800 Words: A New Tonality - A Playlist - Part 2

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881, Russian)

(God, this scared the bejeezus out of me as a kid…)

Mussorgsky occupies the same place in music history that Henri Rousseau does in art history. On the one hand, he was a self-taught dilettante, a learning disabled genius with ten times as many unfinished projects as completed ones. And yet who could blame him? Was there ever a musician who had less desire to look away from adult themes and terrifying truths? Because he had to rely on himself, Mussorgsky is the true father of an entirely new musical thinking. He had virtually no concept of development, that most German of all musical concepts, and after him, no composer needed to have such a concept if he so wished. After Mussorgsky, all that remained a requirement was the ability to redefine harmony, tone color, melody, and rhythm in whatever way a composer wished to maximize the vividness of his music. Composers before Mussorgsky took us part of the way to his path - certainly the “Music of the Future” of Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt, paves the way. Perhaps we even hear a move away from traditional development as early as certain passages of late Beethoven. But Mussorgsky was the moment of emancipation. Thanks to Mussorgsky, music became pure experience.

Mussorgsky Playlist:

Songs and Dances of Death (has there ever been more terrifying music?), The Nursery (One is about death, including the death of children, the other is about a child awakening to life and beginning its understand what it means to live), 
The Puppet Show (somewhat self explanatory...), 
Sunless (Mussorgsky takes on the dread subject of depression), 
Song of the Flea (probably his most famous, look at the text underneath the video, he could have been executed for it. There are many, many other wonderful songs he wrote, which are still nowhere near as known as they should be.), 
Pictures at an Exhibition for piano (If you know the Ravel orchestration, try to get it out of your head. No French perfume here, no smoothing out of the awkward moments with artificial orchestral effects. Just pure pianistic vividness and conjuration from the same world as his unforgettable songs, done by the greatest pianist of the recorded era in his most legendary performance.), 
Boris Godunov (on the other hand, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Vegasization of Boris Godunov did him an enormous service. We’ll never know what impact Chaliapin or Golovanov might have made with the original, but smoothening the rough edges allowed Mussorgsky’s acceptance to happen quickly enough for Boris to become the Great Russian Opera, and for performers to put the roughness back into the music that Mussorgsky would have loved), 
Khovanshchina (Mussorgsky’s ‘sequel’ to Boris. It might even better - greater intrigue, greater character development, still more brutal indictments of Russian politics and history.), 
Sorochinsky Fair (including the famous Night on Bald Mountain - not a great performance, but this was to be the comic antipode to Boris and Khovashchina. Some light comedy it would have been if it includes Night on Bald Mountain..., but the fragments, both complete and incomplete - the Shebalin completion is not to be found on youtube - show us the awful truth: Mussorgsky’s early death was a tragedy for opera second only to Mozart’s.) 
Night on Bald Mountain (here’s the original orchestration by Mussorgsky - a hundred times scarier and darker than Rimsky’s)

Leos Janacek (1854-1928, Moravian Czech)

The composer who as an old man picked up where Mussorgsky left off, and superseded him. Janacek is, even if I’m the only one who believes this, the greatest name on this list - the only composer but Mussorgsky to take a new concept of harmony and use it to bring music still closer to life’s experience. The greatest miracle of Janacek, among many miracles, is his ability to use further levels of musical abstraction to bring us closer to human nature. The more mannered his music became, the closer it came to reality.

Mussorgsky’s songs work on a level which no previous songwriter achieved because he based his word settings on the patterns of human speech. Janacek took Mussorgsky’s insight and systematized it - notating people’s speech patterns as they spoke to him, and in the process, mastering the art of turning natural human speech into music.

And like Mussorgsky, only far more so, Janacek’s concept of harmony was something far beyond the reaches of his contemporaries - unpredictable not only far beyond the imaginations of Dvorak and Smetana (wonderful as they are), but beyond the imaginations of Mahler and Strauss as well. In the first decade of the 20th century, both Mahler and Strauss were piling occasional dissonances that paved the ground on which Schoenberg’s atonality walked. To Mahler, folk music was a way of recalling his early memories in his music, and perhaps his early traumas as well. He seemed to have very little interest in folk music as an adult. Strauss had little to do with folk music, one might imagine that popularity meant so much to him that he would have agreed with Elgar’s famous quote “I AM folk music.” As a result, they both walked in the byways of Bach’s tonality, and only felt the need for the type of escape that blows up the old but builds the new out of the old's pieces. But while the great German composers wanted to blow up the tonal dam, Janacek worked and walked among folk musicians, and through them heard tonal byways - intervals, progressions, modulations - which no composer further northwest ever fathomed. Janacek was the only true revolutionary among these great composers.

