Josef Bohuslav Foerster (1859-1951): Eva
Foerster: a Pillar of Czech Musical History
When, in 1896, the management of the National Theatre
in Prague announced a competition for a new opera,
there was an unusually strong field: Fibich’s ·árka,
Kovafiovic’s Psohlavci (The Dogsheads), and Eva. The
unanimous choice of the jury — The Dogheads —
perhaps says more about the prevalence of a certain
Romanticism à la Smetana than about the works’
relative qualities; what it does make clear is how
modern Eva must have seemed at the time.
Nevertheless, one by one all three received productions
in the National Theatre (by a company that included an
exceptional generation of soloists), and each went on to
become its author’s most successful opera. For the next
sixty years, these operas, along with those of Smetana,
Dvofiák and later Janáãek, formed the core of the Czech
opera repertory. Eva, indeed, proved especially longlived:
each successive administration of the National
Theatre opera company saw a revival of the work. In
1929, to mark the composer’s seventieth birthday, the
director Ostrãil put on a cycle of all the operas Foerster
had so far completed. After the war, Jaroslav Krombholc
directed productions in 1945, 1949 (in the composer’s
ninetieth year, with 113 performances) and finally 1981.
Foerster’s passionate involvement with the subject
of Eva had begun with the première of Gabriela
Preissová’s realist drama Gazdina roba at the National
Theatre in 1889, which he reviewed for Národní listy
(The National Papers). The play was a sensation. Its
portrayal of social conflict, represented in the title,
where the dialect word ‘gazdina’ refers to the socially
respectable farmer’s wife, while ‘roba’ is a derogatory
expression equivalent to ‘wench’, was compelling,
especially the scandalous figure of the woman who
leaves her husband and lives unmarried with another
man. Foerster had no trouble hearing an opera in
Preissová’s play, and with her permission asked
Jaroslav Kvapil, an esteemed man of letters, author of,
among other works, the libretto of Foerster’s Debora
and Dvofiák’s Rusalka, to put it into verse. He even
travelled to the Moravian-Slovak border in order to
‘look inside the hearts of the people’ of the region. For
several years he awaited Kvapil’s libretto in vain when
suddenly, in an obscure watchmaker’s shop in
Hamburg, he found inspiration for the character of
Samko. From that moment he worked on the text
himself. Between September 1895 and October 1896 he
completed the libretto and the vocal score, and the
orchestration was finished in April 1897. His verses
were not composed of the rough, colloquial language in
barely comprehensible dialects that so delighted
Janáãek: as he put it, music is the way humans ‘sense,
already here, down on earth, the bright glory of
paradise’, and therefore demands noble rhymes and
literary sensibility.
Although Foerster was charmed and deeply touched
by the Moravian-Slovak border customs and rites, he
was no ethnologist, still less an ethnomusicologist.
Direct quotations from folk-music, as with Smetana and
Dvofiák, provided only the initial material for artistic
development. In this way Foerster also made liberal cuts
to the play: he left out most of the local colour, reduced
the religious motivation, and of the original twenty
characters kept only six. Moreover, in Preissová’s
original Eva’s child does not die, and people talk about
the drowning of the ‘roba’ only a year later. In his
preface to the first edition of the vocal score in 1908, he
set out his task as he saw it: ‘to stress the lyrical and
dramatic moments, to capture the individual characters
and plot in their psychological veracity’. True to his
word, Foerster expands the originally brief reflections
of the characters into emotionally rich musical periods:
though he was a nationalist, and though his opera is a
quintessentially Czech subject, Foerster did not really
care about his characters’ context, but rather about their
humanity, their soul and its salvation. Thus he
concentrated the action around Eva herself, who in his
conception was no country wench but a woman of noble
soul and hymnic pathos, a woman embodying the desire
for a better life. Eva, physically attractive but misunderstood,
is raised above those around her, in desire
as well as in despair, by virtue of her absolute faith in
love.
Musically Foerster’s interest in his characters’ interiority
translated into an opera built on several short
but flexible motifs, ingeniously elaborated, which both
aptly describe the main characters and, in the multilevelled
network of orchestral voices, reveal what has
not been expressed in words. The fundamental buildingblock
of the whole opera, a short but earthily distinctive
three-bar motif that represents Eva,
is called upon to show not only her energy, solidity,
independence, determination, intransigence and
defiance, but also a more attractive, feminine, wistful
softness. It cuts through the merry dance music of the
village festival in the first scene and then appears in the
orchestra at Samko’s entrance to reveal that it is Eva
whom he has secretly loved for such a long time;
variants of it increase Samko’s desire to the points of
ecstasy that mark his great arias. In the same way,
Foerster works with Mánek’s brief, syncopated motif
(ardent but pragmatic) and Samko’s own theme (longbreathed
and lyrical). From these short motifs, rich
orchestration and a tissue of polyphony, Foerster
builds the monumental structure of a tragic opera in
which death is not a catastrophe, but rather a
symbol of metaphysical purging, conciliation and
mystical redemption.
Striking though Gazdina roba had been at the
time of its first performance, once Modernism had
taken hold of European musical life Eva began to
seem much more of an integral part of the tradition
that Smetana had established, the late Romantic
flowering that would remain the canon of Czech
national opera for an entire century. One might
argue convincingly for aesthetic continuity by
placing Eva alongside the five other Czech operas
produced in the sixty or so years following 1875 to
feature a rural context and an energetic female
heroine: Smetana’s Hubiãka (The Kiss, 1876),
Dvořák’s Jakobín (The Jacobin, 1889) Janáãek’s
Jenu°fa, Hába’s Matka (Mother, 1931) and Martinu°’s
Veselohra na mostû (The Comedy on the Bridge,
1937). It is undeniably important to see Foerster as
part of this wider Czech tradition: he was, after all,
for many years the grand old man of Czech music,
with impeccable nationalistic credentials. Though
he travelled widely and forged lasting relationships
with the great musical figures of the period,
Foerster was always in close spiritual touch with
home through his music. He was a more-thanfitting
President of the Czech Academy of Arts and
Sciences, the recipient of numerous honours, and in
1945 the first musician to be awarded the title of
National Artist. He was a worthy successor to
Smetana; yet for all Foerster’s reverence for the
great composer, he was no imitator: dramaturgically,
if not musically or poetically, Eva is worlds
apart from the tradition it came from. In it, country
life is harsh, and economic disparities set
insuperable obstacles to human feelings: tragic
decline is inevitable. And for all his establishment
credentials, Foerster retained his strong work-ethic
and his strong sense of grounding. He remained
what he had always been: an intensely devout, even
mystical believer.
Helena Havlíková