1) his melodic originality: toward the end of the Romantic movement, the melodic wealth of European music seemed to be running out (there is indeed an arithmetical limit to the permutations of seven or twelve tones); close knowledge of the intonations that come not from music but from the objective world of words allowed Janacek access to a different inspiration, a different source of melodic imagination; in consequence, his melodies (he may be the last great melodist in the history of music) have a very specific character and are immediately recognizable:
a) contrary to Stravinsky's maxim ('Be frugal with your intervals, treat them like dollars'), they contain many unusually large intervals, till then unthinkable in a 'beautiful' melody;
b) they are very succinct, compressed, and nearly
impossible to develop, prolong, elaborate by techniques common till then, which would immediately make them false, artificial, 'deceitful'; that is: his melodies are developed in their own particular way: either repeated (persistently repeated) or else treated like a word: for example, progressively intensified (on the model of someone insisting or imploring), etc.;
2) his psychological orientation: what most interested Janacek in his research on spoken language was not the specific rhythm of the language (the Czech language) or its prosody (there is no recitative in Janacek's operas), but the influence on spoken intonation of a speaker's shifting psychological state; he sought to comprehend the semantics of melodies (he thus appears to be the antipode of Stravinsky, who conceded music no expressive capacity; for Janacek, only the note that is expression, that is emotion, has the right to exist); examining the connection between an intonation and an emotion, Janacek the musician acquired a thoroughly unique psychological lucidity; a veritable psychological furor (remember Adorno speaking of Stravinsky's 'antipsychological furor') marked all of his work; because of it he turned especially to opera, for in opera the ability to 'define emotions musically' could be realized and tested better than anywhere else.
What is a conversation in real life, in the concreteness of the present moment? We don't know. All we know is that conversations on the stage, in a novel, or even on
the radio are not like a real conversation. This was certainly one of Hemingway's artistic obsessions: to catch the structure of real conversation. Let us try to define this structure by comparing it with that of theatrical dialogue:
a) in the theater: the story is told in and through the dialogue; this is therefore focused entirely on the action, on its meaning, on its content; in real life: dialogue is surrounded by dailiness, which interrupts it, slows it down, affects its development, changes its course, makes it unsystematic and illogical;
b) in the theater: dialogue must provide the audience with the most intelligible, the clearest, idea of the dramatic conflict and of the characters; in real life: the individuals conversing know each other and know the subject of their conversation; thus their dialogue is never wholly comprehensible to a third person; it remains enigmatic, a thin veneer of the said over the immensity of the unsaid;
c) in the theater: the limited time span of the performance demands a maximal economy of words in the dialogue; in real life: the characters return to a subject already discussed, repeat themselves, correct what they just said, etc.; these repetitions and awkwardnesses reveal the characters' obsessions and imbue the conversation with a particular melody.
Hemingway knew not only how to catch the structure of real dialogue but also how to use it to create a form-a simple, transparent, limpid, beautiful form, as appears in 'Hills Like White Elephants': the conversation between the American man and the girl begins piano, with insignificant remarks; the repetitions of the same words, the same turns of phrase, throughout the
story give it a melodic unity (this melodization of dialogue is what is so striking in Hemingway, so entrancing); the intervention of the woman bringing drinks curbs the tension, which nonetheless goes on rising, reaches its crisis toward the end ('please please'), then calms to pianissimo with the final words.
'February 15 toward evening. Twilight at 6, near the railroad station. Two young women are waiting for someone.
'On the sidewalk, the bigger one, her cheeks rosy, in a red winter coat, shivers.
'She starts speaking brusquely:
show up.'
'Her companion, cheeks pale, in a flimsy skirt, interrupts the last note with a somber, sad, soulful echo:
''I don't care.' 'And she stayed put, half rebellious, half waiting.'
So begins one of the texts Janacek regularly published, together with his musical notations, in a Czech periodical.
Imagine that the sentence 'We're going to wait here and I know he won't show up' is a line in a story an actor is reading aloud to an audience. We would probably sense a certain falseness in his tone. He speaks the sentence as one might imagine it in memory; or, simply, in a way meant to move his listeners. But how is this sentence spoken in a real situation? What is the melodic truth of this sentence? What is the melodic truth of a vanished moment?
The search for the vanished present; the search for the melodic truth of a moment; the wish to surprise and capture this fleeting truth; the wish to plumb by that means the mystery of the immediate reality constantly deserting our lives, which thereby becomes the thing we know least about. This, I think, is the onto-logical import of Janacek's studies of spoken language and, perhaps, the ontological import of all his music.
Act Two of Jenufa: after lying ill for some days with puerperal fever, Jenufa leaves her bed and learns that her newborn son is dead. Her reaction is unexpected: 'So, he is dead. So, he has become a little angel.' And she sings these phrases calmly, with a strange astonishment, as if paralyzed, without cries, without gestures. The melodic curve rises several times, only to fall back immediately, as if it too were stricken with paralysis; it is beautiful, it is moving, yet without losing its accuracy.
Novak, the most influential Czech composer of the time, ridiculed this scene: 'It's as if Jenufa were mourning the death of her parrot.' It's all there, in this
idiotic sarcasm. To be sure, this is not how we imagine a woman who is just learning of her child's death! But an event as we imagine it hasn't much to do with the same event as it is when it happens.
Janacek based his first operas on 'realist' plays; in his time, doing that in itself shattered conventions; but because of his thirst for the concrete, even the prose drama form soon came to seem artificial to him: and so he wrote his own libretti for his two most audacious operas, the one, for The Cunning Little Vixen, based on a newspaper serial, the other on Dostoyevsky-not on one of the writer's novels (ensnarement by the unnatural and the theatrical is a greater threat in Dostoyevsky's novels than anywhere else!), but on his 'reportage' of the Siberian prison camp: From the House of the Dead.
Like Flaubert, Janacek was fascinated by the coexistence of various emotional charges in a single scene (he felt the Flaubertian fascination for 'antithetical motifs'); thus his orchestra does not emphasize but instead often contradicts the emotional content of the words. There is one scene of The Cunning Little Vixen that I have always found particularly moving: in a forest inn, a gamekeeper, a village schoolmaster,
