A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Janáček
My articles on Beethoven awakened a memory of a visit in the 1980s to Czechoslovakia, and this in turn has reminded me that any survey of the great vocal composers would not be complete without one on Leoš Janáček.
This enigmatic Czech composer was born in Hukvaldy in Moravia in 1854, the son of a schoolteacher. His parents wanted him to follow the family tradition, but his musical talents soon came to the fore, and at the age of 20 he enrolled at the Prague Organ School, and soon fell out with his teachers. This was to be a continual theme in his life, as he seems to have been incapable of getting on with either teachers or authority figures in general. After graduating (having been expelled and then reinstated), he returned to Brno, capital of Moravia, where he had been at school. For many years, he combined music teaching with choir training in Brno, interspersed with periods of study in Leipzig and Vienna, where he fell out with his teachers again.
Back in Brno he married one of his pupils, Zdenka Schulzová, was appointed Director of the Organ School, and returned to teaching, training, conducting and collecting folk songs. His particular interest in Moravian folk tales and music began to take over his life, and he was the spearhead of a movement to find and preserve old folklore. This fascination with the past meant that his composing, which was becoming more important to him, was at odds with the new German school of composition, with Wagner as its head. He was heavily influenced at this time by Smetana and Dvořak and had not yet developed the sound world for which he became famous. In fact, one of the most important elements in his eventual success is that he was completely unknown as a composer, outside Moravia, until 1916, when his opera ‘Jenůfa’ was produced in Prague to ecstatic reviews when he was 62!
‘Jenůfa’ had actually been written much earlier, in 1903/4, after the death of his daughter, Olga, the second of his children to die. Children’s deaths were much more common in the past, before the advent of modern medicine, but still Olga’s death seems to have affected Janáček considerably, and the opera’s grim story of infanticide and redemption seems to have come from a deeply traumatised composer. He wrote his own libretto, based on the play, ‘JejíPastorkyňa’ (‘Her stepdaughter’) by Gabriela Preissová, and the opera was first performed in Brno in 1904. It was reasonably well-received, but the composer failed to get the National Theatre in Prague to put it on and accepted grudgingly that he was a provincial composer and nothing else. One of the people he had disagreed with earlier, the composer Karel Kovařovic, had become director of the National Theatre, and was responsible for thwarting Janáček’ s ambitions. Yet again his antagonistic nature had worked against him. In the years leading up to the First World War, he seems to have also had a propensity for falling in love, mainly with younger women, and so his personal and professional life at this time could be said to be somewhat shambolic! Critical opinion seems to suggest that Olga’s death de-stabilised him, both personally and musically. The musical bit was to posterity’s advantage, but not to those around him.
I have few personal regrets about missed opportunities in my career, but, having discovered in the research for this article (yes, there is some!) that my old mentor at the Guildhall School back in the late 70s and early 80s, Vilem Tausky, was a pupil of Janáček’ s, I would love to have talked to him at length about his experiences of the composer. Tausky was an old man by the time I worked with him (he was the main conductor at Guildhall), but I am sure his stories would have been interesting, although vague. He liked me (always a good thing) but apparently, a couple of years after I left the college, he would come into rehearsals, look around and exclaim in confusion “Ver is Brian?”
He did, however, leave written accounts of his dealings with the composer, which reveal him as strict and uncompromising as a teacher, with a staccato way of speaking, quite similar to the speech patterns of his operas. Recently, I have made the acquaintance of the Czech Consul in Edinburgh, Paul Milar, whose father knew Janáček well in Brno, and his stories are fascinating.
So it was that in 1916 Kovařovic relented, on condition that he be allowed to “revise and correct” the music, and he put on ‘Jenůfa’ at the National Theatre in Prague, to great acclaim. Janáček was a star at 62, and his life changed dramatically. The director’s changes to the score were great, but the composer was happy to see success on an international scale.
The opera is pretty grim, a tale of small-town bitterness and envy, full of sadistic characters and shocking events, with a sort of happy end, after the murder of the heroine’s illegitimate baby. There are excellent roles for most voices, two main tenor parts, a soprano heroine, older women roles for the lower female voices, and - for the bass, the extremely small part of the mayor! However, I did get to sing it, for the first time, at the Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam, one of my favourite cities, with an excellent cast. The insignificance of the role gave me plenty time to explore that fabulous city, and the surrounding area, although world events were to make that period even more memorable. On September 11th, 2001, some of us were strolling round the outside of the opera house, when people started to get agitated and wave their arms. We sauntered inside to the canteen, where the TV revealed to us the awful events of that terrible day in New York. We watched in horror as the pictures kept appearing of airliners crashing into buildings, and those buildings collapsing into rubble, with people jumping out of 40th floor windows. No one knew what was going on or how it would end, and the cameras kept rolling, in a way that, now, after so many horrors, would be cut instantly. Those pictures were never seen again, but we watched in that Amsterdam canteen with shocked intensity as terrible events flashed before our eyes. Because it has become known as 9/11 (using the weird American system of writing dates), people forget that it was on a pleasant autumn day that all this happened. Needless to say, all rehearsals were cancelled that day, and, I think, the next, but it did serve to remind us of how ghastly humans can be, and maybe to understand the world of Jenůfa better?
After the success of the opera in Prague, Janáček’ s private life became more complicated as he began a relationship with one of the singers, Gabriela Horváthová, which led to the attempted suicide of his wife, Zdenka, and a strained marriage for the rest of his life.
