Although I received piano and guitar lessons when I was little, and have two or three pieces of pop music journalism under my belt, I’ve never pursued the subject as anything more than an enthusiastic hobby. My lack of technical expertise means Ted Gioia’s admonitions are never far from my mind – much as I like and admire many of the “lifestyle” music critics he rails against, there’s little I could add to their ranks and even less to the learned likes of Leonard Feather and Withrop Sargeant.
It’s perhaps then unusual that I find myself writing about a classical composer, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Leoš Janáček today and wanted to get some thoughts onto paper. He has a strangeness to him as a figure and an artist that warrants more than daydreamy musings, so you’ll have to forgive my idiosyncratic and probably musically illiterate perspective.
First of all, that Janáček was born in 1854 scarcely seems possible, because the pieces most associated with his legacy feel so modern. And, indeed, they were: Jenufa premiered in Brno on his 50th birthday in 1904, Taras Bulba was completed in 1918, The Cunning Little Vixen appeared in 1924, the Lachian Dances were published in 1925, and the Sinfonietta and the Glagolitic Mass saw the light of day in ‘26 and ‘27 respectively. His work belongs to a different age to the man himself – the year he was born, works by Wagner, Brahms, Berlioz, and Liszt debuted and novels by Dickens, Tolstoy, Tennyson, and Hawthorne were published, yet Janáček’s musical range, complex modal arrangement, incorporation of more “primitive” folk material, an experimentation with speech-derived melodies are all firmly of High Modernist era of the 1920s, the decade he entered his seventies. By contrast, the other giants of that era – Berg, Pound, Bartók, Joyce, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Braque, Eliot, Webern, Kirchner, Woolf, Kafka, Stravinsky, Murnau, von Stroheim – were all born in the 1880s.
(I’m reminded of a curious fact I came upon recently – that Cardinal John Henry Newman, a contemporary influence on both Decadents like Wilde and Modernists like Joyce, was only a few years younger than Keats and Shelley, who feel like they belong to an aesthetic-historical moment universes apart. Keats was born just after the Reign of Terror in France, yet there’s a photograph of Newman hanging in my local church!)
There’s another strong connection between Janáček and literary modernism, of course. After failing to get Jenufa performed in Prague until 1916 (he had managed to incur the wrath of Conservatory conductor Karel Kovařovic by writing a bad review some years before, and even when Kovařovic accepted Jenufa over a decade after its Brno debut it was not without his own revisions to Janáček’s text) the success of the opera in Cologne and Vienna owed much to its championing and German translation by none other than Max Brod. If you know Brod it’s probably as the literary executor of Franz Kafka who refused his friend’s deathbed request to burn his stories and ensured the 20th century was not robbed of its greatest short storyteller.
To my barbaric ear, Janáček’s harmonic language doesn’t sound revelatory or unique. His common chords, 7ths and 9ths and the whole-tone scale, may (as his great English populariser Charles Mackerras said) differ from Debussy’s usage but aren’t innovations in and of themselves. Where he is totally original is in his juxtaposition of those chords and how he spaces them out. We also have strong, sudden bursts of melody, fragmentary and yet powerfully rhythmical. Maybe this derives from his fascination with speech rhythms and patterns, which he obsessively collected from all over Moravia and Bohemia. Even when his daughter Olga was on her deathbed, he sat beside her with a notepad scribbling down her dying susurrations for later use. (Jenufa was dedicated to her memory.) Perhaps a parallel could be drawn with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “discovery” (he insisted, as opposed to invention) of sprung rhythm in English poetry or the alliterative revival of the 14th century Pearl Poet.
Janáček also seems to like to push instruments, whether brass, string, or percussion, to the absolute outer limits of their range. This can make his orchestration sound jarring, but also contributes to the sheer vitality of his later works like the Glagolitic Mass.
Something interesting pertaining to that piece, incidentally: Janáček was a committed atheist, but wrote that piece out of his disdain for contemporary liturgical music and his desire to see it returned to what he saw as its appropriate grandeur. The stormy drama of the Mass which, typical of Janáček’s pan-Slavic obsessions, again incorporates folk inflections and even paganism, is, as he himself put it, “festive, life-affirming, pantheistic, with little of what we could call the ecclesiastical.”
How was Janáček’s late flowering of artistic genius, perhaps paralleled only by Sophocles or Wallace Stevens, achieved? The frisson of unconsummated lust, of course! Or, as we high-minded high art-gobblers like to say, the influence of a muse. Following that long-awaited Prague premiere of Jenufa, he began a relationship with singer Gabriela Horváthová, leading to his long-suffering wife Zdenka’s attempted suicide. (They’d previously separated before following an argument during which Leoš struck her, but had reconciled.) He then met Kamila Stösslová, forty years his junior, who became the unrequited love of his life. From 1917 to his death eleven years later, he wrote over four hundred love letters to Stösslová, and the bulk of his canonical works.
Can we admire a wifebeating philanderer, whose folk-nationalistic sympathies even feel a bit uncomfortably in tune with the malignant decade in central Europe following his death?
Here’s where I think the separation of art from artist is a fool’s errand at best and much more like a sanctimonious liberal hypocrisy. You can’t have one without the other – if Janáček had never met Kamila, given himself over to the extremity of his passions, abandoned his morality and honour for the purpose of artistic creation, we wouldn’t have those bright and brilliantly sui generis works of his last ten years. He would probably only be remembered as a solid Czech composer, barely an advance on the 19th century masters like Smetana and Dvořák. The highly irritating Savonarolas of contemporary cancel culture, who would like us to throw out any artist or performer deemed ‘problematic’ due to their personal lives, are at least more honest than the wheedling sycophants who think you can neatly divorce Wagner the genius from Wagner the tawdry little pamphleteering racist, or Heidegger the central figure of 20th century European philosophy from Heidegger the grubby antisemitic social climber and careerist. You have to take these figures in their totality, warts and wonders and all, to fully understand the legacies they’ve left us.
implicate disorder 