Stosslova only 25. The exact nature and extent of their relationship is not clear. Janacek's wife tolerated it, as did Stosslova's husband, and Stosslova herself, while flattered by the attentions of a celebrity, seems to have been somewhat indifferent to Janacek's music. But the passion Janacek felt is unquestioned, documented in the 700 letters that he fired off to her over the years.
This passion was united with a new nationalist spirit. The early years of the twentieth century in Czechoslovakia were dominated by Tomas Masaryk, an academic and political philosopher who campaigned for Czech independence, which was finally achieved in 1918 at the end of World War I. This could not help but have a strong and positive influence on a nationalist such as Janacek, and he composed a series of masterpieces in the glow of these two events.
In the field of opera, Janacek followed Jenufa with three of his finest works, all with librettos adapted by the composer himself and each with a special significance given his situation: Katya Kabanova (1921) tells of a young wife treated coldly by her husband. After a rendezvous with a young lover, she is consumed with remorse and drowns herself. Perhaps it is significant that the story ends with chilly gratitude expressed by the husband to the townspeople who retrieve the body.
The Cunning Little Vixen (1924) tells of a gamekeeper who captures and adopts a beautiful young fox, which comes to represent a young woman he had futilely courted in his youth. When the vixen escapes and is killed, he associates it with his unreturned love. In the end, he meets another vixen cub with the same appeal and realizes the longing for life he shares with it.
The Makropulos Affair (1926) is a surreal tale of a singer given the gift of indefinitely prolonged life. At the age of 337, she is tired of life and disappointed in love, and offers her secret to anyone who will destroy the formula and allow her to die. Janacek wrote a total of nine operas, with From the House of the Dead his crowning achievement. The opera has a libretto adapted from the book by Dostoevsky, based on a prisoner's experiences in a Siberian camp. It is a somber, upsetting piece, a collective drama with no main characters. This last work was only completed and premiered in 1930, after the composer's death.
While he produced an opera nearly every year after Jenufa's success, he continued to compose in other forms as well, the most important of which are discussed below. One of the most important and best-known is his Sinfonietta (1926), a wonderfully dramatic work orchestrated with massive blocks of sound, highlighting brass and percussion. It opens with fanfare-like signals for a dozen trumpets and timpani, betraying its origins in a commission for a Brno festival, and evolves into a full five-movement symphony. Next came his monumental Slavonic (Glagolithic) Mass (1926-27), which he conceived as a wedding Mass for himself and Kamila; he describes walking in countryside forests and experiencing the force of nature welling up into sound.
A work that appears regularly in concert programs is Janacek's Mladi (Youth), (1924) a wind sextet. This unusual ensemble capitalizes on the bright sounds of wind instruments to suggest freshness, the outdoors, and the energy of youth. Its rhythmic complexities and unusual timbres, however, connect Mladi with Janacek's relationship to folk music.
Two unorthodox string quartets, both written at the request of Czech violinist/composer Josef Suk, also come from the last decade of his life. The first, named the Kreutzer (1923), has a programmatic link to Tolstoy's novel of the same name. Published in 1890, the story treats a Russian noble so consumed by jealousy when he imagines his wife having an affair with her music partner that eventually causes him to torture and murder her. The book was censored or banned in many countries, including the United States, because of its violent content. Janacek's interest in Russian literature and his passion for Kamila inform this work and give it a personal program.
Soon after, he wrote his second quartet, entitled Intimate Pages (1928), an imagined chronicle of his affair with Kamila (linked with the viola) and including her giving birth to a son. These quartets are like nothing else in the literature, with jagged lines, emotional changes and contrasts, and an intensity that challenges both the technical competence of the players and their ability to project dramatic states.
Janacek's final years were both productive and satisfying. He had achieved worldwide recognition for both his music and his nation. His Prague organ school became a fully certified conservatory, and universities, including Prague's Masaryk University, honored him with degrees. He died suddenly at 74, at work correcting proofs of From the House of the Dead.
Style
Janacek created his own style, branching out from his experience with the Germanic tradition and immersion in Russian music and literature along lines suggested by his study of music in folk song, speech, and the sounds of nature and everyday life. While no single example can convey the originality and power of his style, an examination of a solo piano piece--They Chattered Like Swallows From Up the Overgrown Path--reveals some characteristic features.
The melody is composed of two motifs: an upward leap spanning an octave and a hook-like turn that returns to the tonic (home) note. It is a spare, open texture; the melody is repeated and becomes its own accompaniment. There is no development of this theme, no "spinning out" as one finds in Bach and Beethoven; repetition dominates, with the melody moved up and down, outlining new harmonies but with its main components clearly recognizable.
The accompaniment varies, unlike the chords or figures we find in Bach or Mozart. Janacek had observed the free texture of folk music, with sometimes three or four voices or themes combined, sometimes only one or two. As in vocal folk music, voices cross, alternating main theme and subordinate theme above and below each other.
His harmonies are rich--what one of this writer's teachers once called "Hollywood chords" that one encounters in folk and popular music from the 1900s. A chord is often held for a long time--through a repetition of the theme, maybe through several repetitions. When harmonies change, they do not follow the tonic-subdominant-dominant-tonic (I--IV--V--I) pattern of tradition but migrate in unpredictable ways for expressive purpose. As a pianist and organist himself, Janacek experimented with unusual progressions, moving beyond the world of earlier composers.
Janacek's musical structures are varied and loosely organized, unlike classic models. His works have no sonata-form movements, as in Mozart and Beethoven, in which several themes are presented, manipulated and varied, and then re-presented in something like their original form. Janacek does not use this psychologically satisfying journey of beginning-departure-return but rather creates a continuous ongoing stream.
Other aspects of his style not illustrated in this excerpt are equally individual. He favors wind instruments--often in high registers--and percussion, with startling effect. His choral writing is a perfect vehicle for the rhythmic rise and fall of spoken Czech.
Janacek has been well-served by the recording industry. His works have been promoted by top-notch Czech ensembles that have found in music a national note that simultaneously challenges their musicianship and connects them with the most "cutting edge" composers of the West. English conductor Charles Mackerras has been a forceful advocate of Janacek's music ever since first encountering it as a student in Prague in 1947. He has supervised recordings that represent Janacek's own craggy, original orchestrations (often altered by other conductors, much as Mussorgsky's unorthodox orchestrations were modified).
This year marks both the accession of the Czech Republic to the European Union, in May, and the 150th anniversary of the birth of the nation's most original and surprising contemporary voice. It is an auspicious inspiration to head to the record shops and Internet sites, to meet and learn more about this unusual, idiosyncratic, deeply national yet internationally modern composer.
Thomas J. Pniewski is director of cutural affairs at the
Kosciuszko Foundation in New York City.
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