Janacek’s career, his true career, begins in 1904, the year after the death of his beloved daughter, whose dying breath he dutifully notated as he did every other human utterance. His opera, Jenufa, or “Her Stepdaughter” when translated from Czech literally, is the truest treatment of human beings on the operatic stage since Mozart’s death over a century earlier. From then on sprang forth a twenty-five year stream of bizarre and sometimes demented sounding masterpieces interrupted only by death. After Jenufa was Sonata 1. X, 1905 - inspired by the death by bayonetting of a University student, and sounding like Chopin on Meth. Then came the Male Choruses - like Teacher Halfar, Marycka Magdonova, and my favorite The Seventy Thousand - all three of which change tempo, rhythm, and harmony so often that they sound as though a group of fifty singers are improvising on the spot. Through all this, Janacek worked on his own version of The Well-Tempered Klavier - On an Overgrown Path - in which Janacek’s increasingly strange tonalities and rhythms manifested themselves clearly and completely. Then came the ‘statement’ pieces of World War I, when Janacek dipped into Moravian folk mythology to make statements about the need for peace and Czech independence. The Eternal Gospel, in which Janacek doesn’t yet have the secure grasp of how to be quite so bizarre on such a grand scale and sounds like it could be written by Sibelius - hardly something to be ashamed of. More interesting is ‘The Fiddler’s Child’, which is Janacek’s bizarre take on the violin concerto, which is in fact a symphonic poem about the supernatural for orchestra and violin soloist. All of these statements cumulate in Taras Bulba, his orchestral rhapsody which is in fact a love-letter to pan-Slavism - declaring his belief that Russian/Easten Orthodoxy will deliver Czechs from their Austro-Hungarian/Catholic oppressors, in which he finally transfers the bizarre carnival of his more intimate compositions onto a full orchestral stage.

With Taras Bulba, Janacek reaches the cosmic proportions of his final decade. There has never been, nor will there ever be, music like Janacek’s ever again. He founded no school, and his sole truly gifted pupil, Pavel Haas (more on him later), perished in Auschwitz before he could realize the full extent of his gift.

The Diary of One Who Disappeared is a unique Song Cycle. It is about the love of a lower-class peasant for a gypsy girl, an his heartrending decision to leave home to pursue that love. It is both a celebration of love and an elegy for all the things which we must leave behind in order to follow our blis. Love is the stuff of Art Songs, and occasionally a song-cycle appears as this one does that documents love from the point of view of both people - but how many love songs or song cycles have three offstage altos singing with them? If you do not gasp when you hear their first appearance, you do not hear music.

Janacek’s final flowering was based on his love for a comely but ordinary middle class young woman named Kamilla Stasslova. Nobody knew exactly what Janacek saw in her, as she was hardly his intellectual equal, but she was his muse, and Janacek saw her as both the daughter he lost, and the wife he wished he had. His lifelong marriage was mostly a lifelong disaster, and his first string quartet called “The Kreutzer Sonata” tells their story. When Jenufa premiered, he nearly drove his wife nearly to suicide by having an affair with the lead Mezzo. The Kreutzer Sonata is not based on the Beethoven work, but on the Tolstoy story named after the Beethoven work in which a well-intentioned husband ends up demoralizing, abusing, and finally murdering his wife.

Five years later, in the last year of his life, came the companion quartet - ‘Intimate Letters’, in which Janacek put his last measure of devotion to Kamilla. There are 600 letters from Janacek to Kamilla, full of the most ardent (and dirty) love declarations. Even so, there is no definitive evidence that their affair was ever consummated, or even two-sided. In the same year, Janacek went out to retrieve her young son, lost in the woods, and contracted the cold which killed him.

In those intervening ten years, Janacek wrote his greatest orchestral work, the Sinfonietta, and his supreme choral work, the Glagolitic Mass - both inspired by the intense Czech nationalism, optimism, and pride of the Masaryk years - both of them major Beethoven-worthy statements of universal brotherhood and liberty.

But it is as an opera composer upon which his laurels must always rest. And in the 1920’s, Janacek wrote 5 extraordinary operas which are perhaps the only 5 that can compare with the finest five by Mozart.

