Leos Janacek

By Ray Ellsworth

In 1951, the Holland Summer Festival at Amsterdam mounted a performance of an opera with the rather odd name of “Jenufa,” by a Czech composer, Leos Janacek, of whom few people outside Central Europe who were not musicologists had ever heard.

The performance startled the hard-boiled, novelty-ridden music-festival world. For the first time in years, people were saying that they had heard a contemporary opera which was really unique, utterly unlike anything they had heard before—musically original and psychologically complex, yet vividly dramatic and emotionally moving. The opera was repeated in succeeding years at the Holland Festival and joined by other Janacek works—the operas “Katya Kabanova” and “From the House of the Dead,” the dramatic song-cycle “The Diary of One Who Disappeared” and these too were found to be highly unusual, strange and powerful pieces. Other cities were soon having successes with Janacek operas, recordings began to appear, and the interest thus aroused continues to spread today. Clearly, this Janacek seemed a contemporary master to be welcomed onto the scene without delay. The grateful acclaim of enthusiastic audiences awaited him, and critical recognition as well.

However, the acclaim and the recognition, while welcome, have been a little bit late. This new international sensation, this “contemporary” master bas been dead for more than a quarter of a century, and the work, “Jenufa,” which startled the modern world with its contemporary freshness in 1951, had been written almost 50 years before.

Delay in recognition is nothing new in music. It certainly was nothing new in the life of Leos Janacek. He was in his 60s before even his own countrymen knew him as anything more than a conservatory director who sometimes composed, as directors of conservatories will. The conservatory was his own, which he had founded in 1881 as a rock against the circumstance of having been born the son of a village schoolmaster with 12 other children, and of having been born a Czech in a Germanized world. For both purposes it proved serviceable, for with it he could engage quietly in his bitter, 40-year struggle for recognition as a composer without starving to death, and at the same time teach musical treason against the Hapsburgs and the German dominated Classic-Romantic tradition.

Janacek was born on July 3, 1854, in the village of Hukvaldy, in northern Moravia near the Polish border, where the peasants spoke Lachian, a mixed Czech and Polish. The place is a picture-post-card spot of age, beauty, and rural remoteness. “The silence falls from each tree to the ground,” Janacek wrote of it fondly. He got his musical education from his father; from an Augustine monastery near Brno (at that time, under the Hapsburgs, called Brunn), which taught talented children free (and at the monastery from a remarkable priest, one Father Pavel Krizkovsky, who was passionate about the local Moravian folk music); from the Teachers’ Training College at Brno; from a dramatic near-starvation year at the Prague Organ School, where he completed the four-year course in one; and later, briefly and very unhappily, from Leipzig and Vienna. In Prague he once got himself suspended by calling attention to the dust which had gathered on the teaching methods, and in Vienna he pointedly slept through his classes. Janacek and the Teutonic tradition did not get along from the start, but he needed it to survive at all, and there was nothing else. Once he bad paid it his respects, he settled in Brno, started his conservatory, and did his best to get it out of his own system and out of the heads of his pupils.

This was not easy. The Germans were everywhere, in art and in life. Even the greatest of Czech nationalist composers, Bedrich Smetana, had had to lean heavily on the standard traditions for method, whatever he used for material; and Antonin Dvorak, Janacek’s older contemporary, was following the same path. Along with Father Krizkovsky, these composers were Janacek’s major influences. And his only musical influences. In a New York Times interview by Olin Downes, written in the 1920s, at the height of Janacek’s first brief moment of fame for “Jenufa,” he was asked who had influenced him. “No one!” he replied sturdily. And with these early exceptions, it seems to have been true. Even these influences did not seem to go very deep (except Krizkovsky’s passion for folk music); but they did, along with his German training, manage to keep the music he wrote during the first decade of his creative life—roughly from 1875 to 1887—from being especially remarkable in any way.

This is not to say that these early works are negligible. The early choral pieces, the Suite for String Orchestra, the “Romance” for Violin, the piano variations, and his first attempt at an opera, the hero-historical “Sarka,” reveal a genuine composer at work, and to people who read scores with a magnifying glass, also reveal wayward tendencies in the handling of vocal material indicative of things to come. Janacek’s outwardly even-tenored life at his Brno Conservatory covered not only a struggle, which he mostly lost, for recognition as a composer but an intense inner struggle for a style of his own, totally free from any Germanizations.

