The Operas of Leoš Janáček PDF
Preview The Operas of Leoš Janáček
Frontispiece: The late Dr. Erik Chisholm THE OPERAS OF LEOS JANÄCEK by ERIK CHISHOLM, MUS. DOC. EDIN. ( } DVORAK MEDALLIST OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC PERGAMON PRESS OXFORD - NEW YORK · TORONTO SYDNEY . BRAUNSCHWEIG Pergamon Press Ltd., Headington Hill Hall, Oxford Pergamon Press Inc., Maxwell House, Fairview Park, Elmsford, New York 10523 Pergamon of Canada Ltd., 207 Queen's Quay West, Toronto 1 Pergamon Press (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., 19a Boundary Street, Rushcutters Bay, N.S.W. 2011, Australia Vieweg & Sohn GmbH, Burgplatz 1, Braunschweig Copyright (5; 1971 Pergamon Press Ltd. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Pergamon Press Ud. First edition 1971 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 68-22491 Printed in Hungary This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of without the publisher's consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. 00 012853 X (ilexicover) 08 012854 8 (hard covei^ FOREWORD IN 1947 I sat with my young student wife in the gallery of the National Theatre in Prague, listening for the first time to a Janacek opera. It was Katja Kabanovd, conducted by that greatest of Czech conductors, Vaclav Talich, with whom I was studying at that time, and the cast included several famous Czech singers, such as Bcno Blachut, Marta Krasovâ and Ludmila Cerzinkova. What a revelation this performance was to me! Here was a composer whose very name I hardly knew, who had been dead 20 years, writing an opera in an entirely different idiom from anything I had ever known, who used the human voice and the inflexions of his strange- sounding language in an absolutely original way, and whose instrumentation and harmony produced colours and sounds unlike anything I had heard before. We were so impressed with Katja Kabanovd that we determined to see every possible Janacek opera while we were in Czecho- slovakia. So shortly after the war German composers were not popular, and there was an astonishing wealth of Czechoslovak music to be heard; in fact the selection was greater than it is today. We saw nearly all the Janâéek operas "during that year, sometimes travelling to other towns to see them in several different productions. With every hearing, my admiration for the genius of Janâëek grew. I took vocal scores of several operas of this virtually unknown composer back to London in 1948, and was fortunate in being able to interest Norman Tucker of Sadler's Wells in Janacek's work. Of course, these piano ix X FOREWORD scores gave little idea of what Janaöek's orchestration sounds like, and even one's ecstatic descriptions of Janâéek's operas as " a sort of mixture between Mussorgsky, Bartok, Debussy, Sibelius and Mahler" could not create even to the expert mind much idea of the actual sound of a Janâoek score. Not that Janâéek was particularly "advanced" in his methods of composition—after all, Schoenberg had written Pierrot Lunaire before Janâèek's Katja—but he had the knack of expressing absolutely new ideas with apparently conventional means. I managed to secure a tape of Katja through the B.B.C., and during a playback gave a sort of running commentary to Norman Tucker and Desmond Shaw-Taylor, who had heard a lot about Janâoek, but very little of his actual music! They were as enthusiastic as I had always been, and the first English performance of a Janâoek opera was given on April 10, 1951 at Sadler's Wells (Katja Kabanova). There lias seldom been a time since when a Janâôek opera has not been in the Wells repertory; Rafael Kubelik also brought Jenufa to Covent Garden during his time as Musical Director there, and in more recent years some American companies have taken the plunge. In Germany there have been pretty regular productions of Janâcek, and in the .last few years there have been magnificent productions in Sweden, France, Italy and even South America. Janâoek could now be said to have "arrived" outside his own native land, and there is sufficient interest in the purely operatic side of his output to make Erik Chisholm's book not only welcome but positively overdue. Dr. Chis- holm was a fanatical propagandist for a greater apprecia- tion of Janâcek's art and no-one could have been better qualified than he to write the first comprehensive analysis FOREWORD XI of Janâcek's operas in the English language, indeed one of the few books on this subject in any language. Dr. Chisholm's rather unusual idea of commencing his analytical essays with Janâcek's last opera and working back to his earlier ones seems particularly appropriate in this case, with Janâcek's very unusual musical background and development as an operatic composer, so that we plunge straight into his most mature work. It was also a splendid idea on Dr. Chisholm's part to write a complete thematic analysis of at least one scene from a Janâcek opera, in the Appendix, so that the reader can follow the development and transformation of every small thematic organism, watch the composer's methods as it were under a microscope, and see how these methods lie at the very core of Janâéek's operatic thinking. I am quite sure that all lovers of Janâéek will find this book an essential part of their library, and I hope that it will also awaken the interest of many more who do not yet know the work of this most fascinating of opera com- posers. CHARLES MACKERRAS EDITORIAL NOTE THE problem of transliteration always arises in dealing with languages using many letters or symbols not found in English. Here I have taken expert advice and