Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
Some time in the mid-1920s, rehearsing in Frankfurt for performances at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, conductor Jascha Horenstein noticed at the back of the hall a frock-coated, elderly gentleman with a fob-watch. He looked like a typical Central European burgher. Horenstein assumed this was the caretaker, waiting to lock the hall. At the reception which followed the concert the man was introduced: Leoš Janáček, whose music was being presented at the festival. Janáček kept the appearance of what he was: a practical Czech musician, born in 1854 – ‘very bourgeois’, Horenstein remembered ‘like the owner of a Czech or Austrian coffee house’.
The music of this composer in his 70s was being performed in a festival of the avant-garde – a sign of recognition. Yet it was limited recognition, and as late as the 1950s sympathetic British critics could refer to Janáček as an example of a new phenomenon produced by nationalism: the good composer whose works won’t travel. Australia may feel surprised, even a little superior at such comments: we think we know Janáček’s operas quite well. We benefited from an offshoot of an enthusiasm that established Janáček’s standing in Britain – in particular that of the Sadlers Wells/English National Opera music and production staff. Edward Downes, when he was Musical Director of our national company, conducted the first Jenůfa here, and later it was conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, who discovered Janáček as a student in Czechoslovakia soon after his formative years in Sydney, and became one of the composer’s foremost and most knowledgeable champions, in the opera house, the concert hall, and recordings.
Note that it was opera that established Janáček in Australia, especially Jenůfa (although his Sinfonietta and Glagolitic Mass were given Australian premieres premieres in Melbourne in 1957 and 1958 respectively, both under the baton of Kurt Woess, it was not until the AO Jenůfa seasons that Janáček made a real impact, and the risk could be taken of presenting Kátya Kabanová and The Cunning Little Vixen).
Almost everywhere Janáček’s fame began with Jenůfa, but this is paradoxical, or of all operas, Jenůfa is one of the most intensely local. To present so unfamiliar a work, I discovered in the 1970s from those most responsible for the Australian Opera’s first production, required teamwork, and much of that preparation drew on ethnology and ethnography. You couldn’t really appreciate Jenůfa fully, these experts were saying, without an understanding of the Moravian village context. The opera was to be sung in English, but this was even more a second best than usual, because Janáček's reliance on Moravian speech-rhythms and word repetitions can’t really be satisfactorily reproduced in English.
At most a few dozen people attended that introduction, and the production was performed to largely unprepared audiences. Its effect was terrific. This coincided with the discovery of an exciting vocal and histrionic talent in Elizabeth Connell whose performance as the Kostelnička led one to wonder whether this is the Kostelnička’s opera rather than Jenůfa’s (as has often been said). The production was notably well-cast, with Robert Gard’s feckless and fair-haired Steva, Ron Stevens’ dark and intense Laca, both in character by nature. From pit to costumes and sets everything conspired to give Jenůfa its best chance. Even allowing for my pre-existing bias in favor of Janáček, I still count it one of the best things, if not the best, the Australian Opera has ever done.
People were wondering why they had never encountered this marvellous dramatic composer before; this opera, after all, had been around since 1904, as old as Madama Butterfly. To what other opera could they relate Jenůfa? To Puccini, perhaps, or to Italian verismo, for its realistic impact. Yet, the musical idiom is completely different, nor do Janáček’s instrumental works provide clues, since they are even more individual, not to say quirky, than his operas. Audiences were responding to Janáček’s artistic personality as much as to the story, or the music. These are indissoluble, and sincerity is the keynote, a sincerity even Puccini, however genuine his feelings for his characters, doesn’t approach – one is conscious of his theatre craft at work.
Australian audiences, perhaps, with fewer preconceptions about what opera should be, respond readily to this kind of sincerity. Janáček could have said, as did another good composer whose works won’t travel, Elgar, about his The Dream of Gerontius 'I wrote it from my insidest out’. Jenůfa is an intensely personal work – its composer once claimed ‘a pure musical note means nothing unless it is pinned down in life, blood, locale. Otherwise it is a worthless toy…I would bind Jenůfa with the black ribbon of the long illness, the pain, and the sighing of my daughter Olga and my little boy Vladimir’.
Janáček’s son had died a few years before he began to compose Jenůfa, and his daughter Olga died just as he was completing the opera, months before her 21st birthday. Her death, which left him childless, severed the last real link between Janáček and his wife, and gave composition an even greater importance in his life.
Janáček could have commented also on the suffering Jenůfa caused him after it was completed and premiered in his home town, Brno in 1904. Not until 1515 was Jenůfa staged in the leading national theatre in Prague, a delay largely attributed to a hostile review Janáček gave, years before, to music by that theatre’s artistic director, when it was performed in Brno. When Karel Kovařovic did eventually accept Jenůfa for Prague, he insisted on making extensive revisions, primarily to the orchestration (perhaps to justify having rejected it for so long).