Seemingly half of the world’s great operas take place in legend and fantasy, but The Excursions of Mr. Broucek is one of a handful of operas (let alone great ones) which deal in science fiction. Mr. Broucek journeys to the moon and time travels to the 15th century. Like most good Science Fiction, it is meant not as an alternative world, but a parallel world which can tell truths about our world in allegory which you can’t do in reality. No opera composer since Mozart, and no opera composer since, has ever done things this outrageous - and yet, like Mozart, even the most outrageous things are done with an astonishingly light touch, full of waltzes and parody songs which give the finger to the audience which expects a diversion.

The most beautiful, and in some ways the most heartbreaking, of the final great five, is Kata Kabanova. It’s a tale of a doomed, forbidden affair between a rich but absued young man and a married woman in a suffocatingly provincial small town. Kata is dedicated to Kamilla, and is clearly supposed to be Kamilla as Janacek saw her, the young angel of his desires, whose fragile beauty is doomed to be crushed by a cruel world. Janacek pictures himself as the figure of Boris, once again a young, vigorous man, able to consummate his desires and briefly tempt Kamilla away from her husband, but helpless against the suffocating claustrophobia of small town life.

But greatest of all is the third - The Cunning Little Vixen - in which the entire life cycle of nature - youth, old age, prosperity, poverty, love, hate, nature, nature’s destruction, eros, thanatos, birth, death, and rebirth, and all this is done in an opera populated by farm and forest animals, which itself is based on a newspaper comic strip. There are moments, not often but moments nevertheless, when I rate this opera above any by Mozart, and therefore as the greatest of all operas. Whether created by animals or humans, there is nothing about the experience of being alive that is missing from this opera about a fox. It’s an anthropomorphic animal fantasy, it’s a commentary and satire on human behavior, it’s a requiem for the passing of time, and a celebration of all the things that are still to come. Find a performance of this still much too unknown opera, if you have a soul, your life will never be the same.

Which is not to devalue his final two operas. The Makropoulos Case, in which Janacek merges Kamilla and himself into the personage of a brilliant 338 year old opera singer, assertive and volatile, ‘a passionate woman with flexible morals,’ but with a vulnerable core beneath her bluster. At one point in the opera, a long sought-after love affair is finally consummated, with disappointing results. It’s enough to make one wonder if the period in which he wrote this opera was the period in which Janacek finally bedded Kamilla, and wished he hadn’t. The Makropoulos Case is a bit like a detective novel, in which the enigma of Elena Makropoulos is gradually revealed in its full strangeness, both the plot and the musif growing ever more bizarre as it develops.

His final opera, From the House of the Dead, based on Dostoevsky’s novella about his prison experience, is no longer Kamilla or soprano obsessed. Instead, it returns to Janacek’s former political obsessions, about a Siberian prison and how the prisoners try to retain their dignity under inhuman circumstances. The foreshadowing of Eastern Europe in the 20th century should be obvious to anyone. To Milan Kundera, this opera, along with Berg’s Wozzeck, is the heart of the 20th century. According to many, Janacek was heartsick from Kamilla’s rejection, and planned for From the House of the Dead to be his last opera - perhaps he even  wrote From the House of the Dead as his own requiem. We will never know the true nature of their relationship, nor will we know precisely what Janacek saw in her. But like so many artists, love, and the possibility of it, was what inflamed him to levels of creativity which others can never see. When the possibility of love dies, the desire for life often dies with it.

All of this strangeness in Janacek is not possible without strange music. Between the very straightforward emotions of most great operas and art-songs, and the music of alienation which atonality brings is a chasm-wide gulf of ambiguity in which the real quirks of human behavior reside. What Janacek and Mussorgsky were able to do past virtually any composer of whom I can think is to plumb the deep ambiguities of human emotion, behavior, and condition. The questions they ask are eternal, but they are of a very different eternity than either the Church-bound masterpieces of the Renaissance and Baroque, or the State-bound masterpieces of the Classicism and Romanticism. This is music for the age of Democracy, for the age of Literature, music that not only demands freedom after the manners of Beethoven and Wagner, but asks us what that freedom is. We still don’t know, but at least we now know to ask these questions, and who knows if we would have without these two geniuses?