retained the original Czech form of names, some of which, e.g. Petroviö (pronounced Petrovitch, the c sound being fami- liar to most readers here) or Lujza (Louise), are obvious, while unfamiliar ones like Jan z Rokycan (John ofRoky- can) and Matej (Matthew) are translated in footnotes where they first appear. The name Katja I have taken from the score, although in Czech it can be written as either Kat'a or Kâtâ, but I revert to Kristina because the Krista and Christa of the score are, I think, adopted to save space; she is actually addressed in the text as Kristina. Vec Makropulos is usually translated The Makropulos Affair, "affair" having a wider significance than "case", but as it was an actual legal case in the story, I have adhered to Dr. Chisholm's title, which was also used by Sadler's Wells. Dostoevsky's novel, in Czech Z mrtvého domu (From the House of the Dead), was used exactly by Janacek for his opera, but is often quoted without the "From", and here I have retained Dr. Chisholm's choice which often reads more easily in a discursive text. Czech inverted commas, as often in German, are thus: „Nemâm psa", and exclamation marks precede as well as follow a phrase thus : i... ! I have used the English simpler method. Incidentally, as Miss Margaret Cox points out, the above two-word sentence typifies the Czech characteristic of brevity. Nemam psa means in colloquial xiii XIV EDITORIAL NOTE English "I have not got a dog"—in our shortest form it would be "I have no dog". This characteristic poses prob- lems for those translating Czech libretti into English (or German) for singing; Norman Tucker has proved himself an adept at the task. His evocative references to orchestral effects come straight from the professor rather than from the pedagogue — for instance, the"ostinato chuckling figure", "violins screaming at the top " or a certain " theme gnawing awya in the lower octave ", likewise the " shimmering triplets " and the reference to the idiotic " tidli-tidli figure". And such homely phrases as "amorous goings-ön" and "he makes a pass at her" constantly remind us of Erik the down-to- earth human, the man of humour whose delightful précis of the Osud story is quoted on page 359. The sad fact that Dr. Chisholm's sudden death robbed him of an author's opportunity for a final revision of his book has imposed heavy responsibility on myself as his edi- tor. Many a time while scanning these pages I have longed for his personal clarification or instructions. The 263 musi- cal quotations, all sketched in his own hurried hand and often with barely decipherable alterations or annotations, sometimes even with a misplaced numbering, called not only for reference to vocal scores but also for help from musicians with practical knowledge of the music. The help was readily given by Charles Mackerras, who knows it as both Czech scholar and as a practical opera conductor, also from his colleague David Lloyd-Jones. To both of them I am immensely grateful, especially to Mr. Mackerras for his Foreword. I wish also to acknowledge the fine professional work of Mr. Jack Lugg who, in preparing all these music quota- EDITORIAL NOTE XV tions for the press, discovered he had undertaken a task- more demanding in time and patience than even the transcription of a complete manuscript symphony by one of our least legible composers ! Miss Margaret Cox, an expert in the Czech language and unusually knowledgeable on Czech music, has given invaluable help by going through not only the music and its accompanying lines of text, but also the proofs. I am very grateful for her enthusiasm. In a work of this kind there is always the problem of style. A writer who indulges perhaps in no other musical activity develops a characteristic literary style. Erik Chisholm was a man of immense enthusiasms, white-hot convictions, and tremendous energy. A book like this had to be squeezed in between his lecturing, conducting, administration, and composing. For him it was more important to pour out this information as though he were speaking it to his students, to you and to me: in fact much of it was dictated. He had no chance to polish it, to weigh up the niceties of delicately balanced phrases. I often wonder if he did this with a subconscious knowledge that they would be his last lines spoken on this earth, as indeed they almost proved to be. Knowing him as I did, I can hear his Scots voice speak- ing the text, with his homely but striking allusions, collo- quial phrases, and always with humour and humanity peep- ing through. Therefore I have in the main left his copy as he sent it, making such slight changes here and there as I felt he would have made had he lived to see his proofs —adjustments in words to avoid duplication, corrections to obvious slips in his hurried quotations from the pub- lished scores. Those from the early opera Osud he must have noted in Brno; I have been unable to find singlea copy. XVÎ EDITORIAL NOTE I therefore ask the indulgence of those readers who may find inaccuracies, which, if substantiated, will be adjusted in later reprints; I trust they will not be serious. Dr. Chis- holm has minutely analysed Janacek's scores in the tech- nique he learned with Sir Donald Francis Tovey. As an opera composer and conductor his analyses are unusually perceptive, even though some may occasionally find them pedantic. He believed that the present growing apprecia- tion of these operas justified such treatment, and he died hoping, as does the Publisher, that this may prove to be a valuable reference book for many years to come. K. W.
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