It must have been galling for Janáček that Jenůfa launched his international success in a form other than he had intended (recent productions, including the AO’s, have shown that Janáček’s original version is completely viable). But success it was (there had been 70 productions by the time Janáček died in 1928). There are few stranger phenomena in the history of music than the sudden emergence into the world of modern music of this septuagenarian provincial musician, composing in a style that seemed as distant from the familiar ‘Czech’ idioms of Dvořák and Smetana as from the international style of the 1920s. Jenůfa’s success after 1915 was like the breaking of a log-jam for Janáček, releasing his extraordinary Indian summer of creativity, including four more major operas.
Janáček authority John Tyrrell draws a melancholy contrast with the career of the author on whose play Jenůfa is based, Gabriela Preissová. When Její pastorkyna (Her Foster-daughter) was premiered in Prague in 1890 it was criticised from all sides – the subject matter was considered demeaning of Czech people, and implausible (though Preissová had based the story on two incidents reported in a local paper when she was living in Moravia). The Romantics attacked the play as a nasty example of slice-of-life realism, while the ‘realists’ were uneasy about the underlying religious concerns of the play and the optimistic ending. Preissová protested, like Janáček, that she simply wrote what she felt, but her confidence was undermined and she never wrote anything as fine or as bold again, or anything that contributed to the development of Czech drama or literature. Fortunately, she had inspired Janáček, whose opera has supplanted her play.
Jenůfa presages some of the confessional, autobiographical concerns dominating Janáček’s third and last period, but his choice of Preissová’s play for his libretto reflects the ethnographic interests typical of his first period. Preissová attempts a faithful presentation of Moravian village life – both play and opera were meant to be presented in folk costume as authentic as possible (the only one of Janáček’s mature operas thus conceived). The dialect in which play and opera are written is also Moravian and rural; Preissová’s adviser in this was the same František Bartoš who had worked with Janáček in the 1880s and 90s collecting Moravian folksongs (a precursor of the activities of Bartók and Kodály in Hungary).
I remember Edward Downes, who had collaborated with Otakar Kraus making the singing translation of Jenůfa, telling us that the repetitions of words and phrases so characteristic of this opera (and so difficult to render convincingly into English) are typically Moravian. The real reason for their predominance in Jenůfa is interesting. Janáček, with typical independence, tried to do something never attempted in Czech opera before, or indeed anywhere except in Russia: to compose an opera on a prose text (he almost certainly didn’t know the experiments of Dargomyzhky and Mussorgsky until later). In his earlier opera The Beginnings of a Romance Janáček had ‘lifted’ folk material in verse form intact. He seems to have begun adapting Preissová’s play by repeating lines and words, to form the equivalent of a verse structure. Later he changed his approach, excising most, but not all of the repetitions (a tell-tale sign of his attempt to conform to scholarly ideas of linguistic authenticity is Janáček’s attempt in his revisions to stress words like Jenůfa on the first syllable; some of the music he had already composed made consistency impossible).
Janáček thought Her Foster-daughter was suitable for an opera, though the play’s author did not. He made fewer changes in adapting text than for any of his other librettos. He cut about one third of the play, but added no new words or lines. Is Jenůfa, then, a folk opera? Michael Ewans, the Australia-based authority on Janáček’s operas, points out that Moravian folksongs are often essentially folk dramas, and that in this sense Her Foster daughter is in spirit a folksong text. Yet comparison with – say – Smetana’s Bartered Bride reveals Janáček's ethnic portrayal concerned less with characterful and ‘decorative’ elements than with dramatic truth. In any case Jenůfa is a tragedy, not a comedy, for all its optimistic ending. Also, Janáček, like Bartók, immersed himself so deeply in his folk materials that they molded his style – he came to speak the Moravian musical language by instinct.
Janáček insisted there was not a single folk tune in Jenůfa, not even the bridesmaids’ chorus in the final act, which now has the status of a folksong in Czechoslovakia, but whose melody is Janáček’s own invention. He came to believe that all his musical language derived from what he called speech melodies – the natural inflections and patterns in the spoken language, analogous to music. ‘I have been noting speech melodies since the year 1897’, he stated in 1925. This was during his visit to England, where he jotted down, for example, the sound of the page in his hotel calling out ‘wanted’ names. ‘I have a vast collection of note-books - they are my window through which I look into the soul. They are of the utmost importance to dramatic music’.
Most of Jenůfa is conversational, apart from the choruses, and this makes the big ensemble near the end of the first act stand out all the more (‘Every young couple must get over their troubles’); it seems more conventionally operatic. Nevertheless, there are far more passages in Jenůfa than in Janáček’s later operas where more than one voice sings at a time (another reason for its readier acceptance). What strikes audiences most forcefully is the human story of the opera, stressed by Janáček at the expense of Preissová’s background detail. But to understand this human story fully requires knowing about the social structure of the Moravian village setting, and in particular the family relationships of the characters. These hints to which Janáček reduced Preissová’s explanations may be picked up by a Czech audience, missed by outsiders.
