Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

I ve referred many times to Leos Janacek's music. It is well known in England and the U.S.A., and in Germany. But in France? In the other Romance-language countries? And which of his works could be known? On February 15, 1992, I go to a large record shop in Paris to see what is available.

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I immediately find Taras Bulba (1918) and the Sinfonietta (1926): the orchestral works of his great period: as the most popular works (the most accessible to the average music lover), they are almost always put together on the same disc.

The Suite for String Orchestra (1877), the "Idyll" for String Orchestra (1878), and the Lachian Dances (1890). These are pieces from the prehistory of his creative work, whose insignificance astonishes people expecting Janacek's name to mean great music.

I pause at the terms "prehistory" and "great period": Janacek was born in 1854. That is the whole paradox. This great figure of modern music is older than the last of the great Romantic composers: four years older than Puccini, six years older than Mahler, ten years older than Richard Strauss. For a long time he wrote works that, because of his allergy to the excesses of Romanticism, are notable only for their pronounced traditionalism. Always dissatisfied, he punctuated his life with torn-up scores; only at the turn of the century did he arrive at his own style. In the twenties, his compositions appeared on modern-music concert programs alongside Stravinsky, Bartok, and Hindemith; but he was thirty, forty years older than they. A solitary conservative in his youth, he became an innovator when he was old. But he was still alone. For though he stood with the great modernists, he was different from them. He came to his style without them, his modernism had a different nature, a different genesis, different roots.

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I continue my stroll among the bins at the record shop: with no trouble I find the two String Quartets (1924, 1928): this is Janacek's peak; all his expressionism is concentrated here in total perfection. Five recordings, all excellent. Even so, I regret not finding (I've long been looking for it on compact disc) the most authentic (and still the best) performance of these quartets, that of the Janacek Quartet (the old Supraphon recording [50556], awarded the Prix de l'Academie Charles-Cros and the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik).

I pause at the term "expressionism":

Although he never made the connection himself, Janacek is actually the only great composer to whom the term can be applied fully and in its literal sense: for him, everything is expression, and a note has no right to exist except as expression. Thus the total absence in his work of mere "technique": transitions, developments, the mechanics of contrapuntal filler, routine orchestration (on the contrary, a penchant for previously novel ensembles made up of a few solo instruments), etc. The result for the performer is that, every note being expression, every note (not only every motif, but every note of a motif) must have maximal expressive clarity. Another point: German expressionism is characterized by a predilection for excessive states-delirium, madness. What I'm calling expressionism in Janacek has nothing to do with such one-dimensionality: it is an enormously. rich emotional range, a dizzyingly tight, transitionless juxtaposition of tenderness and brutality, fury and peace.

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I find the beautiful Sonata for Violin and Piano (1921) and the "Fairy Tale" for Violoncello and Piano (1910). The Diary of a Man Who Disappeared, for piano, tenor, alto, and three female voices (1919). And then, the works of his very last years; his creativity explodes; never before had he been so free as he was in his seventies, overflowing with humor and invention; the Glagolitic Mass (1926): like no other: it is more an orgy than a mass; and it is fascinating. From the same time, the Sextet for Winds (1924), the Nursery Rhymes (1927),

and two works for piano and various instruments that I especially love despite rarely satisfactory performances: the Capriccio (1926) and the Concertino (1925).

I count five recordings of works for piano solo: the Sonata (1905) and two cycles: "On an Overgrown Path" (1902) and "In the Mists" (1912); these beautiful works are always grouped on one disc that is nearly always (unfortunately) filled out by other, minor pieces from his "prehistory." Incidentally, pianists in particular get Janacek wrong, as to both spirit and structure: they nearly all of them succumb to a pret-tied-up romanticizing: by softening the brutal aspect of this music, by ignoring its forte markings and by throwing themselves into the delirium of a nearly systematic rubato. (Piano music is particularly undefended against rubato. It is actually difficult to arrange for rhythmic inaccuracy with an orchestra. But the pianist is all by himself. His fearsome soul can rampage with no control and no constraint.)

I pause at the term "romanticize":

Janacek's expressionism is not an exaggerated extension of Romantic sentimentality. On the contrary, it is one historical option for moving out of Romanticism. An option very different from the one Stravinsky chose: unlike him, Janacek did not reproach the Romantics for having talked about feelings; he reproached them for having falsified them; for having substituted sentimental gesticulation ("a Romantic lie," Rene Girard [1] calls it) for the unmediated truth of the emotions. He has a passion for the passions, but still more for the precision he musters to express them. Stendhal, not Hugo. Which involves breaking away from Romantic music, from its spirit, from its hypertrophied sonorities (Janacek's economy of sound shocked everyone in his time), from its structure.

