Music: Rebirth of an Eccentric

“Only a cut above the amateur” was British Critic Ernest Newman’s scornful evaluation of Czech Composer Leoš Janáček in a 1924 review of the opera Jenufa. “Atrocious drama and wretched theater,” complained a New York Times critic after a 1931 performance of From the House of the Dead. Through years of such disasters,Janáček (pronounced Ya-na-chek) remained a proud, angry man who longed desperately for recognition and stubbornly believed that his peculiar brand of musicmaking would be vindicated. Now, four decades after his death, the often maligned composer is winning the recognition and admiration denied him during his life.

A stunning revival of the Excursions of Mr. Brouček was a hit last summer at West Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, as was the Stockholm Royal Opera’s The Makropulos Case in Munich last month. The San Francisco Opera gave Jenufa its first professional performance last week on the West Coast. “Pile-driving drama,” critics raved. “Music that stabs, jabs, spins, lunges, pecks, soars.” This week 185 stations will carry National Educational Television’s color production of From the House of the Dead, which is likely to provide an hour-and-a-half of emotional shock. The New York City Opera is planning a production of The Cunning Little Vixen,Janáček’s paean to nature, for its 1970 season.

Janáček’s music sounds like nobody else’s: short, choppy phrases, thorny melodies that blossom abruptly and are suddenly plucked away, trumpets and trombones that whoop with glee, orchestration that seems all top and bottom with a yawning gap in between.

Janáček’s nine operas seem appropriate to an age of revolt, space travel and biochemical revolution. From the House of the Dead, based on Dostoevsky’s novel, broods over the futility of life in a prison camp. Mr. Brouček involves a flight to the moon (although the propulsive liquid is beer rather than rocket fuel) and a 15th century invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Makropulos Case tells of a 300-year-old woman who discovers the secret of eternal life and finds eternity not worth enduring.

Second Youth. Janáček was born in 1854 in Moravia, now part of Czechoslovakia. He studied music in the town of Brno, married there (unhappily), suffered through the early death of his two children, and enjoyed no major success as a composer until he was 60. About that time, he fell in love with Kamila Stössl, 38 years his junior and the wife of an antique dealer. The affair was apparently platonic; nonetheless, it brought the composer an astonishingly productive second youth. From the time of his meeting with Kamila, his music surged with an energy and abundance of imagination barely suggested by his earler work. Janáček was continuously productive until his death in 1928 from pneumonia, caught while chasing Mrs. Stössl’s small son up and down the hills near his native village.

Janáček was fascinated by the melodic curves of speech. He would eavesdrop on conversations in the street, jotting down musical notations of individual speech patterns. He claimed to have recorded 60 distinct ways in which the word yes could be pronounced. He was also fascinated by bird calls, animal cries, and the whispering of leaves. Conversations between his dogs were carefully transcribed onto music paper. Czech Conductor Karel Ančerl, now music director of the Toronto Symphony, recalls the first time he saw Janáček: “I was returning home from a party with a few friends. A full moon lighted the park, and suddenly we saw a stocky man in a long overcoat talking to some birds. He was saying, ‘Please talk to me, speak to me. I must hear your music, I must have it.’ When the birds flew away, he would chase after them for a few feet, crying to them all the while. When he saw us, he simply turned and walked away.”

No Believer. An intense nationalist who had a Pan-Slavic fascination with Russia—one reason why his work is exceptionally popular in the Soviet Union —Janáček was a bitter atheist. “A church is concentrated death,” he once said. “Tombs under the floor, bones on the altar, pictures that are nothing but torture and dying. Death and nothing but death. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” Atheist or not, Janáček had a profoundly spiritual appreciation of the value of life. One of his most powerful compositions is the Slavonic Mass—a soaring, jagged work for chorus, orchestra and soloists that has sometimes been used in Czech Catholic liturgical ceremonies. The Mass was a salute to nature, not God, and as usual Janáček’s critics missed the point. After its premiere, one wrote sardonically that “the old man” was apparently turning to belief in God. Janáček answered with a bristling postcard: “No old man, no believer. Not till I see for myself.” Janáček stuck by his unbeliefs till the last. As he lay dying, a nurse asked him if he would like to make his peace with God. “Nurse,” Janáček firmly replied, “you probably don’t know who I am!”

Janáček’s work has been kept alive over the years by a handful of conductors such as Rafael Kubelik of Munich’s Radio Orchestra and Charles Mackerras of London’s Sadler’s Wells Opera. Another devoted fan is Walter Susskind of the St. Louis Symphony, who remembers Janáčekfrom his student days in Prague. He compares Janáček’s originality with that of America’s Charles Ives. Like Ives, Janacek was a weird, lonely figure who owed little to his musical ancestors and had no true descendants. His method of composing was slapdash and, to would-be performers, sometimes unintelligible. Says Mackerras: “He never really knew his craft. He had an absolutely lackadaisical approach to the details, but a strict and passionate approach to what the music was trying to convey.” Susskind suggests a reason for the carelessness: “It’s as though Janáček figured his stuff wasn’t going to be played anyway, so he might just as well write it the way he wanted to. But truth prevails. You can’t keep a work of genius down forever.”