Crucial, for example is the ownership of the mill whose presence and even sound dominates the stage. Steva’s boastful self-confidence is based on his right of inheritance to the mill. Laca resents his half-brother because he has been disinherited by his father’s death and mother’s remarriage. This gives Jenůfa’s infatuation with Steva a deeper than merely romantic dimension, as it does to Laca’s jealousy of Steva, and Jenůfa’s eventual settling for an unglamorous marriage with Laca. It also helps explain why the attraction to Steva of the Mayor’s daughter Karolka vanishes so quickly when she discovers he is the father of Jenůfa’s child. Steva was ‘a good match’ rather than an object of affection. Steva and Jenůfa belong to the Buryja family; Laca and the Kostelnička are outsiders, though she has been married to a Buryja. Her husband was very like Steva – irresponsible and a drunkard – as the Kostelnička explains in a passage Janáček set, but eventually left out, a passage which explains why she reacts so decisively to Steva’s drunken reveling, imposing the delay on Jenůfa’s marriage that precipitates the tragedy.
Harking back again to the introduction to the opera I attended back in the 1970s, the point made most strongly there was how important it is to understand the Kostelnička’s relationship to the other characters. Her name is her function (her family name is Buryja, but this is never used; we never learn her first name) – she is the Sacristan or Sextoness, who assists the clergy by keeping the church, and fulfills various other tasks of social welfare in the village (Preissová shows her, writes Tyrrell, as agony aunt, wise woman, amateur nurse and physician). Both by her dress and by the way she speaks we gather (or at least a Czech audience does) that she is more highly educated, and possessed of a higher moral authority, than her fellow-villagers (the Kostelnička’s dignity, perhaps an essential part of her Act I character, is in danger of disappearing if the part is played too much for intensity - in this respect I found Elizabeth Fretwell’s interpretation, in a Melbourne performance of the production, more convincing than Connell’s).
So much does Preissova’s play focus on the Kostelnička that its title Her Foster-daughter is entirely apt, emphasising the relationship with Jenůfa (except that Jenůfa is step-daughter as well as foster-daughter!) Janáček cut so much about the Kostelnička from the play that much of her behavior is left unexplained. Perhaps because of this, her interventions are extremely dramatic, a tribute to the power of Janáček’s musical conception. The Kostelnička’s guilt, the villagers’ shock at her fall from her own exalted standards – these are sensed through the music, before being understood as psycho-social facts.
The second act, where we witness the falling apart of the Kostelnička’s character, has been described as her act; its stunning ending, driven home by the orchestra with the utmost power, runs the danger of making it her opera – but Janáček has something even more telling in reserve. It was difficult to be truly interested in Jenůfa and Steva in the first two acts except in the effect their behavior has on Laca and the Kostelnička, and Steva remains weak and a cipher throughout. Laca and Jenůfa truly develop. This is what Act III reveals, in music which lifts the end of the opera to a more convincing level than the play.
Janáček’s re-starting with music in a new key, after the shock of the discovery of the Kostelnička’s crime has been worked out, is a very daring artistic procedure. It succeeds, a tribute to Janáček’s powers of musical invention, and to his identification with his characters. The loss of his daughter Olga, and the deterioration of his marriage, gave him a deeper insight into female characters. The domination of Act II of Jenůfa by two female voices prefigures the centrality of women in Kátya Kabanová, The Makropoulos Case and Vixen Sharp Ears, not to mention purely instrumental works: the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ and ‘Intimate Letters’ string quartets.
If Jenůfa is like any other opera, it must be Russian opera, and especially Mussorgsky, though it has been demonstrated that Janáček did not get to know the Russian composer’s work until after composing Jenůfa. He named his son Vladimir, his daughter Olga, and he sent her to study in Russia. Not only did he admire things Slav, but there was a strong Slav streak in his character, as his biographer Jaroslav Vogel points out, comparing the composer with Laca in Jenůfa, resorting to violence and repenting of his actions a moment later. Jenůfa herself, as Preissová’s play stresses, was intended by the Kostelnička to be a teacher, and she has been teaching Jano, the shepherd boy. Through sexual infatuation she loses her way, but in the tragic outcome she gains a new maturity. Janáček was the son of a schoolmaster and like Preissová a fanatical advocate of education as an arm of Czech nationalism. He poured himself for ten years into the composition of Jenůfa, his first masterpiece, and his first fully original work, completed when he was 50 years old. As Laca and Jenůfa are left standing on the stage at the end and the orchestra upliftingly extends their new and realistic optimism, audiences sense that a new dimension has been added to opera and to their experience of it.
First published in Opera Australia, 1991