800 Words/Late Friday Playlist #18: Janacek - the Good Stuff

Let's start with some of the operas:

To see some of the extraordinary stuff in Jenufa, scroll down to end of the last post. But here's one more gorgeous clip. 

The opera after Jenufa was Osud. A hall of mirrors in which the main character is a composer who is putting on an opera. Listen to the music here and try to tell me why the hell is this music not performed more often?

Next came his sci-fi/fantasy opera The Excursions of Mr. Broucek. Mr Broucek gets drunk and finds himself first on the moon and then in the 15th century. If I told you that an opera with a plot this awesome was merely the 7th-best opera by Janacek, you'd have no reason to believe me. It's not at all a bad opera, Janacek is just that good. 

After the premiere of Jenufa, Janacek ran off with the mezzo who played Kostelnicka (the older lady who drowns the infant), and even brought the singer home with him – insisting that she stay as both his mistress and a houseguest. Understandably, this caused Janacek’s wife, Zdenka, to attempt suicide. Leos and Zdenka remained separated for the rest of their lives, rarely ever seeing each other. It’s said that the turbulence of his first string quartet, the “Kreutzer Sonata” (based on the Tolstoy novella about a husband who murders his wife, not Beethoven’s sonata) is based upon the turbulence of his marriage. In a letter, he confides about the work “I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata.”

Janacek was a Moravian Czech, not a Bohemian Czech. While this distinction may mean very little to us, it meant a great deal to him. The Bohemians (among them composers like Dvorak and Smetana) hailed from the Czech lands’ Western half, and were oriented to Central Europe. Their capital was Prague, the second city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their culture modeled itself on the polished sophistication of Vienna and the German capitals. The Moravians hailed from the Czech east, with the comparative backwater Brno as their capital. The Moravians were very much Slavophiles who hoped that Russia would unite the Slavic peoples. Their lifestyle was more rural, coarser, more peasant-rooted. This is reflected in Janacek’s music, which is far less refined than Dvorak’s and must have disturbed many German listeners, who thought even Dvorak an exciting Czech barbarian. True to his pan-Slavic beliefs, Janacek created an orchestral rhapsody called Taras Bulba, based on a Gogol novel about a militant Cossack feudal lord in the Middle Ages who must sacrifice his two sons in his pursuit of Russian glory. In addition to being a very political work, one can’t help but notice the symmetry to Janacek’s personal life, in which he lost both his children before adulthood.

There are three other great works, greater than Taras Bulba, that have to be considered explicitly political. One after the other in 1926, Janacek wrote two of the most exciting works in the concert repertoire. The Sinfonietta, which he dedicated to The Czechoslovakian Armed Forces, and which he said was intended to celebrate ‘contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, his courage and determination to fight for victory'….whatever. I just know that it’s one of the most exciting pieces of music ever written, with a particularly stunning finale.

And then there’s the still more amazing Glagolitic Mass - described by Milan Kundera as 'more an orgy than a mass.' It’s just the plain Church Mass which so many Christian denominations use to this day, but it’s in Old Church Slavonic rather than Latin or Greek or Russian. Oddly, the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) section is missing, with its invocation ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ (Give us peace). It’s fruitless to speculate, but my guess is that Janacek did this deliberately, and substituted in its place a war cry. Specifically a war cry played by the Organ, to sound a note of defiance for the Czech people who had been under Austro-German subjugation for so many centuries (and would soon be again).

As a sidenote, I will say that the most extraordinary musical experience of my life occurred when I heard this piece performed in London’s Royal Festival Hall next to an old lady who claimed to know Bela Bartok. We spoke about Bartok for a number of minutes, about Janacek, and about the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras – an Australian judged by nearly all music lovers to be the greatest Janacek conductor of all time. I sat in the audience, and wept hot tears for the next forty-five minutes as the most religious experience of my life came over me. At the time, I was unaware that the ‘original’ version of the piece existed – and that it made certain passages sound completely unrecognizable. The Veruju always felt like there was something missing, as though the highest peak had not been hit – and then it most certainly hit that peak. After an experience like that, how could I ever leave music? After the performance, I stood in line to greet Mackerras at a CD signing and I said “Maestro, I hope I should one day be able to conduct ay composer half as well as you do Janacek. Everybody around Mackerras seemed extremely impressed by my gumption, but he beckoned me to say it to him closer. He still couldn’t hear after the second time. I tried one last time, but he still couldn’t hear me and simply said “Yes,…. Janacek’s a great composer!

