It took a half-century after the death of Czech composer Leos Janacek (1854-1928) for his music to emerge before a worldwide audience. Much of the credit for its current esteem goes to the advocacy of Sir Charles Mackerras, the British conductor who studied in Czechoslovakia and returned bearing treasures. His superb London opera and orchestral recordings from the late 1970s and the ’80s elevated Janacek from a parochial specialty to stardom. However, such long neglect would have meant permanent obscurity for music of less conviction and fire.
Like Bela Bartok after him, Janacek began with nineteenth-century romanticism but abandoned it for folk-inflected music of national consciousness. He modeled his music on the speech patterns of the Czech language. This hardly seems a recipe for international acclaim and, during his lifetime, his success, though great, was limited to his homeland. Yet his music has immediate appeal and tremendous impact because he wrote with such compelling vision. Janacek said, “I penetrate because there is truth in my work; truth to its very limit. Truth does not exclude beauty, on the contrary, there should be truth as well as beauty, and more and more. Life, mainly. Always eternal youth. Life is young. It is spring. I am not afraid of living; I like it terribly.” One can feel that life pulsing in every bar of his music.
Janacek tried to express the inexpressible, not in some ethereal or abstract way, but, like Dostoevsky, with tremendous human passion, as if his life depended on it. As did Mozart in his own way, Janacek anthropomorphized the orchestra. The instruments become human voices. In Mozart they sing; in Janacek, they speak—or try to, for what they attempt to express is beyond human language.
This desperate sense of yearning gives Janacek’s music a special poignance and power that is expressed, not in any form of technical innovation, for his music is tonal throughout, but in certain stylistic features: for instance, his use of the extremes of instrumental ranges, highly charged dance rhythms, and short, punchy themes. Verging on hysteria and seemingly spontaneous, Janacek’s music nonetheless maintains a tight inner logic; it communicates with an elliptical economy of means that leaves one puzzled as to how it works musically. In dizzyingly quick turns, the music can be ferocious, with a barbaric energy, then achingly lyrical, and then wildly jubilant. Even when festive, it is so wildly festive that one can feel an underlying longing that no earthly happiness can fulfill. With Janacek, there is no gentle tapping on the gates of heaven, no being wafted into paradise on swells of perfumed ecstasy. Heaven is the object of human passion, and Janacek will take it by storm, and, if necessary, break down its gates to get in.
One can hear this unquenchable yearning at its most intense in his late masterpieces, especially the Glagolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta from 1926, the two String Quartets, and the late operas. The galvanic Glagolitic Mass is in old Church Slavonic, the liturgical language used by Sts. Cyril and Methodius when they converted Moravia in 863 A.D. Janacek wrote on the title page, “God is gone up with a shout.” He said, “I depict in it, to a certain extent, the legend which says that when Christ was hanged on the cross, the heaven was torn asunder. Well, I am making both roar and lightning.” The result is a volcanic masterpiece, one of the greatest choral works of the twentieth century. The faith it expresses, however, is somewhat unconventional. Janacek was peeved when a critic wrote that the Mass indicated that Janacek had become an orthodox believer in his old age. Janacek replied: “I am not an old man, and I am not a believer—until I see for myself.” Yet, at the same time, he said, “I wanted to portray the nation’s faith not on a religious basis but on a strong moral one which calls God to witness.”
The Sinfonietta is a secular equivalent to the Mass in its wildness, orchestral brilliance, use of punchy motifs, and dramatic abbreviation. Its finale is one of the blazing glories of twentieth century music. In recordings it is usually paired with the colorful and almost equally brilliant Taras Bulba. Sir Charles Mackerras is a good recommendation for these works, as he is for all the operas. But the Czech conductor Karl Ancerl brought a special visionary intensity to his performances of these three pieces with the Czech Philharmonic in Supraphon recordings from the early 1960s. His Glagolitic Mass won the 1964 Grand Prix de l’Academie Charles Cros. Supraphon has reissued these recordings in various CD formats, usually at mid-price (e.g., the Glagolitic Mass and Sinfonietta on Supraphon Collection 110609; the Sinfonietta and Taras Bulba on Supraphon 111929). They are indispensable.
