In transition: Speech melodies

In addition to the impulses given by folk music, the observation of the melodic and rhythmic elements of speech essentially influenced the change in Janáček‖s musical language as well. The emergence of Janáček‖s own musical idiom is usually connected to his opera Jenůfa at the time when the composer was already near his fifties. If Leipzig and Vienna did not bring any solution in finding an own style, neither did Janáček‖s folkloristic period. As Milena Černohorská (1957: 175) remarks, Janáček‖s operas Počátek románu (1891) and Jenůfa (1903) represent two totally different worlds. Thus one must look for a third factor, which could explain the difference between the “old” and the “new” Janáček.

According to Černohorská, this third factor—interest in speech melodies, however, would not have appeared without Janáček‖s folkloristic activity, which culminated in the Prague ethnographic exhibition in 1895. At these times we can also find Janáček‖s first notations of speech melodies. (Ibid. 173.)

Miloš Štědroň (1998) introduces another interesting and noteworthy view on the role of Janáček‖s folkloristic activity in his development as a composer. Accordingly, collecting folk songs in the 1880s and 90s changed the whole habitus of Janáček as a composer, his creative aesthetics and working habits, and his opinions about the meaning of composing.

As an educated musician Janáček had the ability to pay attention also to the modal deviances of folk songs and was able to understand that what his predecessors thought were only wrong or “irrelevant” tones, could be an indication of another kind of musical thinking. During his ten-year-long intensive collecting activity Janáček gave up the view that folk songs and folk music would present something that is finally crystallized. On the contrary, he starts to see them as a dynamic organism. According to Štědroň, Janáček arrives at the borders of naturalism and expressionism above all through the thematics of folk songs. As Štědroň points out, the techniques of taking notes secondarily influenced this metamorphosis as well, becoming for Janáček a daily habit of recording speech and its musical qualities: notating folk tunes meant only a short step to notating speech melodies.

Undoubtedly, this method led also to Janáček‖s early verismo, naturalism and expressionism. Štědroň sees Janáček‖s folkloristic period as an era of a stylistic ―diaspora‖. In building a mechanism to defend himself against the impulses of neoromanticism Janáček created a basis for his verismo and naturalism expressly on the realism of folk songs and folk music. (Štědroň 1998: 231, 233.)

126 In his 1832 preface to the collection, the part that interested Janáček most in Sušil‖s collection, Sušil expressed his ideas on the musical aspect of his “Moravian National Songs”, on the “Slavonic character” of their airs, and in general on the “theory of Slavonic music” (Vysloužil 1970: 252).

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I.2.1.1 Changing idioms of the 1890s: Music for Indian Club Swinging and Amarus

Discussing these two compositions in one chapter might seem to be quite an unusual decision. The two compositions represent extreme examples both as to their contents and musical style in Janáček‖s output in the beginning and end of the 1890s. The first composition, Music for Indian Club Swinging, is related to the Czech Sokol (“Falcon”) Association. Janáček had been a member of the nationalistically flavored gymnastic association Sokol already from the year 1876 onwards (Drlíková 2004: 21).¹²⁷ Music for Indian Club Swinging (Hudba ke kroužení kužely; “Music for gymnastic exercises”)¹²⁸ was used for the annual display by the Sokol Association in Moravia-Silesia on 16 April 1893 in Brno, where it accompanied basic gymnastic drills rather than actual club swinging (Simeone, Tyrrell, & Němcová 1997: 255). Furthermore, the piece was published by the gymnastic association in 1895.

Music for Indian Club Swinging consists of five parts in march rhythm, each beginning with a two bar fanfare. The form of the pieces is a clear A-B-A and in each of them there is a Smetana-like trio (Vogel 1997: 106; 1981: 109):

The basic unit in each part is a regular eight bar phrase. The accompanying harmony follows mainly the tonic and dominant (especially parts II and III). As a whole the pieces form a uniform rondo, growing from almost only one motive. (Gregor 1931–32: 296–297.)