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I pause at the term "structure":

– whereas Romantic music sought to impose emotional unity on a given movement, Janacek's musical structure is based on unusually frequent alternations of different, even contradictory, emotional fragments within a single piece, a single movement;

– corresponding to this emotional diversity is a diversity of tempi and meters, which also alternate unusually often;

– the coexistence of many contradictory emotions in a very limited space makes for a semantics that is brand new (what astonishes and fascinates is the unexpected juxtaposition of emotions). The coexistence of emotions is horizontal (they follow one another) but also (even more unusual) vertical (they sound simultaneously as a polyphony of emotions). For example: at the same time, we hear a nostalgic melody, beneath it a furious ostinato motif, and above it another melody, which sounds like cries. If the performer doesn't understand that all these lines have equal semantic importance and that therefore none of them should be made into mere accompaniment, into an impressionistic murmur, he is missing the structure characteristic of Janacek's music.

The permanent coexistence of contradictory emotions gives Janacek's music its dramatic quality; dramatic in the most literal sense of the term: this music does not evoke a narrator telling a tale; rather, it evokes a stage set on which many different characters are simultaneously present, speaking, confronting each other; the seed of this dramatic space is often to be found within a single melodic motif. As in the first measures of the Piano Sonata:

The forte motif of sixteenth notes in the fourth measure, still part of the melodic theme developed in the preceding measures (it consists of the same intervals), at the same time forms its harsh emotional opposite. Some measures later, we see how much the brutality of this "secessionist" motif contradicts the elegiac melody it comes from:

In the following measure, the two melodies, the original and the "secessionist," come together; not in an emotional harmony, but in a contradictory polyphony of the emotions, the way yearning tears and rebellion can come together:

In their desire to lay an emotional uniformity on these measures, all the pianists whose recordings I could find at the record shop neglect the sudden forte Janacek marked in the fourth measure; thus they strip the "secessionist" motif of its brutal character and Janacek's music of all of the inimitable tension that makes it recognizable (if it is properly understood) instantly, from its very first notes.

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The operas: I don't find The Excursions of Mr. Broucek in the record bins and I don't miss it, as I consider this work rather a failure; all the others are here, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras: Destiny (written in 1904, whose versified, catastrophically naive libretto and even its music, coming after Jenufa, represent a distinct regression); then five masterpieces that I admire unreservedly: Katia Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Affair; and Jenufa: Sir Charles Mackerras has the immeasurable merit of hav-

ing finally (in 1982, after sixty-six years!) rid that opera of the arrangement that was imposed on it in Prague in 1916. Still more brilliant a success, I think, is his revision of the score of From the House of the Dead. Thanks to Mackerras, we became aware (in 1980, after fifty-two years!) how much the adapters' arrangements had weakened this opera. Restored to its original form, wherein it regained all its spare and strange sonority (poles apart from Romantic symphon-ism), From the House of the Dead emerges alongside Berg's Wozzeck as the truest, the greatest opera of our dark century.

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An insoluble practical difficulty: in Janacek's operas, the charm of the vocal parts does not lie only in the beauty of the melodies but lies also in the psychological meaning (always an unexpected meaning) that the melody confers not on a scene as a whole but on each phrase, each word sung. But how to sing it in Berlin or in Paris? In Czech (Mackerras's solution), the listener will hear only meaningless syllables, gain no understanding of the psychological subtleties present at every melodic turn. In translation, then, as was done when these operas started their international career? That too is problematic: the French language, for example, would not tolerate the stress put on the first syllable of Czech words, and in French the intonation would take on an entirely different psychological meaning.

(There is something poignant if not tragic in the fact that Janacek should have concentrated most of his innovative powers on opera of all things, thus putting himself at the mercy of the most conservative bourgeois audience imaginable. Moreover: his originality lies in an unprecedented revaluation of the sung word, meaning specifically the Czech word, which is incomprehensible in ninety-nine percent of the theaters in the world. It's difficult to imagine a greater self-imposed accumulation of obstacles. His operas are the most beautiful homage ever paid the Czech language. Homage? Yes. Homage in the shape of a sacrifice. He immolated his universal music on the altar of a nearly unknown language.)

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A question: If music is a supranational language, is the semantics of speech intonations also supranational in nature? Or not at all? Or at least to some degree? Problems that fascinated Janacek. So much so that in his last will and testament he bequeathed nearly all his money to the University of Brno to underwrite research in spoken language (its rhythms, its intonations, its semantics). But as we know, people don't give a damn about wills and testaments.