Janacek was as eccentric in his choice of opera subjects as his music is original. Like Dostoevsky, he believed dramatic extremes are more likely to reveal the fundamental truths of the human heart and soul. His predilection for bizarre subjects was seen as early ‘as 1897 in his cantata, Amarus. This work is based upon a poem about an illegitimate child sequestered in a monastery, whose adolescent heart is fatally stirred by the loss he feels upon seeing, for the first time, two lovers embrace. He then expires upon his mother’s grave. Katya Kabanova is about adultery and suicide. Jenufa concerns jealousy and infanticide. The Makropulos Case is about the despair of a woman who seemingly could not die, and her relief in finally doing so after three hundred years. The Cunning Little Vixen was inspired by a cartoon strip depicting the adventures of vixen, in both human society and the forest. From the House of the Dead is based on Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name.
The Cunning Little Vixen, the most charming of Janacek’s operas, intermingles animal and human in novel fashion. The two are distinct but interact within nature, which enfolds them both within cyclical currents of loss and renewal. The love duet between the fox and the vixen is as dramatic and sensuous as opera has to offer. The music is neither cute nor syrupy; it is filled with delights and great energy, e.g. the vixen’s wedding and the ballet of the fox cubs. In the last scene the gamekeeper reflects in a long, autumnal monologue on the mysteries and magic of nature, which he knows is overtaking him as well. We are left with old age in spring, a mixture of sweetness and pain. Janacek called this opera “a merry piece with a sad end.” The end so moved him that he asked for it to be played at his funeral. So, on August 15th, 1928, over his open coffin in the Old Brno Augustinian Monastery, a singer intoned the gamekeeper’s epilogue: “People will bow their heads and will understand that heavenly bliss has passed by all around them.”
With From the House of the Dead, we enter the gloom of a czarist prison camp. But the gloom is not overwhelming. In fact, this opera is exhilarating, with a compactly powerful and moving score. Straining for the inexpressible reaches of the spirit, it almost shouts to God. On the title page of this opera Janacek inscribed, “in every creature a spark of God.” During its composition, he said: “I’m finishing perhaps my greatest work—this latest land last] opera. I feel so excited as if my blood wanted to gush out.” That’s evident in the music. This is a work of extremes, veering between desperation and hysterical joy; it is exhausting but not enervating, and there are lyrical respites. It is one of the most original, powerful works in the world of opera.
Another work of Janacek’s maturity that is typical of his penchant for the bizarre is his symphonic poem, The Danube. It is based on two poems depicting desperate women drowning themselves. Janacek did not finish the score, but left the orchestrated sketches for four movements, the third of which includes a vocalization for soprano. A Marco Polo CD [8.220362] offers a completed version that displays the formidable merits of this work. The CD also includes the incidental music to Shluk and Jau, a play by Gerhardt Hauptmann. The music does not sound incidental at all. It was written in 1928, the year of Janacek’s death, yet at a time when the composer was at the height of his powers. The two movements presented here, an Andante and an Allegretto, are vintage Janacek that can stand next to the Sinfonietta in their power and appeal. The Allegretto is especially noteworthy: It is an amazing piece of music that packs more into its short duration than most symphonies and builds to an exhilarating ending.
For those who know only the Janacek of blazing horns, thundering timpani, and crying voices, his piano oeuvre will come as a surprise, with its intimacy and modest scale. The intensity, though, emerges in a style that is as close to impressionism as Janacek ever came. But this is not a cool impressionism; nature is not being impersonally evoked in shimmering reflections d’eau. Rather, it is haunting, nocturnal music of moving simplicity and directness, deeply expressive of human feelings. Though Rudolf Firkusny, a pupil of Janacek, was deservedly famous for his beautiful interpretations of Janacek’s piano music (available on RCA Red Seal 60147-2RC), I have heard no pianist who makes these works “speak” more intensely than the brilliant Ivan Moravec. Unfortunately, his sublime performances on the Nonesuch label are only available on cassette [Elektra/Nonesuch 79041-4].
Both of Janacek’s string quartets are masterpieces. They evoke, in Janacek’s words, “exaltation, passionate declarations of love, anxiety, indomitable yearnings.” They are among the most nakedly emotional works ever written. Of the Second Quartet, Intimate Letters, Janacek said the music is “like a piece of living flesh. I don’t think I ever shall be able to write anything deeper and more truthful.” He wasn’t. It was his last work. He was dead within the year of its completion. The Talich Quartet gives a moving performance on Calliope [CAL 9699], but they cannot displace my affection for the 1962 Grand Prix du Disc performances by the Janacek Quartet, that have resurfaced on several labels, licensed by Supraphon [Quartet No. 1 on Canyon Classics EC 3680 and Quartet No 2 on Multisonic 310351-2].
If there is divine madness in music, this is it.