The music composed by Janáček became very popular inside the Sokol. It was used not only as an accompaniment to gymnastics with clubs but also to the usual exercices and exercising with single sticks.¹²⁹ The piece that was originally composed for piano was later arranged for brass bands of different sizes and even for a symphony orchestra.¹³⁰ The thematics of the pieces echo certain kind of easily digestable folksy songfulness, which in its way reflects Janáček‖s still ongoing folkloristic phase (1889–95). Music for Indian Club Swinging reflects also Janáček‖s role as an organizer in Brno of the 1890s, even though he at this point had already left the Beseda Society, which had been occupying him a good deal.

Behind the reason of the piece being forgotten is both the fact that it was functional music and Janáček‖s well-known indifference towards his early compositions. (Gregor 1931–32:

295, 297; Štědroň 1950; Vogel 1997: 106, 376.)

127 The Czech gymnastic organization Sokol was founded in 1862 on the model of the German Turnverein, ostensibly to promote physical education though it also became an important movement in raising Czech national awareness. Janáček remained a member until his death, though there are no reports of his taking part in any exercises (Simeone, Tyrrell, & Němcová 1997: 255).

128 Indian clubs are bottle-shaped and made of wood, generally used by gymnasts and jugglers. Exercising, usually with pairs of clubs, is done by holding each club by its neck and tracing a large circle (using the whole arm), or a small circle (with the forearm) (Simeone, Tyrrell, & Němcová 1997: 255).

129 By 1900 club swinging seems to have been considered an activity more suitable for women than men, who were expected to exercise with a single, longer stick (Simeone, Tyrrell, & Němcová 1997: 255). See illustration of the club-swinging exercise paths in Simeone, Tyrrell, & Němcová 1997: 256.

130 Contemporary arrangements of the work for wind band were made by Josef Kozlík and František Kmoch. An arrangement for orchestra was broadcast by Brno Radio under the title Čtverylka [Quadrille]

(Simeone, Tyrrell, & Němcová 1997: 255).

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Despite its stylistic and temporal difference, this little Sokolian piece has its counterpart in Janáček‖s late output. Namely, in 1926 Lidové noviny asked for Janáček a fanfare for the Sokol festivities in Prague. The commissioned five-part cycle was performed in Prague on 26 June 1926 according to the name of the festivities, Sletová sinfonietta (“Sokol festival Symfonietta”). Janáček, however, wished to name it as Vojenská sinfonietta (“Military Symfonietta”), because he thought it was a tribute to the young independent state and a free man. He gave the five parts of the cycle names referring to Brno: Fanfáry (1.

“Fanfares”), Hrad (2. “The Castle”), Králové klášter (3. “The Queen‖s Monastery”), Ulice (4.

“The Street”) and Radnice (5. “The Town Hall”). The new free Brno was perhaps a stronger symbol of independence for Janáček than the capital Prague. (Štědroň 1950; Vogel 1997: 304–305, 380.) Today the work is known only as Sinfonietta.

Amarus (based on the poem by Jaroslav Vrchlický), a cantata composed in 1897, represents a new kind of idiom compared to Janáček‖s earlier works and anticipates his developing new style. Its orchestration reflects the characteristics of the vocal part, thus shedding light on the genesis of Jenůfa (1893–1904) (Černohorská 1957: 175–176.) The main protagonist of the cantata is a young monk, Friar Amarus, who, according to a prophecy by an angel, would die on the day on which he would forget to add oil to the lamp on the altar. One day Amarus (―bitter‖) catches sight of young lovers in the church and follows the happy couple to the monastery garden, forgetting the lamp on the altar. Next day the other monk friars find him dead on his mother‖s grave. Janáček connected this story, placed in the monastery environment, later to the Monastery of Brno‖s Queen and his own childhood. (Vogel 1997: 120–121.) As the later Sinfonietta looks back to the Sokolian fanfares, Amarus find its counterpart in Janáček‖s late output in the Glagolitic Mass (1926).¹³¹ Amarus is the last work of the “pre-Janáček” (in the sense Jaroslav Jiránek has characterized him)¹³² and at the same time the first work of the modern Janáček, situated in the junction of his stylistic metamorphosis. As Tyrrell (2006: 437) points out, Amarus was the first big work in a decade that had nothing to do with Moravian folk music, and the first one (together with the choral work Hospodine, 1896) showing Janáček‖s individual voice as a composer.

