IF I WERE ASKED WHAT FEATURE HAS INDELIBLY WRITTEN my native land into my aesthetic genes, I would not hesitate to answer: the music of Leos Janáček. Biographical coincidences have some role in this: Janáček lived his whole life in Brno, like my father who, as a young pianist, was a member of the enchanted (and isolated) circle of the composer’s connoisseurs and defenders; I came into the world a year after Janáček had left it and, from my earliest childhood, I would hear his music played daily on the piano by my father or by his students; at my father’s funeral in 1971, during that somber period of the Russian occupation, I forbade any orations; only at the crematorium, four musician friends played Janáček’s Second String Quartet.
Four years later I emigrated to France and, shaken by the fate of my country, I talked about its greatest composer on the radio, several times and at length. And later I happily accepted an invitation from a music journal to review recordings of his music made during those years (the early nineties). It was a pleasure, yes, but somewhat spoiled by the incredibly uneven (and sometimes disgraceful) level of the performances. Of all those recordings only two delighted me: the piano works played by Alain Planès and the quartets played by the Berg Quartet of Vienna. To pay them homage (and thereby to inveigh against the others) I tried to define Janáček’s style: “dizzyingly tight juxtaposition of highly contrasting themes that follow rapidly one upon another, without transitions and, often, resonating simultaneously; a tension between brutality and tenderness within an extremely short time span. And yet further: a tension between beauty and ugliness, for Janáček may be one of the rare composers who could pose in their music the problem familiar to great painters: ugliness as the subject of an artwork. (In his quartets, for instance, the passages played sul ponticello scrape and grate, and turn a musical sound into noise.)” But even this wonderful Berg Quartet recording came packaged with a text presenting Janáček in a stupidly nationalist light, calling him a “spiritual disciple of Smetana” (he was the opposite of that!) and reducing his expressivity to the romantic sentimentalism of a bygone time.
That different performances of the same music should have different qualities is quite natural. But with these Janáček disks it was a matter not of flawed rendition but of deafness to his aesthetic! Of a failure to comprehend his particularity! I find that incomprehension revealing, and significant, for it points to a curse that has weighed on the fate of his music. Thus this essay on “the long race of a one-legged runner”:
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Born in 1854 into a poor milieu, son of a village schoolteacher (in a small village), from age eleven on he lived in Brno, a provincial town on the margins of Czech intellectual life whose center was in Prague (which under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was itself merely a provincial town). In such circumstances his artistic development was unbelievably slow: he wrote music from a young age but did not discover his own style until he was nearly forty-five, as he composed Jenůfa, the opera he completed in 1902 and whose first performance took place in a modest Brno theater in 1904; he was fifty years old, and his hair was completely white. Constantly undervalued, nearly unknown, he was to wait through fourteen years of rejection until in 1916 Jenůfa was finally presented in Prague with unexpected success and, to general surprise, brought him immediate renown beyond the borders of his country. He was sixty-two, and the course of his life sped up at a dizzying rate; he had twelve years left to live and he wrote the major part of his work as if in an uninterrupted fever. Invited to all the festivals organized by the International Society for Contemporary Music, he appeared alongside Bartók, Schoenberg, Stravinsky as their brother (a much older brother, but nonetheless a brother).
So who was he? Some provincial character under the spell of folk music, as he was persistently described by the arrogant musicologists of Prague? Or one of the great figures of modern music? And in that case, of which modern music? He belonged to no recognized trend, no group, no school! He was different, and alone.
In 1919 the musicologist Vladimir Helfert became a professor at the Brno University and, fascinated by Janáček, immediately set about writing a huge monograph on him, planned for four volumes. Janáček died in 1928, and ten years later, after long labors, Helfert finished the first volume. It was 1938: Munich, the German occupation, the war. Deported to a concentration camp, Helfert died in the first days after the war. Of his study we have only the first volume, ending with Janáček at just thirty-five years old, with no important work to his name yet.
An anecdote: In 1924 Max Brod had published an enthusiastic little monograph (in German) on Janáček, the first book about him to appear. Helfert promptly attacked it: Brod lacked any scholarly substance! The proof: there were some youthful Janáček compositions the fellow didn’t even know existed! Janáček defended Brod: what was the point of considering unimportant work? Why judge a composer on music he himself does not value, and much of which he had even burned?
This is the archetypal conflict: a new style, a new aesthetic—how to grasp them? By running backwards to the artist’s youth, his first coitus, his baby diapers, as historians like to do? Or, as the practitioners of an art do, by looking at the work itself, at its structure, analyzing and dissecting it, comparing and contrasting?
I think of the famous first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani: the writer was twenty-eight years old, his supporters younger still, and they were all afire not only about the play but especially about its new aesthetic, which they knew well, which they advocated, which they did battle for. I think of Schoenberg: disliked as he was by a broad audience, still he was surrounded by young musicians, by his students and by connoisseurs, among them Adorno, who was to write a famous book about him, a major analysis of his music. I think of the Surrealists, forced to present their art accompanied by a theoretical manifesto so as to head off any misinterpretation. In other words, all modern currents have had to fight both for their art and for their aesthetic program.
Back in his provincial home Janáček had no band of friends around him. No Adorno, not even a tenth, not a hundredth of an Adorno, was on hand to explain the novelty of his music, which therefore had to move ahead on its own, with no theoretical support, like a one-legged runner. In the last decade of his life, in Brno, a circle of young musicians adored him and understood him, but their voices were scarcely audible. A few months before his death, the Prague National Opera (the body that had rebuffed Jenůfa for fourteen years) produced Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; the Prague audience, irritated by that too-modern music, whistled down the show, and the theater management, docilely and speedily, pulled Wozzeck from the repertory. The elderly Janáček took up Berg’s defense, publicly and violently, as if he meant to make clear, while there was still time, whom he belonged with, who were his kin, the kinsmen whose presence he had been missing over a whole lifetime.
Today, eighty years after his death, I open up the Larousse dictionary and I read his portrait: “He undertook a systematic collection of folk music, whose juices fed all his work and all his political thinking” (just try to imagine the unlikely idiot such a line describes!). His work is “deeply national and ethnic” (which is to say, outside the international context of modern music!). His operas are “steeped in socialist ideology” (utter nonsense); his forms are described as “traditional” and his nonconformism unremarked; of his operas the dictionary mentions Sarka (an immature work, justly forgotten) but offers not a word about From the House of the Dead, one of the greatest operas of the century.
So how can we be surprised that for decades, pianists and orchestra conductors, misled by all those wrongheaded signposts, should have erred in their search for his style? My admiration is all the greater for those who did understand it with immediate certainty: Charles Mackerras, Alain Planès, the Berg Quartet…. Seventy-five years after his death, in Paris in 2003, I attended a great concert, played twice over before an enthusiastic audience: Pierre Boulez conducting Capriccio, Sinfonietta, and The Glagolitic Mass. I never heard a Janáček that was more Janáčekian, with his bold clarity, his antiromantic expressivity, his brutal modernity. I said to myself then: Maybe, after a whole century of running, Janáček with his one leg is finally coming to join his own team, the team of his kinsmen, once and for all.