And somewhere in the late 1880s, he began to find it. With the appearance of his set of six “Lach Dances” of 1889-91, we begin to get a glimpse of it applied instrumentally. The “Lach Dances,” unlike Dvorak’s “Slavonic Dances” (which inspired them), were not developed Germanically, into semi-symphonic compositions, but presented with stubborn honesty, almost bare. With the appearance in 1903 of his third opera, “Jeji Pastorkyna” (“Her Foster Daughter”), better known as “Jenufa,” we get the culmination of this struggle.

The operas which fllowed, and most of the other music as well (though Janacek had moments of regression into romanticism, as in the 1918 “Taras Bulba,” for orchestra), are simply refinements of and variations on the principles underlying “Jenufa.” These refinements might be used to ends of great dramatic intensity, as in “Katya Kabanova,” “The Makropulos Affair” and “From the House of the Dead,” where they reach a terrifying virtuosity; or be used to ends of whimsy, gentle humor, and warming philosophy, as in the animal opera “The Cunning Little Vixen.” Or they could be used to effect a remarkably cutting satire, as in the two-part opera “Mr. Broucek’s (Mr. Beetle’s) Excursions,” which deals with a typical Prague burgher’s love for material things, even in romantic, story-book surroundings. The style proved flexible enough to produce non-vocal music having the same validity and originality—something not achieved by Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, or other primarily operatic composer—as in his two remarkable string quartets, the startling Concertino for piano and chamber group, and the powerful Sinfonietta. Somewhere in the late 1880s, Janacek found for himself a musical voice utterly his own, and one capable of startling with its freshness and contemporary feeling the blasé world of the 1950s—and beyond.

Janacek’s road to this achievement lay through the most ruthless discard of any but his most genuine instincts and predispositions. Born without wealth, full of a certain Bantam-cock vanity, Janacek had a need for fame almost as much as a starving man has for food. Moreover, the means to the fame he craved lay to his hand: he was a bundle of valid artistic gifts—composer, critic, conductor, pianist, organist, linguist, teacher. He even had a literary flair, and might have made a first-rate dramatist. Any of these paths could have brought him fame and material wealth far quicker than the path he chose. But his brushes with the outside world of diplomacy and compromise at Leipzig, Vienna and Prague—and even in his native city as conductor and administrator—had shown him how temperamentally ill-suited he was for public life and anything requiring patience on a small scale. (Patience on an epic scale was more in his line.) Despite the success of his school, for instance, Janacek was a bad teacher. With abundant dark hair and remarkable dark eyes, he was a handsome little man, beautifully proportioned in his youth and rather minutely majestic in his old age, the whole enhanced by the bristling imperial he affected, but aware of his size, always on the defensive, brusk, violent, even volcanic on occasion. Gifted with lightning intelligence, he was impatient of its lack in others, be the person a recalcitrant student or a slow-witted bureaucrat. He frightened people, pounding his desk, flashing his eyes, stalking out of classes. He defied the world every day. But what he taught and lived was magnificent. Aim, he told his students, at “the turbulent center” of emotion, find the distinctive pattern of folk speech, and dare to independence. Other paths to fame, whatever his gifts, were closed to him by his passionate honesty and stubborn belief in his perceptions. Only lonely composition remained, where he could let the furies drain from his pen to speak over the heads of his contemporaries directly to the world beyond.

He was, of course,.a patriot—so fierce a patriot that his father-in-law once threatened him with court action, denouncing his nationalism as being so fanatic as to border on madness. His favorite term for the musical authorities in Austria was “those hangmen in Vienna.” In those final decades of the Hapsburg tyranny, a tyranny which went back to the “Battle of White Mountain” in 1620, perhaps a little madness was necessary. The emergence of a viable Czech culture was synonymous with the emergence of Czech freedom. And it was this which probably had the most profound effect on Janacek’s career as a composer. Smetana and Dvorak had begun the battle. The land was full of composers eager to take a place beside them, none of whom burned with a purer flame than Janacek.