I.2.1.2 Composing to prose: Jenůfa

Janáček‖s opera Jenůfa bears some hallmarks of folklorism but it does so more perhaps because of Gabriela Preissová‖s play Její pastorkyňa (“Her stepdaughter”, 1890), on which it is based. ¹³³ Jenůfa is the work by which Janáček first broke through in the musical life of Prague and later also on the opera stages of the world.¹³⁴ The long time of the composition of the opera (1894–1903) is usually connected to the emergence of Janáček‖s theory of speech melodies. Thus it reflects Janáček‖s efforts of finding his own way of expression as a

131 One can also mention Janáček‖s other spiritually inspired works in this connection: the Otče náš (“Moravian Lord‖s Prayer” for tenor solo, choir and piano or harmonium) from the year 1901 and the cantata The Eternal Gospel (Věčné evangelium) from 1914.

132 With the term “pre-Janáček” Jaroslav Jiránek (1995: 370) refers to the “empty” folklorizing period of the young Janáček. Jiránek (1985: 36–37) also refers to Janáček‖s early compositions in the spirit of folk music as ephemeral products of the school of Křížkovský.

133 Outside of the Czech language area the opera is known by the name of its main protagonist.

134 The success in Prague, however, came first in 1916.

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composer. The prosaic text of Preissová‖s play also set its own requirements for the composition.¹³⁵

The musical language of Jenůfa deviates essentially from Janáček‖s earlier compositions.

It does not include arias in the sense of a traditional opera, and also closed numbers are few (e.g., ensemble a cappella Každý párek si musí svoje trápení přestát in the end of act 1). As Tyrrell remarks (1985: 41–42), from Jenůfa onwards, as the set number, the duet and the ensemble give way to the monologue, the operatic conversation and the symbolic chorus.

And as Vogel (1997: 21) notes, none of Janáček‖s later operas includes such a traditional ensemble as in act 1 of Jenůfa. The choir, instead, conveys symbolic meanings for example in The Cunning Little Vixen (“forest”), Káťa Kabanová (“Volga”), The Makropulos Case (“mankind”) and Janáček‖s last opera From the House of the Dead (“the heavy breathing of the prisoners”). (Ibid.)

Gabriela Preissová, Bohemian by birth, tried to create the atmosphere of the Slovácko dialect in her play only after one year spent in Moravia. The language of the text has thus influences of the vernacular in the same way as in Božena Němcová‖s novel Babička (1855).

However, as Pala (1955: 95–96) points out, from a linguistic point of view, the expression and phrases of the play and its formulations are quite heterogenous, representing rather linguistic exotism. Thus one cannot categorically say that the dialogue of Její pastorkyňa¹³⁶ would have been written in the Slovácko dialect. The same remark is made by Slavomír Utěšený (1957: 71) in his comment on Preissová‖s play.

Janáček first knew Preissová‖s play at the beginning of the 1890s (it was performed in Prague in November 1890 and in Brno in February 1892). The events of the play take place in a Moravian mountain village in the 19th century. Janáček perhaps connected its theme with corresponding stories in folk songs about jealousy and other human feelings.

Janáček‖s composition Žárlivec (“The Jealous Man”, 1888) for male choir and baritone was based on a tune with the same name in Sušil‖s collection Moravské národní písně s nápěvy do textu vřaděnými.¹³⁷ On the basis of this composition Janáček started to sketch an overture for his opera Její pastorkyňa. Only a few fragments of the original folk tune appear in the overture, but Janáček attaches extracts of its text to the piano score. For example, in the introductory allegro he adds the words Na horách (“On the mountains”), which refer to the milieu of Preissová‖s play. (Štědroň 1968a: 49.) According to the date Janáček made to his print of the play, the overture was ready on 31 December 1894. According to Štědroň (ibid. 47–48), the version for four hands was probably finished first, followed by an orchestrated version in the beginning of the year 1895. The style of the overture is half classic and half romantic, including some elements of folk music harmonies (ibid. 66).