The third of them is Janacek’s last ‘completed’ work, “From the House of the Dead.” It’s his most advanced piece of music – musically, dramatically, politically. The opera is based on a Dostoevsky novella of the same name about a Siberian prison camp. There are scenes in which prisoners are beaten and humiliated, but the book is meant to show how people are capable of keeping their dignity even under the worst conditions – an opera that proved more and more prophetic as the 20^th century advanced. Musically, Janacek never wrote a more daring score – full of harmonies and instrumental effects which would be advanced even for the 1960’s. But to the end, however much he bended it, Janacek stuck stubbornly to tonal music.

And then there’s his unfinished Symphonic Poem “Danube” (doubtless meaning the Danube River which runs through all the Balkan lands). It very well have been meant as a similarly political statement, but we’ll never know because the always sloppy Janacek left Danube in such an incomplete mess that it had to be reconstructed. Even in its reconstruction, it’s a shame this piece isn’t better known – it has some of Janacek’s most daring writing, perhaps that’s why he couldn’t complete it.

And now comes the Kamilla story…

In 1917, the 63-year-old Janacek developed an infatuation for an unsophisticated girl he met at a spa. Kamila Stosslova was thirty-seven years Janacek's junior, married anything but his intellectual equal, and it’s probable that their relationship was never consummated – in spite of the hundreds of letters Janacek sent her, nearly all of which Kamila saved. Many, perhaps most, of these letters contain melodramatically passionate declarations of love. It’s probable that Janacek’s feelings were unrequited, but Kamila kept a very close correspondence with him all the same and made Janacek a close family friend. It was Kamila who was with Janacek at his bedside when he died in 1928, after going out into the woods at night to search for her son.

One also has to wonder whether Janacek’s own feelings were quite as erotic as he claimed. Janacek developed a similar infatuation for another young woman (also named Kamila) shortly after his daughter died – it’s possible, though perhaps unlikely, that Janacek was in fact seeking a psychological substitute for his deceased daughter Olga.

In any event, even if Kamila was never Janacek’s lover, she was certainly his muse. The first fruit of his infatuation was an unforgettably beautiful song cycle: The Diary of One Who Disappeared. It is a diary in poems which tells a story about a village boy who comes across a gypsy girl (re: the worldly Leos and the unsophisticated Kamila) and decides to leave his family and village to be with her. The song cycle has parts for both tenor and alto (and an almost unbearably haunting offstage ensemble of three female singers). In one letter to Kamila, he wrote “…And the black gypsy girl in my Diary of One Who Disappeared – that was you. That’s why there’s so much emotional fire in the work. So much fire that if we both caught on, we’d be turned to ashes…And all through the work I thought of you!”

If that declaration was embarrassingly intimate, there is also his second quartet, which he subtitled ‘Intimate Letters.’ In case there is any doubt what’s meant by that title, he wrote in another letter to Kamila “You stand behind every note, you, living, forceful, loving. The fragrance of your body, the glow of your kisses – no, really of mine. Those notes of mine kiss all of you. They call for you passionately…” ….yowza! Well, even if this is dirty old man music, it’s breathtaking. The two middle movements contain some of the most gorgeous music written in the twentieth century.

And then, finally, there are the three operas in which Janacek claimed to represent Kamila in his protagonists:

The first was Kata Kabanova, which Janacek explicitly dedicated to her – which tells story in a drab, provincial town (not unlike a smaller version of Brno) of an extra-marital affair and the woman’s eventual suicide. The music representing Kata, the protagonist, is both pure and ecstatic – like a perfect fusion of religious and sensual feeling, but set against her is oppressive music that at times sounds like apocalyptic brutality. The fusion between these two creates the greatness of this opera – the contrast between all life’s savage tribulations and all that makes life worth living – is what makes the opera work so miraculously. The tragic ending is made that more poignant because she’s clearly an oasis of something lovely in a drab place.

 For the moment, we’re going to skip over the next opera chronologically and move on to The Makropulos Case, an opera based on a play by Karel Capek (better known as science fiction’s inventor of ‘robots’). In this opera, Kamila is represented by the world-famous singer: Emilia Marty. While Marty seems young, she is in fact 338 years old and possesses a potion which keeps her perpetually young. Like so many great performers, Emilia’s core of vulnerability is concealed by an emotionally frigid exterior – treating subordinates and lovers alike with terrible indifference. The layers of psychological meaning in this opera are unbelievably thick. Is Emilia Marty in fact a portrait of Kamila, or is she a portrait of Janacek himself – a great artist, coldly indifferent to those around him (like his wife) and with great sexual bravado into old age? Or is Janacek represented by Hauk-Sendorf, the senile old man who recognizes Emilia as Elina, a girl he had an affair with half-a-century before when Emilia assumed a different identity.

And now we come to the greatest opera of the last 200 years – if we still don’t count Sondheim musicals as opera then I’m deadly serious. Since Mozart, there has been no opera composer but Janacek who could possibly match him in the ability to create living characters, diversity of emotion, and sheer musical wonders. At the top of the opera heap, it’s just Mozart and Janacek, there is no third.

Mozart beats Janacek in his seamless ability to blend the emotional content and intellectual content to the point that they’re one and the same. In Mozart, just as there’s no musical effect that overwhelms the dozen others that are happening simultaneously, there is no character who overwhelms any other (except of course Don Giovanni – the exception who proves the rule because that’s exactly what Mozart set out to do). But not even Mozart (nor Beethoven) proved himself capable of writing a piece of music that showed an entire cosmic view of all life – birth to death, highest forms of life to lowest, highest tragedy to lowest comedy. There are four musical works I can think of which achieve this (obviously with extra-musical help) – The Creation by Haydn, Mahler’s 3^rd Symphony, arguably Into The Woods, and The Cunning Little Vixen. And of those four, The Cunning Little Vixen clearly does it best. For profundity, there is not a single piece of music in all creation that equals it – and it’s an opera based on a comic strip!

Like all those cosmic works – it contains every dramatic state within it: tragedy, comedy, clearly there’ irony - we’re  watching animals talk like human beings, and there’s much Romance as well – a we watch foxes marry one another. So why then should a cutsie opera (made still more cuddly than it needs to be by too-cute productions) that skirts a fine line between the ridiculousness of opera and the ridiculousness of Disney be considered the most profound opera ever written? The answer can probably be found by a description of the plot.

It helps digesting all that depth to know that this is one of the world’s most entertaining pieces of music – full of comedy that needs no apologies by saying it’s ‘opera comedy’ and full of romance to balance out the death (and arguably rape) that takes place over the course of the opera. In this piece, Janacek presents us the entire natural world as though it’s an opera by Pixar – anthropomorphic animals seemingly of every genus and species, with opera singers playing foxes, dogs, gophers, chickens, frogs, mice, and insects. And these characters behave much as humans do – discussing matters of the farm and the forest as though they’re political and philosophical issues. It presents us with the life cycle of a vixen named Sharp Ears (Kamila) – independent, strong willed, a sort of female animal version of Tom Sawyer in her younger days who thumbs her nose at all authority. A farmer captures her to be a housepet, but she eats half the hens after luring them out of their coup with a rousing speech about how they are being exploited by the capitalist hen for their work. She then tries to befriend a haughty bourgeois gopher who rejects her, she then she drives out of his burrow by peeing on him.  We then watch as she meets a male fox and falls in love with him, gets pregnant, and summons the entire forest for their wedding – all in the span of twenty minutes.

The first act was comedy, the second act is romance. The third act is tragedy, a death so that the life cycle can begin anew. The farmer, swearing vengeance on the Fox for killing his chickens, hunts Sharp Ears obsessively. But it’s a friend of his who finds Sharp Ears with a tasty Rabbit trap which she escapes easily. But while Sharp Ears has an enormous family to feed, she still feels no compunction about breaking the trap or about scampering as though nothing’s wrong when men are clearly so closeby. And it’s this hubris which inevitably results in her getting shot.

But that only leads us to the most life-enhancing part of this story. Before the final scene, the old gamekeeper notices that the same friend, who married the town beauty every man had a crush on, gave her the fur of Sharp Ears as a present. This double loss causes him to go back into the forest to the place where he first saw the Vixen. He mourns the loss of them both, he despairs the dullness of his marriage and mourns the time of life when he and his wife were vigorous and attractive. But then he sees another Vixen who looks so much like the young Sharp Ears that it's clearly her daughter. And just before he can capture her, a frog jumps into his lap for the second time during the opera. But this frog speaks to him, and tells him that it was his grandfather who'd once jumped into his lap, and that his grandfather told all sorts of stories about the gamekeeper. And thus the opera ends on a note which says that life will always go on, even after death.

What makes Janacek so extraordinary is that he belongs in that elite cadre of artists for whom anything is possible – and nothing is predictable. So many artists have infinite intellectual reach, yet their intelligence precludes any emotional give – along with ditching traditional forms they ditch the emotions those forms housed. Other artists have a bottomless well of emotion to give us, yet their music is predictable – hewing to the same formulas again and again. But there is an exceedingly rare group of artists whose work suggests more things in the heavens and the earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy – if I wanted to count the number of musicians who master both playing fields consistently, even Mozart and Sondheim can’t make it on here – too rigid: I think of Beethoven, Schumann, Mahler, Janacek, Ellington, Schnittke, The Beatles, … and then my mind draws a blank. Janacek is one of the very few geniuses of music who can open up the entirety of the cosmos. If you’ve never heard his music, it’s a large part of the cosmos which you’re missing.

…And I haven’t even gotten into the piano or a cappella choral works….

800 Words: The Disorganized Imagination of Leos Janacek

I have a mind that goes into overdrive all too easily. I find that if I don’t write something – something long - every day, I spend whole hours or afternoons which should be spent at my desk finding ways to be productive in boyish fantasies of being productive – my favorite fantasy is indulging in the thought of being the great Maestro Ivan Tuckerini who made his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic when he was six. Now I spend only eighteen weeks of every year on the podium – six for orchestras, six for operas, six for choruses, and no more than eighteen weeks because any more feels utterly limiting for an artist of such burning creativity as myself. Another eighteen weeks of the year are spent writing Nobel Prize-worthy fiction, plays, poetry, history, and even the occasional symphony if I have a week to spare – every book I write makes the New York Times Bestseller list and my books are said to have initiated a new Golden Era of reading and writing for American society. Inner city children wander the streets quoting my poetry, sexually liberated graduate students hang on my every word when I speak at their colleges. The rest of the year I spend touring around with my grammy-winning classical/jazz/blues/roma/bluegrass/soul band for which I’m lead singer, violinist, and co-songwriter. The rest of my band consists of a Jewish folk-song expert from Minnesota who can’t sing, two Liverpudlian Brits, one of whom’s taken up with a Japanese conceptual artist; a working class New Jersey college dropout, two very sincere multi-instrument-playing Canadian hippies – one guy, one girl; two London art-school kids who love the blues, a New York Jewish son of a dance-band leader (though his singing partner doesn’t make it); and a gay piano player from the London suburbs who loves 50’s rock’n roll.

This life of selfless devotion to my art continues until I die at the age of 95 from complications due to a twelve-hour orgasm brought on by my second, much younger wife (I was an early widower who bravely raised three children by myself) and half-a-dozen groupies who accompany us from show to show. In my unauthorized biography, it is revealed that I negotiated peace in the Middle East and cured lymphoma.

Unfortunately, I have a mind that operates on spontaneous combustion, and order is utterly anathema to my brain. Even if I wanted to,I wouldn’t know how to organize my thoughts, and believe me I’ve tried. One can either beat oneself up for one’s faults or accept who one is, and above all else, I am thoroughly disorganized.

In art, as in life, my mind tends toward the disorderly. Give me the diverse ramblings of Chaucer, not the well-ordered tiers of Dante. Give me the mad confusion of the Marriage of Figaro any day over the plastic perfection of The Magic Flute. Give me Beethoven fugues, not Bach’s. Give me Bellow, not Nabokov. Give me Turner, not David. Give me Howard Hawks, not Stanley Kubrick.

It’s very easy to admire orderly things – well put together art, well organized buildings, well-built people. But perfect order is beyond us – humanity is not perfect, and perfect things are cold, distant, and unobtainable for us mortals. No matter how much we long to possess it, to understand its perfection, the experience of perfection eludes us every time - something is always in the way. Perfection, if it exists, needs nothing but itself, and no matter how much we try to love it, we ultimately fail because something perfect is incapable of loving us back - if it's perfect, it has nothing to do with us because we could only besmirch it. Perfection demands everything of us, only to give nothing back in return.

This is why Leos Janacek is such a necessary composer for classical music (a disorganized preamble if ever there was one…). In a century of composition that nearly banished all concerns but structure and design, Janacek stands out as one of the few great composers whose primary concern was human expression. The form of his music, such as it was, had no reason to exist except to fit the content. And if the content was too diverse for any form to fit, that was OK too.

I remember reading a music critic – Greg Sandow if I’m not mistaken – who compared classical music’s obsession with form to people who complement a woman for having beautiful face because her skull is perfect (why is this post so sexual?). To appreciate the design without the content which the design provides is to utterly miss the point of why music, why art itself, exists - it exists for us to love, not to worship.

I remember a harmony class with a professor I was (unsuccessfully) trying to win over. Like most music theory teachers, his mind went unfailingly towards the orderly and well-kempt. He was an organist who loved Bach and sacred music, so naturally we weren’t meant to get along. At the time, I was just falling in love with Janacek and I asked him what he thought of my new favorite composer. His response was instant, “He’s the best third-rate composer I know.”

Composers like Janacek will never appeal to the orderly mind. It still amazes me that certain classical musicians have overcome their hatreds of Mahler and Ives, composers of disorganized genius if ever there were any. But in some ways Janacek is on a level of disorganization entirely above even Mahler and Ives – even above Schumann and Mussorgsky (ok…maybe not Mussorgsky). In Janacek, there is no such thing as musical development. A theme can be non-chalantly thrown in only for another theme to replace it instantly, then another, and another, with no sense that one theme has anything to do with the other. At least in Italian opera, the various melodies and motifs are divided into arias (songs) and recitatives (sung exposition) - but no such division is necessary in Janacek. All that mattered to Janacek was to capture the right music to suit the expression of that particular moment, and if the music had nothing to do with the music that came before or the music that came after, that was perfectly acceptable. His only compatriot in this regard is Modest Mussorgsky - but Mussorgsky did not live long enough to stretch this technique to Janacek's extent. Other modern composers, like Debussy and Stravinsky, mostly rejected the very ‘German’ idea of developing the same musical themes. But of those who rejected musical development, only Janacek and Mussorgky made emotional expression their primary goal.

Like Ives, Janacek toiled for his entire career as a virtual unknown in the provinces – not acquiring a name for himself until he was retirement age. He made his living as nothing but a mere provincial organist and musicmaster, and came home every day to a disastrous lifelong marriage and children he eventually had to bury. In an era when Vienna was still the center of music, Janacek couldn’t even live in the second city: Prague. He lived in Brno, Prague’s grimy industrial counterpart in the Czech-speaking lands.

 (For me, the most terrifying scene in all opera, even if it's in the wrong language here - German rather than Czech. The old town sacristan convinces herself to drown her ward’s newborn bastard son in a frozen lake.)

It was in Brno, at the age of fifty, that Janacek penned his first masterpiece. As his daughter lay dying in the next room, Janacek wrote the opera Jenufa. In doing so, Janacek finished the job begun by Mozart to take opera out of the stylized realm of Gods and legends and put it squarely in the realm of human beings. For Janacek, opera was not poetry – it was everyday prose. Every emphasis of the words, every rise and fall in the melody, is as precisely notated as possible to correspond with everyday speech. When a person grows angry, he speaks in a different manner than he does when he’s happy, or sad, or ambivalent. Janacek’s great insight is to find the appropriate speech pattern for each psychological state. The result is a dramatic expression every bit as heightened as in any other great opera, but with a naturalness and believability that is only Janacek’s. Of course, for melodic passages he slows down the speech patterns, but they are still the same speech patterns, just done in half-or-quarter time.  This is musical organization of a type every bit as precise as anything in Monteverdi, but in a manner so different that to certain people it seems like a jumble of musical sludge in which one musical motif has nothing to do with any other.

(The astonishing finale of Jenufa from the astonishing third act of Jenufa. Just watch.)

To the end of his career, Janacek remained utterly devoted to his speech method. He would notate people’s speech precisely as he heard it, with cadence, rhythms, and notes on the page existing exactly as they were when they came out of people’s mouths, and in his papers there exists a page on which he notated his daughter’s dying breath.

There is not a single great opera composer since Janacek who has taken up his mantle. Britten and John Adams occasionally let their music speak through prose, but mostly as buildup to another poetic section. With the exception of Berg, none of the high modernists from Schoenberg to Birtwistle have cared a fig for making characters sing as people would speak. One can only surmise that had more composers followed Janacek’s example, the story of 20^th century music would have been very, very different.

Janacek Sinfonietta in a Shopping Mall

Buying toilet paper never felt quite this important before.