He thought his best hope of gaining such a place was by getting as close as possible to the Czech people. The Moravian folk music, largely unexplored until Janacek’s time (Smetana and Dvorak used Bohemian folk music), was a logical starting place for this. Janacek plunged into folksong studies, and with Frantisek Bartos, a fellow composer, did research almost as monumental as that of Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. But for Janacek the songs alone were not enough. He thought the soul of any people could be caught in the rhythms and emotional intensities of their speech, and that by catching the particular rhythms of Czech and Lachian speech he could express the soul of his people in art. “I listened furtively to the speech of passers-by,” he wrote, “observed them. I took note of . . . society, the times . . . I felt every inflection in melodic statements . . . .” “ He noted nature sounds, too, and even the “intensities” of silence, for, as he said, it was all a part of man’s life and God’s world. He also entertained some other theories, such as those he derived from the German scientist Helmholtz concerning acoustical “periods of reverberation” and the linking of tones, but his speech-rhythm theories were the basis of his art.

The intensity of his patriotism had another result. In driving him away from all things German, it drove him toward all things Russian. He made three trips to Russia, spoke the language of Tolstoy, Ostrovsky and Dostoyevsky, and drew several of his most significant compositions directly from their work—”Katya Kabanova” from Ostrovsky’s “The Storm,” “From the House of the Dead” from the Dostoyevsky novel, and his First String Quartet, which he entitled “The Kreutzer Sonata,” from Tolstoy. His rejection of the West was never total—his German training and his common sense prevented that—but his identification with the Russian East was nevertheless deep and certainly the second most profound influence on his compositional life. Nor can it be said to be only the result of his patriotism. He was distrustful of all abstraction (he liked Beethoven, for instance, and disliked Mozart), and the Russian humanists simply struck the note of commitment to humanity which was part of his own make-up.

It is curious to note that Janacek’s debt to Russia was almost wholly literary and spiritual rather than musical. He admired Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein, and also Chopin, whose music he said he studied “keenly,” but these composers, with the possible exception of Rubinstein, are not reflected in his music. Mussorgsky, the one composer with whom he had the most in common—indeed, duplicated in the realm of theory—he seems not to have heard at all until he was in his 70s. In view of Janacek’s wide reading and deep identification with Russia, his complete lack of knowledge for so long concerning Mussorgsky is indeed strange.

Janacek was in his 60s when “Jenufa,” begun in 1894 and completed in 1903, was finally produced at the National Theater in Prague on May 25, 1916, to bring him his first taste of national recognition and, despite the very troubled times, his first and relatively brief moment in the international sun. “Jenufa” was produced in Vienna in 1918, and in New York at the Metropolitan during the 1924-25 season, with Maria Jeritza singing the title role in both productions. The composer’s remaining years were spent basking in the light of that success and, respected as a local master, producing the works which followed. He visited England, where he heard the applause “refuse to stop” when his Concertina was played, taught a master class in composition at Prague University, saw his small Brno Conservatory, now grown large and famous, accepted as a state institution under the government of a free Czechoslovak Republic. He had his rewards and satisfactions, though they were less than he deserved and late in coming, But there had been tragedy, too. He had lost both his children, his son Vladimir at the age of two, and his greatly beloved, beautiful daughter Olga at the age of 20. He was not a bitter old man, however, and displayed a zest for life up to the very moment of his death, which came with dramatic suddenness, accompanied by an ironic note worthy of one of his own operas.

Though he disliked Mozart, Janacek acknowledged him a great master. On April 7, 1928, Janacek paid a visit to the Bertramka villa in Prague where Mozart had at one time stayed. In one of the rooms was a bell which had a legend attached to it that anyone who tried to ring the bell would not live out the year. It is said that Janacek mockingly rang the bell to show his disbelief in such things. In August, 1928, the composer took his usual vacation at his beloved Hukvaldy. He appeared in his usual robust health and ready-for-battle vitality. While walking, however, he caught a summer cold, which developed rapidly into pneumonia. Within the week he was dead, at 74, in the hospital at Ostrava. The date was August 12, 1928. He had lived out less than six months of the Mozart prophecy.