This podcast is about the composers who slipped through history's cracks; composers so distant from the wellspring of cultural history that few were there to listen to them, and therefore few to tell others they're worth hearing; composers of such forward vision that there was no place for them in the world of their present, and the future has yet to catch up with them.
Suk Serenade for Strings Opening (fade out at 0:55 until 1:00)
Janacek Veruju. (gradually bring up until 20:00, hard cut at 21:15)
Obviously it's a bit of a straw man to hear these two passages, but if a person with no musical sense told you that the composer of the former was born twenty years after the latter, you'd rightly tell that person to shut up because they had no idea what they were talking about. And yet it's absolutely true. The piece we heard at the beginning was composed in 1892, when Brahms and Tchaikovsky were still alive and Suk was still only a brilliant seventeen year old capable of writing a string serenade that at least in my opinion, outdoes even Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Elgar.
Josef Suk was a composer of the 1900s, not the century but the decade, a composer of the alternate twentieth century that never came of age because it grew organically out of the nineteenth. At the peak of Suk's creativity, he was still barely thirty years old and he properly belongs to a generation of composers ten years older than him like Strauss, Elgar, Sibelius, Mahler... What we then heard was the Glagolitic Mass of Leos Janacek, written at the age of 73 in 1927, the year before Janacek's death. Janacek was born in 1854, but he is truly a composer of the 1920s, and he belongs to a generation of musicians thirty or forty years younger than he: Bartok, Berg, Webern, Prokofiev, Hindemith - if anything, Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Ives can be considered a generation older than Janacek! For forty years, Janacek was just another competent Czech composer, occasionally inspired, but much too rebellious for his creativity to come unleashed within the strictures of the nineteenth century. But while a whole generation of potential great artists lay strewn on the battlefields of the Somme and Tannenberg and Verdun and all the multi-fielded offensives, the longevity of this composer as old as Brahms's First Piano Trio let him live until a much more rebellious era could accommodate his defiant spirit.
Life is what happens when you're making other plans, but had the past century proceeded as planned, the arts would have changed much more slowly. And just as classical music may never have been supplanted by what we therefore call more 'popular' genres, and classical music lovers, who would probably be much more numerous, would probably listen to Josef Suk rather than Janacek, Nikolai Medtner or Myaskovsky rather than Stravinsky, Zoltan Kodaly rather than Bartok... All of these supposedly second-rank composers wrote excellent music. Is it cosmic music of the type you get from titans like Beethoven and Wagner? Well, is Brahms's? Is Faure's? Is Dvorak's? Composers like Suk and Kodaly were trained in the much more bourgeois late 19th century, where the rules of what constituted great art were much much stricter. and by the standards of their predecessors, they weren't even particularly conservative. Compare the Nikolais Myaskovsky and Medtner to real conservatives of their generation like Rachmaninov or Glazunov - the Nikolais are clearly much more daring; harmonically, melodically, coloristically... And let's not even get started on Nikolai Roslavets... more on him in another podcast...
By the standards of their predecessors, all these would-be-20th century masters did things their forebearers wouldn't dare. All they lacked was the desire to turn all the rules upside down. Perhaps they lacked that bold rebelliousness of spirit you get from Stravinsky and Janacek, but on the other hand, the love which so-called classical music engendered among the public never recovered from that radical break. Are we composers and music historians and journalists, the musical 'elite' so we fancy ourselves, so sure that Janacek and Stravinsky are objectively better than Suk and Myaskovsky? Or have our values, our ideology, our contempt for the musically lazy, pulled the wool over our eyes? We had the love of millions, and little by little, we allowed the disconnect between composers and audience tastes to grow larger with every passing decade of the 20th century. We're now one-fifth through the twenty-first, and the audiences of the new generations don't even remember we're here. Is it possible that perhaps we've waged an artistic war for a century that was never won because it was in the service of a bad cause?
Burlesque for Violin and Piano op. 17 no. 4
By the standards of anybody today but certain octogenarians, even Stravinsky and Bartok are not particularly radical music, even Schoenberg seems relatively accessible next to Xenakis and Elliott Carter. That is not the point. The point is that by insisting upon by making an aesthetic religion out of modernity, probably at least as much in visual art as in music and nearly as much in literature, we gradually exiled an enormous segment of the audience for classical music, and the result is that the boldest musical spirits of this generation: our Bartok's and Stravinsky's, can, comparatively speaking, barely get a hearing. In the long run, this elevation of the revolutionary over the reformative did not even benefit the revolutionaries!
What we just heard was the Burlesque for Violin and Piano, op. 17 no. 4. The violinist is Josef Suk's grandson,... Josef Suk. No, it's not Bartok, but it's not even Prokofiev, but the writing is daring, even... innovative! When music has this much character, and even this much rebelliousness of spirit, must a piece of music change the face of music forever in order to earn lots of performances?
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The story of Josef Suk is the story of the aesthetic moderate, who has no champion because he fits no neat agenda, and adjusted himself like a magpie to the various musical influences of his era. Is he fully the equal of Dvorak or Janacek? Well... no. Dvorak and Janacek were unrepeatable musical events, stars who burned at the brightest possible flame who reinvented themselves time after time to fit the requirements of their eras, their commissions, and their performers. But if Edward Elgar and Jean Sibelius, so particular to the ethos of their times and places, can be considered among the great composers of all time - and deservedly, so can Josef Suk. If the unique musical language of Carl Nielsen can be understood beyond the boundaries of border and language, so can Josef Suk. And if musical conservatives like Brahms and Tchaikovsky and even Bach and can force us to reconsider what's conservative and what's progressive, so can Josef Suk. In nearly any other small nation, the quality of Suk's music would make him stand tall as their greatest composer. He had the good and bad luck of being born in a country and an era with so many great composers that you had to be careful not to step on them. He embodied his era's contradictions, a 19th century gentleman forced prematurely to confront the century of death. It spurred him prematurely into a new era, and caused him no end of nostalgia for the world to which he could not go back. Suk received a very dark glimpse of the future, so dark he simply laid down his pen - exactly as Elgar and Sibelius did, who found the truths of this new era just too terrible to keep telling them....
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