The Czech lands produced many composers over the centuries. Among the best known, especially to performers, are two generations of the Benda family, the first, Jan Benda, was born in 1686. Others are the father and sons Stamitz, the senior born in 1717. These and others were not only composers but accomplished performers as well. They traveled and performed throughout Western Europe settling wherever they could obtain employment.
In more recent history, the nineteenth century Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) and Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904) attained international stature during their lifetimes and to the present. Both incorporated the musical idiom of their native Czech tradition in their compositions. Smetana is best known for his opera The Bartered Bride and the tone poem My Fatherland. One section, The Moldau (Vltava), is a portrayal of the river that flows through Prague.
Antonin Dvořák, best known of all Czech composers is, who is known for his Romantic and very lyrical style, incorporated national themes in his works. His conducting tours throughout Europe and a lengthy engagement in New York added to his prominence internationally. He served as director of New York's National Conservatory of Music and as a teacher of composition. Dvořák spent four years (1891-1894) in the U.S. with periodic visits home to Bohemia. While in the U.S. he enjoyed summering in the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa. There he composed two superb works, his ninth (and last) symphony, the New World, and his 'American' quartet, opus 96. Much as he enjoyed the U.S. hospitality, homesickness overcame him and he returned to his homeland before completing his New York contract.
Dvořák's vast compositional output includes a great favorite, the Cello Concerto opus104 (begun in the U.S.), nine symphonies, symphonic poems, Slavonic dances, countless songs, chamber music, a Requiem and nine operas. Rusalka, a fairy tale opera, is the most popular and is still performed today.
LEOŠ JANÁČEK (1854-1928)
Janáček can be considered a 'late bloomer'. Most of his best works were composed
in the last ten years of his life, during the first quarter of the twentieth
century. In fact, wide spread recognition did not come until those last ten
years. He is therefore considered a twentieth-century composer. Ironically the
woman who became his muse during those years and was therefore responsible for
his success, was also indirectly responsible for his death.
Janáček was born into a family of teachers and musicians in the village of Hukvaldy near Brno, the capital of Moravia. The Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia were at that time under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the tenth child in a family of fourteen (only nine survived their first year, which was common in that era). Even though poor, the family was always involved with music in their home and community. Later in life, Janáček said that he "simply had music around him from the cradle". By age eleven, his father being very ill, he was sent to the St. Augustin monastery in Brno (where Gregor Mendel did his study on genetics). Under the tutelage of a former student of his father's, now rector (principal) of the monastery's school, young Leoš obtained a scholarship for all his studies. After his father's early death, the rector, Father Křížkovský, took Leoš under his wing and guided his education. Křížkovský, a learned musician, choirmaster and composer is considered a co-founder of modern Czech national music. The rector's influence laid the foundation for the nationalistic bent in Janáček's compositions.
Upon graduation, having excelled in all musical studies, especially in organ playing and choir conducting, Janáček obtained several conducting positions in Brno. At this time, ca. 1872, he began composing works for choral groups. He undertook further musical studies including composition in Prague, Vienna and Leipzig, never finishing a course. He was always dissatisfied with the quality of instruction and felt that it did not meet his needs. He returned to Brno where he was to live his whole life.
In Brno he resumed his choral directing, founded several choral groups still in existence today and embarked on a teaching career. He also found time to form the Brno Organ School in 1882 which later became the Czech Conservatory of Music. Composing in earnest was also becoming a major and favored occupation. He was still searching and developing his compositional voice. Musical patterns of speech intrigued him. He frequently traveled into the countryside collecting folk songs, notating various peoples' natural speech patterns and the melodic shape of natural sounds. Animal cries, wind, water and storm sounds were all faithfully noted in his journal. All these sounds helped establish his musical style. His theories of harmony were original, particularly the sudden shift in key in many of his works. He definitely was, and still is, considered a composer of startling originality. While increasing his compositional output, he continued teaching as a means of livelihood until his 64th year. Not until the last ten years of his life would his compositions bring adequate financial rewards.
In 1881, Janáček married one of his piano students, 15 year old Zdeňka Schulzová, twelve years his junior. An only child (until the birth of a brother around the time she gave birth to her first child), Zdeňka was an intelligent, well educated, somewhat spoiled young woman. A few differences signaled a troubled future for the couple. Zdeňka and Leoš came from vastly different background. Her family was quite well off, willingly helpful to the newlyweds. They had in fact been acquainted with Leoš for some time prior to the young couple's marriage and had arranged several important introductions for Leoš to help his career. Janáček came from an educated but poor, lower class family, which wounded his pride. Another problem was the difference in their ethnic backgrounds. Zdeňka's family originated in Austria while Leoš, an ardent Czech nationalist, was determined to see his homeland emerge from under Austro-Hungarian rule. All this created countless frictions between Leoš his in-laws and Zdeňka and contributed to their marital problems.
Their daughter Olga was born in 1882 and son Vladimir six years later. Much to both parents' sorrow, the son died at two years of age and Olga at twenty-one. Janáček was devastated by the children's deaths, especially Olga's. She had become a cherished companion and sounding board for her father. Any bonds that had held Leoš and Zdeňka together were severely damaged, but they continued to live together in the house built for them on the Music Conservatory grounds in Brno.