In 1917, he met Kamila Stősslová, who was 26 and married, and thus began a new extraordinary relationship, about which we know a great deal, due to the over 700 letters he sent her! She seems to have given him little overt encouragement, except the occasional sweet remark, but was with him at his death in 1928. Nonetheless, this obsession with Kamila resulted in the inspiration for three of his most important operatic heroines, Katya Kabanova, The Vixen and Emilia Marty, as well as his string quartet no 2 (subtitled ‘Intimate Letters’), and was responsible for the amazing outpouring of music in his final decade.
I was due to sing Dikoj in ‘Katya Kabanova’ in my ‘triumphant return’ to Scottish Opera in spring 2019, but Fate intervened in the shape of a fractured vertebra, and I had to cancel. This was a double shame, as it would have been the first time I had sung with Scottish Opera since 1985, and the first time I had sung in ‘Katya’, another of Janáček’ s grim but wonderful operas. It is interesting that the Czech composer’s contemporary, Giacomo Puccini, also wrote operas most of which can only be described as nasty, in terms of plot and characterisation. Tragedy and sorrow run through the works of both composers, although, in ‘Gianni Schicchi’, Puccini did at least, come up with a comic masterpiece. ‘Katya’ is a tale of illicit love and small-town meanness, which has some beautiful music. It has been referred to as the first of Janáček’ s mature operas, premiered in Brno in 1921, when he was 67.
My favourite opera of this mature period, in fact, my favourite of all his operas is ‘Příhody lišky Bystroušky’, commonly known as ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’, premiered also in Brno in 1924. We must briefly mention the mistranslation of the title into English. The direct translation is ‘Tales of the Vixen Sharp Ears’, but somehow, via the German version and misunderstandings generally, the vixen has become little and cunning. Bystroušky can mean sly, but only out of context, and most commentators think the composer meant for her to be sharp-eared and sharp-witted. She does, however, have a great propensity for fooling people and other animals, so it’s maybe not such a bad translation after all.
The inspiration for the opera came from an illustrated serialised novella by Rudolf Tĕsnohlídek, ‘Liška Bystrouška’ which appeared in the newspaper, ‘Lidové Noviny’ in 1920. Having decided to make an opera from the comic book, Janáček met the author and also made a study of some of the animals and birds involved in the story. With his encyclopaedic knowledge of Moravian folk songs and tunes, he produced a work unlike any other in the repertoire, where animals and humans interact to each other’s benefit but also detriment. Set in a small community deep in the Moravian forest, it tells a heart-warming but also heart-breaking story of a young vixen, her love, her family and eventually her death at the hands of the Gamekeeper. Like an embryonic Czech version of the’ Lion King’, it describes the great cycle of life from birth to death, and shows how small actions can have huge consequences.
Janáček, by now 70 years old, was able to bring a lifetime of life experience to this apparently simple tale, and, using the speech rhythms of the Czech language, he produced a small miracle. The humans talk in a strange staccato way (apparently reminiscent of the composer’s own speech style) which is quite hard to get used to, especially in a language so full of semi vowels and semi consonants. Only very occasionally does a singer get a chance to pour out big lyrical phrases, and the minor characters, never! I sang the role of the Priest in a lovely production at the Bregenz Festival in Austria in 2003, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. My old friend Peter Coleman-Wright sang the Gamekeeper, wonderfully, and we had a most splendid stay beside Lake Constance, in a fabulous summer. A scene in a village pub provides the main human interest in the story, where the Gamekeeper, Schoolmaster and Priest interact, regretting their past lives, and we see the two stalwarts of village society stumble home in alcoholic bemusement, not for a laugh but to gain insights into their humble and humdrum lives. One of Janáček’ s most magical moments comes later in the opera, where we return to the pub, but without the priest, who has moved elsewhere to avoid controversy. The two remaining characters ask after him, and in a few bars of music, the composer sums up every kind of sadness, nostalgia and yearning possible. It is one of the saddest bits of music I know, and most people will miss it, but for me, it represents the power of music to describe emotion better than anything else.
I first saw and heard ‘Vixen’ years ago, in a production which did the rounds of all the provincial British companies, by the brilliant David Pountney, with the Welsh soprano Helen Field singing the Vixen. It remains in my memory as one of the best productions of any opera I have seen.
Sadly, these have been my only experiences of singing the music of Janáček, but I hope perhaps one day to sing in his amazing Glagolitic Mass (concert promoters, take note!). This mass, sung in old church Slavonic, written in the Glagolitic alphabet, a forerunner to modern Cyrillic, was premiered in Brno in 1927, the year before the composer’s death, and is an extraordinary work, opening and closing with fabulous fanfares. It is unlike anything else and I’d love to sing it.
If you don’t know the music of Leoš Janáček, I advise you to give it a try. Don’t be put off by its seeming modernity and the unfamiliar language. It will repay the extra effort, and you will discover a true and unique master. Maybe start with the instrumental Sinfonietta of 1926. There are lots of excellent opera recordings available, and if you look very hard online, you might find my recording of the ‘Cunning Little Vixen’, taken from a live broadcast on Austrian radio, and filed away under the ÖRF label. It has been fun to write this Blog, but I will be delighted not to have to stop at every second word to insert Czech accents, of which there are many. One final plea: the composer’s name is pronounced with the accent on the second a, the one written á, and it warms the heart of every pedant if you pronounce it properly!