The overture, which Janáček titled originally as “Prelude to Her Step-Daughter”, was performed in Brno on 13 October 1917 by Karel Kovařovic. For the concert program Janáček wrote a comment where he says that the musical motives of the overture do not have much in common with the opera: it rather serves as its motto (ibid. 53).¹³⁸ The overture characterizes the key motives of the opera, jealousy and passion, thus outlining

135 Other composers of prose are, for example, Dargomyshky, Musorgsky, Strauss and Charpentier.

136 Whereas the form ―pastorkyňa‖ is dialectal (cf. the literary ―pastorkyně‖).

137 No. 124 ‘Na horách, na dolách, co sa. . .’ from Břeclav (Smetana & Václavek 1998: 115).

138 ‘Úvod sevřen těsně, je toliko heslem, mottem k Její pastorkyni’ (“Einleitung fest geschlossen, ist bloss Stichwort, Motto zu Jenufa”) (Štědroň 1968b: 30).

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the portrait of one of the protagonists, Laca (who spoils Jenůfa‖s face by a slash of knife).¹³⁹ (Ibid. 54, 72.) In 1906 Janáček added the subtitle “Jealousy” (Žárlivost) to the overture to illustrate the programmatic nature of the work. Even though the overture is usually not performed as a part of the opera, Janáček could have originally intended it as an integral part. (Ibid. 48.)

Another folk element relating to Jenůfa is the East-Moravian and Slovakian dance Ej, danaj. There were naturally many variations of this quick dance in the musical folklore of the area. Janáček had heard one version of it accompanied by two violins, double basss and bagpipes during his vacations in 1891 in Velká (however there are no recordings of this performance). (Štědroň 1970: 91.) In 1892 Janáček compiled a piece for piano, Ej, danaj (in the suite Three Moravian Dances) and a choral work with orchestral accompaniment, Zelené sem sela (“Green I Sowed”), based on this dance. This musical material became the core of the Recruits‖ scene in Act 1 of Jenůfa. In the scene Števa, who has managed to avoid service in the army, returns to the mill with other recruits. In the first speedy number of the scene Janáček uses words of folklore relating to recruiting: “Married they would all be, of war they are afraid, I shall not get married, I‖m not afraid of war! He who has got riches can pay to stay at home, and I, a poor fellow, must be a soldier brave.”¹⁴⁰ The other number of the scene, Daleko, široko do těch Nových Zámků, has elements both of original folk tunes and Janáček‖s compositions Ej, danaj and Zelené sem sela. Daleko, široko is the ferocious dance that Števa orders from the folk musicians, throwing them money: “Why aren‖t you playing? You hungry hares!” (Co nehrajete? Vy hladoví zajíci!), and dragging Jenůfa with him.¹⁴¹ (Ibid. 94–95.)

Act 3 involves still one number that is associated with folk tunes. It is the song Ej mamko, mamko, maměnko moja, which the girls of the village sing to Jenůfa before her wedding with Laca. The text of the song is the same as in No. 2090 in Sušil‖s collection (from Uhřice). As Bohumír Štědroň (1968b: 160–161) has pointed out, there are no congruences between the song (Sušil‖s collection No. 2091) and Janáček‖s music:

139 In addition to Kostelnička, Jenůfa‖s foster mother, Števa, Laca and Jenůfa form the main trio of the opera. In the beginning of the opera Jenůfa is expecting Števa‖s child. Act 2 culminates in the infanticide made by Kostelnička and her scruples about her deed: the act ends with Kostelnička‖s scream Jako by sem smrt načuhovala! (“The icy voice of death forcing his way in!”), when the snowstorm is rising outside of her house.

