Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
Piano Music Vol. 2
From October 1879 to March 1880 Janáček was
in Leipzig, studying with Reinecke
and others at the Conservatoire. A love-gift for Zdenka Schulzova the
fourteen-year-old daughter of his superior at the Teachers' Institute in Brno,
whom he was to later marry, the op. 1 "Zdenka" Variations
in B flat (29 January - 22 February 1880) date from this time.
Modelled on Schumann and Brahms -but with a touch of Smetana, a gloss of learning,
a breath of piquancy - the seven variations of contrasted tempo, texture and
figuration are framed by a pensive, dance-echoing andante theme in 2/ 4 - the
first half closing in G minor, the second staying mostly in C minor.
For Janáček there was his country: ''I have
one greatjoy: Moravia alone is enough to
give me all necessary inspiration. so richare her sources" (1916). His
country's language:"speechmelody;the seatofthe emotional fumace"
(1918). His country's dance:"the flashingmovement, thelaces sticky with
sweat; screams, whooping, the sounding furyofthe musicians." (1924). And
his country's song: "in folk-song, there is the whole man: body, soul,
landscape... He who grows from folksong, grows into a whole man" (1926).
Discovered in 1948, the first of his Three Moravian Dances (2 April1892) is in
the stylised manner of the Chopin mazurkas or Smetana polkas. Vitalised by a
regional dance of the same name, Ej, Danaj!, its audacity is bold. How could
anyone possibly guess from the jolting, side-stepping harmonies of its opening,
or the tonal shocks that follow, that this is music with a key signature of G
minor? Anticipating the odzemek from the recruiting scene in Jenllfa,
the refrain in both minor and major forms, was derived from a traditional
song about a girls anxiety on parting from her lover, Zelene sem sela (I
sowed green plants). Incorporating folk-tunes had collected in the field, the
second and third Dances (c 1904, published 1905) are more direct. Čeladensky
in A flat (a miller's, beggar's or clown's dance) and Pilky in B flat (a
saw dance associated with the bringing in of firewood for the winter)
correspond respectively to the fifth and sixth of the Lachian Dances for
orchestra (1893): "... a kaleidoscope of moving, turning, bending
bodies... full of flashing little notes, full of teasing songs, sometimes
chattering, sometimes thoughtful" (22 May 1928).
"I finish one work after another - as if I
were soon to make my account with life" (30 November 1927). Commissioned
by a Serbian music magazine, the E major Recollection, a 20-bar albumleaf,
was written shortly before the composer's death (12 August 1928).
Curiously for one so rhythmically energised,
Janáček, like Beethoven, was not a dancer, but he was a gymnast. His Music
for Gymnastic Exercises or Club-Swinging (1893) was composed for his fellow
enthusiasts of the Sokol Gymnastic Association- they are of Sinfonietta inspiration.
The five march-like pieces, in G, D, C, E minor and Care preceded by fanfares
and have commonly related trio sections a fourth below .Folk echoes and
Moravian dance-steps never seem far away: No 2, for example, has the short/long
rhythm of the sedlačka; while No 3 passingly resembles a
Moravian/Slovak song, Zitra sa ja vydavat mam (Tomorrow I must marry).
The last of Janáček's mature piano cycles,
first played by Marie Dvořákova in Brno on 14 January 1914, In the
Mist (1912), was the intimate admission of an anguished mental state. It
"does not contain a single moment of respite," Jaroslav Vogel has
written (1962), "it is one long struggle of resignation and recurring pain
which predominates even at the end". The music reveals many typical Janáček
traits, liberated rhythms and pulses rapidly contrasted juxtapositions and inflexions
... song and dance fragments intensively concentrated and worked (what Ronald
Stevenson calls "brusque, ejaculatory thematic invention")...
enriched, austere, gritty sonorities (the most subtly voiced and detailed
Janáček was ever to sense for the piano) speech melody... recessed worlds
of confiding dialogue, whispered images, natural silences and solitary
recitative. Its "black" keys, D flat, G flat -major, minor, modal,
seem intentionally distant and tactually mysterious; while emotionally there's
at times a hyper-intense nervosity, a breathless holding back and rushing
forwards, verging on Schumannesque inner revelation. When, near the end of the
fourth movement, a fleeing, urgent glimpse of a lone mountain shepherd
improvising on his fujara or wooden pipe, Janáček is again haunted
by those same calls (and sounding pitches) of the owl that years earlier had
harbingered the death of his only daughter Olga (An overgrown path), the
extent of his suffering and confession is forcefully brought home. The shout of
his realisation, his unforgetting heart-ache, is painful (bars 121ff). The first
version of this finale [5] shares common material but in lengh (137 bars
against 159), key (E flat instead of D flat) and metre (fixed rather than
fluid) is otherwise audibly different. Conspicuosly, its accellerating allegro-presto-prestissimo
structure omits the tempo / mood / atmosphere changes of the final draft - what
eventually became a slow theme, for instance (the andante molto pesante at
bar 77), was originally fast (bar 36).
A
sequel to the earlier Mladi, the Concertino (spring 1925), for piano,
string and wind septet, was first performed in Brno on 16 February 1926, the year
of the Sinfonietta. Acknowledging its autobiographical stimulis, Janáček
called it "an intimate expression of the artisťs reminiscences of his
youth, but in contrast to the suite for wind instruments [Mladi] of serious
experiences, among them the bitterness and difficulties at the beginning of his
creative work" .Later he wrote of its apparent programme: "It was in
the spring, when we once blocked the entrance of a hedge-hog's house in a
linden tree. The hedge-hog had lined its nest softly in that old tree. It was
beside itself with anger! It just could not understand it... Should the
hedge-hog stand on its hind-legs and burst into an elegy? No sooner had he put
his snout out, than he had to roll up again [first movement (prelude), 4/4,
6/4: piano/horn]. The squirrel chattered away, as it jumped from the top of one
tree to another. Later, it moaned in a cage like my clarinet, but turned around
and danced to amuse the children [second movement (scherzo) 6/8, 2/4, 6/16:
piano E flat clarinet]. The wide-open eyes of little owls and big owls stared
insolently out from the strings of the piano, as did those of the remaining
critical night-folk [third movement, 4/4]. In the fourth movement [2/4, 5/8]
everything seems like the penny that one quarrels about in fairy-tales. And the
piano? Someone must, surely, be in command. I believe that every movement has three
motifs" (Pult und Taktstock , June 1927) ".
@ 1996 Ates Orga
* From Janáček's Uncollected Essays on Music,
edit & trans Mirka
Zemanova (Marion Boyers, London/New York 1989),
reprinted by kind permission