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Sir Charles Mackerras's admirable fidelity to Janacek's work means: grasping and defending what is essential. Aiming for the essential is, indeed, Janacek's artistic ethic; its rule being: only absolutely necessary (seman-

ticallv necessary) notes have a right to exist; from which follows an extreme spareness in orchestration. By ridding the scores of their imposed additions, Mackerras restored that spareness and thus made clearer the Janacek aesthetic.

But there is also another, an opposite, kind of fidelity that takes the form of a passion to collect everything an author leaves behind him. Since in his lifetime every author has already tried to make public everything essential, the garbage-can scavengers are devotees of the unessential.

A perfect example of the scavenger spirit shows in the recording of the pieces for piano and violin or cello (ADDA 581136/37). On this two-disc set, minor or worthless pieces (folk music transcriptions, abandoned variants, juvenilia, sketches) take up some fifty minutes-a third of the time-and are scattered among the full-scale compositions. For example, there is six and a half minutes of music written to accompany gymnastic exercises. 0 composers, control yourselves when pretty ladies from a gym come to ask a little favor! Your good turn will outlive you-as a laughingstock!

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I go on looking through the bins. I search in vain for certain beautiful orchestral works of Janacek's mature years ("The Fiddler's Child,"1912; "The Ballad of Blanik," 1920), his cantatas (especially: Amarus, 1898), and some compositions from the time when his style was taking shape, works notable for their moving

and unparalleled simplicity: Pater Noster (1901), Ave Maria (1904). The most important and serious lack here is his choral works; for in our century there is nothing in this genre to equal the four masterpieces of Janacek's great period: "Marycka Magdonova"(1906), "Schoolmaster Halfar" (1906), "The Seventy Thousand" (1909), "The Wandering Madman" (1922): works of diabolic technical difficulty, they were excellently performed in Czechoslovakia; those recordings must surely exist on old pressings from the Czech firm Supraphon, but for years now these have been impossible to find.

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The balance sheet, then, is not entirely bad, but it is not good either. With Janacek this was so from the beginning. Jenufa reached the world's stages twenty years after it was written. Too late. For after twenty years the polemical character of an aesthetic disappears, and then its novelty is no longer discernible. That is why Janacek's music is so often badly understood, and so badly performed; its historic meaning is blurred; it seems unclassifiable; like a beautiful garden laid out just next door to History; the question of its place in the evolution (better: in the genesis) of modern music doesn't even arise.

If in the case of Broch, of Musil, of Gombrowicz, and in a certain sense of Bartok, delay in recognition is due to historic catastrophes (Nazism, war), but in Janacek's case it was his small nation that completely took over the role of the catastrophes.

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Small nations. The concept is not quantitative; it describes a situation; a destiny: small nations haven't the comfortable sense of being there always, past and future; they have all, at some point or another in their history, passed through the antechamber of death; always faced with the arrogant ignorance of the large nations, they see their existence perpetually threatened or called into question; for their very existence is a question.

Most of the small European nations became free and independent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus they have their own evolutionary rhythm. For the arts, this historical asynchrony has often been a fruitful thing, as it made for the curious telescoping of different eras: for instance, Janacek and Bartok were both ardent participants in the national struggle of their peoples; that is their nineteenth-century side: an extraordinary sense of reality, an attachment to the working classes and to popular arts, a more spontaneous rapport with the audience; these qualities, already gone from the arts in the large countries, here merged with the aesthetic of modernism in a surprising, inimitable, felicitous marriage.

The small nations form "another Europe," whose evolution runs in counterpoint with that of the large nations. An observer can be fascinated by the often astonishing intensity of their cultural life. This is the advantage of smallness: the wealth in cultural events is on a "human scale'; everyone can encompass that wealth, can participate in the totality of cultural life; this is why, in its best moments, a small nation can bring to mind life in an ancient Greek city.

That potential for everyone's participation in everything can also bring to mind something else: the family; a small nation resembles a big family and likes to describe itself that way. In the language of the smallest European people, in Icelandic, the term for "family" is fjolskylda; the etymology is eloquent: skylda means "obligation"; fjol means "multiple." Family is thus "a multiple obligation." Icelanders have a single word for "family ties": fjolskyldubond: "the cords (bond) of multiple obligations." Thus in the big family that is a small country, the artist is bound in multiple ways, by multiple cords. When Nietzsche noisily savaged the German character, when Stendhal announced that he preferred Italy to his homeland, no German or Frenchman took offense; if a Greek or a Czech dared to say the same thing, his family would curse him as a detestable traitor.