140 Všeci sa žéníja, vojny sa bóija, a já sa nežéním, vojny se nebóím. Kerý je bohatý, z vojny sa vyplatí, a já neboráček, mosím byt vojáček, (Bartoš I, No. 18; No. 138 [Nezbytnost] in Bartoš & Janáček collection Kytice z národních písní moravských, slovenských i českých, 4th edition, Prague 1953: 92).

141 Janáček compiles this dance from three different original sources: the words as such come from a dance called Vrtěná (the tune of which is completely different), the opening notes Janáček borrows from the song Zelená sem sela from Bartoš I collection (No. 22 from 1882), and the final rhythmic pattern is taken from a similar tune in the collection Bartoš–Janáček III (1901, No. 666). This structure already exists in the piece for piano Ej, danaj from 1892. (Štědroň 1970: 94–95.)

52 Sušil 2091:

Jenůfa:

In the tune No. 2091 (from Příbor) in Sušil‖s collection and Janáček‖s piece, one can see rhythmical similarities, but only in the first four bars. According to Janáček‖s own words, he did not want to borrow folk tunes in his works, because they also have a composer, although anonymous.¹⁴² (Ibid. 153, 155.) The references to the folk tunes of these scenes were transmitted directly from the instructions in Preissová‖s play, but Janáček incorporated them musically into his opera anew from their original shapes.

The geneses of Jenůfa and Janáček‖s theory of speech melodies are closely related to each other, as will be discussed in Chapter III.1.1.2 (“The chronology of Jenůfa). Due to this fact Černohorská (1957: 175–176) suggests that the actual work of composing Jenůfa would have started in 1898 or even after that. According to Černohorská (ibid.), a work of its kind could not have evolved before Janáček had become involved with speech melodies and the opportunities they can offer to opera. Moreover, Jiří Vysloužil (1985a: 13–14) dates the composition of the opera after the year 1897 and considers it as a turning point to true vocal thinking in Janáček‖s output. In his letter to Otakar Nebuška on 22 February 1917, Janáček recalls the process of composing Jenůfa and mentions that there was a long pause between the composition of the first and the second acts. According to Janáček, he could have started the work in 1896, but at that time he had so much work that it did not allow him enough time for composing, and the work was progressing slowly. (Vogel 1981: 136.)

142 According to Janáček: “Anyway, every folk song is composed by somebody: the fact that he is not the owner of his melody does not make anybody justified to take his work!” (Vždyť přece každou národní píseň složil kdosi: že nestojí majitel při svoji věci, není přece nikdo oprávněn si ji přivlastnit!) (Vysloužil 1955: 69.)

53 I.2.2 Departing from folklore

I.2.2.1 Janáček and verismo

The first two operas starting Janáček‖s new compositional phase, Jenůfa and Fate [Osud], have stylistic convergences with verismo. (Straková 1968: 67.) As Straková (ibid. 75) and Štědroň (1968/69: 135) point out, as an opponent of Wagner, Janáček‖s conception of opera is generally related to Italian and French verismo, though not sharing their melodic characteristics. As evident in the term, verismo conveys truthfulness and an attempt to describe the reality of its subject matter plainly without setting it, for example, in a mythical veil. As Straková (1968: 68, 71) notes, fertile ground for verismo can be found in the French revolution and the following naturalistic musical drama until Jules Massenet. In

The first two operas starting Janáček‖s new compositional phase, Jenůfa and Fate [Osud], have stylistic convergences with verismo. (Straková 1968: 67.) As Straková (ibid. 75) and Štědroň (1968/69: 135) point out, as an opponent of Wagner, Janáček‖s conception of opera is generally related to Italian and French verismo, though not sharing their melodic characteristics. As evident in the term, verismo conveys truthfulness and an attempt to describe the reality of its subject matter plainly without setting it, for example, in a mythical veil. As Straková (1968: 68, 71) notes, fertile ground for verismo can be found in the French revolution and the following naturalistic musical drama until Jules Massenet. In