Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

The Suite for String Orchestra (1877), the 'Idyll' for String Orchestra (1878), and the Lachian Dances (1890). These are pieces from the prehistory of his creative work, whose insignificance astonishes people expecting Janacek's name to mean great music.

I pause at the terms 'prehistory' and 'great period': Janacek was born in 1854. That is the whole paradox. This great figure of modern music is older than the last of the great Romantic composers: four years older than Puccini, six years older than Mahler, ten years older than Richard Strauss. For a long time he wrote works that, because of his allergy to the excesses of Romanticism, are notable only for their pronounced traditionalism. Always dissatisfied, he punctuated his life with torn-up scores; only at the turn of the century did he arrive at his own style. In the twenties, his compositions appeared on modern-music concert programs alongside Stravinsky, Bartok, and Hindemith; but he was thirty, forty years older than they. A solitary conservative in his youth, he became an innovator when he was old. But he was still alone. For though he stood with the great modernists, he was different from them. He came to his style without them, his modernism had a different nature, a different genesis, different roots.

2

I continue my stroll among the bins at the record shop: with no trouble I find the two String Quartets (1924, 1928): this is Janacek's peak; all his expressionism is concentrated here in total perfection. Five recordings, all excellent. Even so, I regret not finding (I've long been looking for it on compact disc) the most authentic (and still the best) performance of these quartets, that of the Janacek Quartet (the old Supraphon recording [50556], awarded the Prix de l'Academie Charles-Cros and the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik).

I pause at the term 'expressionism':

Although he never made the connection himself, Janacek is actually the only great composer to whom the term can be applied fully and in its literal sense: for him, everything is expression, and a note has no right to exist except as expression. Thus the total absence in his work of mere 'technique': transitions, developments, the mechanics of contrapuntal filler, routine orchestration (on the contrary, a penchant for previously novel ensembles made up of a few solo instruments), etc. The result for the performer is that, every note being expression, every note (not only every motif, but every note of a motif) must have maximal expressive clarity. Another point: German expressionism is characterized by a predilection for excessive states-delirium, madness. What I'm calling expressionism in Janacek has nothing to do with such one-dimensionality: it is an enormously. rich emotional range, a dizzyingly tight, transitionless juxtaposition of tenderness and brutality, fury and peace.

3

I find the beautiful Sonata for Violin and Piano (1921) and the 'Fairy Tale' for Violoncello and Piano (1910). The Diary of a Man Who Disappeared, for piano, tenor, alto, and three female voices (1919). And then, the works of his very last years; his creativity explodes; never before had he been so free as he was in his seventies, overflowing with humor and invention; the Glagolitic Mass (1926): like no other: it is more an orgy than a mass; and it is fascinating. From the same time, the Sextet for Winds (1924), the Nursery Rhymes (1927),

and two works for piano and various instruments that I especially love despite rarely satisfactory performances: the Capriccio (1926) and the Concertino (1925).

I count five recordings of works for piano solo: the Sonata (1905) and two cycles: 'On an Overgrown Path' (1902) and 'In the Mists' (1912); these beautiful works are always grouped on one disc that is nearly always (unfortunately) filled out by other, minor pieces from his 'prehistory.' Incidentally, pianists in particular get Janacek wrong, as to both spirit and structure: they nearly all of them succumb to a pret-tied-up romanticizing: by softening the brutal aspect of this music, by ignoring its forte markings and by throwing themselves into the delirium of a nearly systematic rubato. (Piano music is particularly undefended against rubato. It is actually difficult to arrange for rhythmic inaccuracy with an orchestra. But the pianist is all by himself. His fearsome soul can rampage with no control and no constraint.)

I pause at the term 'romanticize':

Janacek's expressionism is not an exaggerated extension of Romantic sentimentality. On the contrary, it is one historical option for moving out of Romanticism. An option very different from the one Stravinsky chose: unlike him, Janacek did not reproach the Romantics for having talked about feelings; he reproached them for having falsified them; for having substituted sentimental gesticulation ('a Romantic lie,' Rene Girard [1] calls it) for the unmediated truth of the emotions. He has a passion for the passions, but still more for the precision he musters to express them. Stendhal, not Hugo. Which involves breaking away from Romantic music, from its spirit, from its hypertrophied sonorities (Janacek's economy of sound shocked everyone in his time), from its structure.

4

I pause at the term 'structure':

– whereas Romantic music sought to impose emotional unity on a given movement, Janacek's musical structure is based on unusually frequent alternations of different, even contradictory, emotional fragments within a single piece, a single movement;

– corresponding to this emotional diversity is a diversity of tempi and meters, which also alternate unusually often;

– the coexistence of many contradictory emotions in a very limited space makes for a semantics that is brand new (what astonishes and fascinates is the unexpected juxtaposition of emotions). The coexistence of emotions is horizontal (they follow one another) but also (even more unusual) vertical (they sound simultaneously as a polyphony of emotions). For example: at the same time, we hear a nostalgic melody, beneath it a furious ostinato motif, and above it another melody, which sounds like cries. If the performer doesn't understand that all these lines have equal semantic importance and that therefore none of them should be made into mere accompaniment, into an impressionistic murmur, he is missing the structure characteristic of Janacek's music.

The permanent coexistence of contradictory emotions gives Janacek's music its dramatic quality; dramatic in the most literal sense of the term: this music does not evoke a narrator telling a tale; rather, it evokes a stage set on which many different characters are simultaneously present, speaking, confronting each other; the seed of this dramatic space is often to be found within a single melodic motif. As in the first measures of the Piano Sonata:

The forte motif of sixteenth notes in the fourth measure, still part of the melodic theme developed in the preceding measures (it consists of the same intervals), at the same time forms its harsh emotional opposite. Some measures later, we see how much the brutality of this 'secessionist' motif contradicts the elegiac melody it comes from:

In the following measure, the two melodies, the original and the 'secessionist,' come together; not in an emotional harmony, but in a contradictory polyphony of the emotions, the way yearning tears and rebellion can come together: