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 20th 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
3rd 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….
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