Janáček had a roving eye and frequently became infatuated with younger women. Whether it led to serious affairs is open to question, but these 'acquaintances' helped inspire many of his works. In 1915 he met his muse, thirty-eight years his junior, a married woman, Kamila Stösslová. The Janáčeks and Stössls became friends. At first the two couples visited each other and even traveled together. The friendship ended due to Zdeňka's perception of the too friendly behavior of Leoš toward Kamila. Eventually Leoš actually developed a passionate attachment to Kamila which was to last until his death. What her husband, an art dealer, thought of it is not clear. Kamila seems to have been a passive, almost indifferent bystander to this infatuation. She was, however, the inspiration for the best works during his last ten years. In the hundreds of letters he wrote to Kamila, he not only wrote of his love for her but his thoughts, hopes and plans for his works. Most of these letters survive and have been published. Janáček even wrote a string quartet named Intimate Letters. In essence he considered Kamila his idealized wife. In one letter to Kamila he wrote: "between you and me there is a world of beauty, but all is nothing but fantasy". Kamila answered few of the letters and then rather impersonally. She however enjoyed the attention of a "famous man".
In 1928, while vacationing in his native village with the Stössl family, Janáček, Kamila and one of her young sons went for a walk. The boy strayed and disappeared. The 74 year-old Janáček caught a chill while searching for the child. Shortly thereafter he developed pneumonia and died on August 12, 1928. Zdeňka was not at his side.
Janáček's compositions number in the hundreds. Several have been lost and others went unfinished. The first work that brought him wide recognition was his opera Jenůfa, completed in 1903. He kept revising it until 1916. First performed in Brno in 1904, it was well received. However, wider acceptance of this work eluded him since he had offended the conductor of the Prague Opera with a published negative concert review. Jenůfa was finally prèmiered in Prague in 1916. It received high acclaim there as well as in Vienna, Berlin and other European cities.
Max Brod, a prominent Prague writer and critic and ardent admirer of Janáček's works, translated all of his opera into German. It was customary to present opera in the language of the presenting theatre. Having his operas translated gave Janáček access to large audience outside of his native country.
It must be stressed that operas performed in the composer's intended language rather than in translation offer a far truer sound, matching words and music. This is especially true of Janáček's style of composition. Of his nine operas, two are still in opera houses' repertory and two others are performed occasionally; the rest are heard mainly in the Czech Republic.
Jenůfa and a later work, Kát'a Kabanová, could be called verismo operas. Janáček had a predilection for choosing literary sources for his libretti either from real life situations or from fantasy which sometimes bordered on the supernatural. He handles people in emotional conflicts in a realistic way. To quote Janáček, "Don't look in dramatic music only for melodies — opera must be the stuff of which real life is made". The use of motifs for his characters interwoven with folk melodies are prevalent in most of his operas. As always, his interest in "speech melodies" that mark the Janáček sound makes his music easily identifiable. Orchestration, relatively sparse and simple in his early works, increased incrementally with each work, still distinctively and lushly Janáček's own sound.
Thus Jenůfa and Kát'a Kabanová belong to the reality genre. The first deals with a gamut of emotions among simple folk in a village; love, jealousy, honor and honesty drive the characters as Janáček visualized them in a Moravian village, familiar surroundings for him. In Kát'a, based on a play by Russian nineteenth-century writer Alexander Ostrovsky, The Storm, Janáček deals with the emotional conflicts of a middle class family of the time. He portrays the older characters as stereotypes of the merchant classes, ruthless and hypocritical. The young men, one, Tichon, dominated by his mother, takes refuge in drink and is unable to stand up for his young wife. The other young man, Boris, can not escape from his uncle's oppression. The young wife, Kát'a, unable to have a rewarding marriage with her husband, makes a fatal decision that leads to her death. In the end, propriety and appearances take precedent over personal happiness and freedom.
Janáček's operas The Cunning Little Vixen and The Makropulos Case deal with fantasy. Vixen, based on a cartoon serial character from a daily newspaper, is a delightful story. Human characters and animals living in the woods coexist integrated in one another's lives and deal with life's cyclic problems. The Makropulos Case, written by Czech author Karel Capek (also the author of RUR where the word robot was first introduced) is about a glamorous woman who had lived unchanged for over three hundred years due to a formula developed by her father. She is desperately looking for the formula in order to prolong her life again, but finally realizes that she is bored with life, having experienced all there is, and actually wishes to die. Janáček's final opera, From the House of the Dead, is based on a story by Russian writer Dostoyevsky. Janáček had a great affinity for Russian literature, as a matter of fact for most things Russian. His antipathy to what he felt was oppression under Austro-Hungarian rule turned him into a Russophile. From the House of the Dead is a narrative of life in a Siberian prison camp. An all male cast relates the reasons for being imprisoned and the good and evil that each prisoner visualizes in his life and imprisonment. Janáček did not live to see the première of this opera in Brno in 1930.
Four other operas with widely differing themes were also written and presented between 1887 and 1917. Other well known works from his output that are frequently performed are: Taras Bulba, a rhapsody for full orchestra; Glagolitic Mass, a cantata; the song cycle Diary of a Young Man who Vanished; and Sinfonietta, a fanfare-like symphony. Three chamber music pieces are: The 1st String Quartet (Kreutzersonata), 2nd String Quarter (Intimate Letters — a reference to his correspondence with Kamila Stösslová) and the Wind Sextet Suite (Youth). These are but a few from Janáček's vast output. Many dances, songs and choral works plus church music demonstrate the varied spectrum of composition during Janáček's 74 years of life.
U.S. born and Australian raised conductor Sir Charles Mackerras left the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to pursue further conducting studies in Prague in 1947. During his two year stay in the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia at that time) the 22 year-old conductor developed an affinity for Janáček's works and became a passionate promoter of his music. A noted conductor today, his artistry keeps him busy around the globe. Almost single-handedly, Sir Charles has reintroduced Janáček's music wherever his engagements take him. Thus Janáček's works are now performed in music venues all over the world.