Secluded behind their inaccessible languages, the small European nations (their life, their history, their culture) are very ill known; people think, naturally enough, that this is the principal handicap to international recognition of their art. But it is the reverse: what handicaps their art is that everything and everyone (critics, historians, compatriots as well as foreigners) hooks the art onto the great national family portrait photo and will not let it get away. Gombrowicz: to no purpose (and with no competence either), foreign commentators struggle to explain his work by discoursing on the Polish nobility, on the Polish Baroque, etc., etc. As Lakis Proguidis writes, [2] they "Polonize" him, "re-Polonize" him, push him back into the small context of the national. However, it is not familiarity with the Polish nobility but familiarity with the international modern novel (that is, with the large context) that will bring us to understand the originality and, hence, the value of Gombrowiczs novels.

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Ah, small nations. Within that warm intimacy, each envies each, everyone watches everyone. "Families, I hate you!" And still another line from Gide: "There is nothing more dangerous for you than your own family, your own room, your own past… You must leave them." Ibsen, Strindberg, Joyce, Seferis knew this. They spent a large part of their lives abroad, away from the family's power. For Janacek, that ingenuous patriot, this was inconceivable. And he paid the price.

Of course, all modern artists have had experience with hatred and incomprehension from the public; but they were also surrounded by disciples, by theoreticians, by performers who from the beginning were defending them and promulgating the authentic idea of their art. In Brno, in a province where he spent his whole life, Janacek too had his faithful followers, some performers who were often admirable (the Janacek Quartet was among the last heirs to this tradition) but whose influence was weak. From the early years of the century, official Czech musicology disdained him. Knowing no other musical gods but Smetana, nor other laws than the Smetanesque, the national ideologues were irritated by his otherness. The pope of Prague musicology, Professor Nejedly, who late in his life, in 1948, became minister and omnipotent ruler of culture in Stalinized Czechoslovakia, took with him into his bellicose senility only two great passions: Smetana worship and Janacek vilification. The most useful support of Janacek's lifetime came from Max Brod; between 1918 and 1928 Brod translated all Janacek's operas into German, thereby opening frontiers to them and delivering them from the exclusive power of the jealous family. In 1924 he wrote the first monograph on Janacek; but Brod was not Czech, and thus the first Janacek monograph was in German. The second was in French, published in Paris in 1930. The first complete monograph in Czech only appeared thirty-nine years after Brod's. [3] Franz Kafka compared Brod's campaign for Janacek to the one for Dreyfus earlier-a startling comparison that indicates the degree of hostility leveled at Janacek in his own country. From 1903 to 1916, the National Theater of Prague persistently turned away his first opera, Jenufa. In Dublin at the same time, from 1905 to 1914, Joyces countrymen refused publication of his first book of prose, Dubliners, in 1912 even burning the proofs. Janacek's story differs from Joyce's in the perversity of its outcome: he was forced to see the premiere of Jenufa directed by the conductor who for fourteen years had dismissed him, who for fourteen years had had only contempt for his music. He was obliged to be grateful. After that humiliating victory (the score was reddened with corrections, deletions, additions), he eventually came to be tolerated in Bohemia. I say "tolerated." If a family doesn't succeed in annihilating its unloved son, it humiliates him with maternal indulgence. The common view in Bohemia, meant as favorable, tears him out of the context of modern music and immures him in local concerns: passion for folklore, Moravian patriotism, admiration for Woman, for Nature, for Russia, for Slavitude, and other nonsense. Family, I hate you. Not a single important musicological study analyzing the aesthetic newness of his work has to this day been written by any of his compatriots. There is no significant school of Janacek interpretation, which might have made his strange aesthetic intelligible to the world. No strategy for making his music known. No complete recorded edition of his works. No complete edition of his theoretical and critical writings.

And yet that little nation has never had any artist greater than he.

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Let us go on. I consider the last decade of his life: his country independent, his music at last applauded, himself loved by a young woman; his works become more and more bold, free, merry. A Picasso-like old age. In the summer of 1928, his beloved and her two

children come to see him in his little country house. The children wander off into the forest, he goes looking for them, runs every which way, catches cold and develops pneumonia, is taken to the hospital, and, a few days later, dies. She is there with him. From the time I was fourteen, I have heard the gossip that he died making love on his hospital bed. Not very plausible but, as Hemingway liked to say, truer than the truth. What better coronation for the wild euphoria that was his late age?

And it is also proof that within his national family there were, after all, people who loved him. For that legend is a bouquet set upon his grave.