Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

In their desire to lay an emotional uniformity on these measures, all the pianists whose recordings I could find at the record shop neglect the sudden forte Janacek marked in the fourth measure; thus they strip the 'secessionist' motif of its brutal character and Janacek's music of all of the inimitable tension that makes it recognizable (if it is properly understood) instantly, from its very first notes.

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The operas: I don't find The Excursions of Mr. Broucek in the record bins and I don't miss it, as I consider this work rather a failure; all the others are here, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras: Destiny (written in 1904, whose versified, catastrophically naive libretto and even its music, coming after Jenufa, represent a distinct regression); then five masterpieces that I admire unreservedly: Katia Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Affair; and Jenufa: Sir Charles Mackerras has the immeasurable merit of hav-

ing finally (in 1982, after sixty-six years!) rid that opera of the arrangement that was imposed on it in Prague in 1916. Still more brilliant a success, I think, is his revision of the score of From the House of the Dead. Thanks to Mackerras, we became aware (in 1980, after fifty-two years!) how much the adapters' arrangements had weakened this opera. Restored to its original form, wherein it regained all its spare and strange sonority (poles apart from Romantic symphon-ism), From the House of the Dead emerges alongside Berg's Wozzeck as the truest, the greatest opera of our dark century.

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An insoluble practical difficulty: in Janacek's operas, the charm of the vocal parts does not lie only in the beauty of the melodies but lies also in the psychological meaning (always an unexpected meaning) that the melody confers not on a scene as a whole but on each phrase, each word sung. But how to sing it in Berlin or in Paris? In Czech (Mackerras's solution), the listener will hear only meaningless syllables, gain no understanding of the psychological subtleties present at every melodic turn. In translation, then, as was done when these operas started their international career? That too is problematic: the French language, for example, would not tolerate the stress put on the first syllable of Czech words, and in French the intonation would take on an entirely different psychological meaning.

(There is something poignant if not tragic in the fact that Janacek should have concentrated most of his innovative powers on opera of all things, thus putting himself at the mercy of the most conservative bourgeois audience imaginable. Moreover: his originality lies in an unprecedented revaluation of the sung word, meaning specifically the Czech word, which is incomprehensible in ninety-nine percent of the theaters in the world. It's difficult to imagine a greater self-imposed accumulation of obstacles. His operas are the most beautiful homage ever paid the Czech language. Homage? Yes. Homage in the shape of a sacrifice. He immolated his universal music on the altar of a nearly unknown language.)

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A question: If music is a supranational language, is the semantics of speech intonations also supranational in nature? Or not at all? Or at least to some degree? Problems that fascinated Janacek. So much so that in his last will and testament he bequeathed nearly all his money to the University of Brno to underwrite research in spoken language (its rhythms, its intonations, its semantics). But as we know, people don't give a damn about wills and testaments.

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Sir Charles Mackerras's admirable fidelity to Janacek's work means: grasping and defending what is essential. Aiming for the essential is, indeed, Janacek's artistic ethic; its rule being: only absolutely necessary (seman-

ticallv necessary) notes have a right to exist; from which follows an extreme spareness in orchestration. By ridding the scores of their imposed additions, Mackerras restored that spareness and thus made clearer the Janacek aesthetic.

But there is also another, an opposite, kind of fidelity that takes the form of a passion to collect everything an author leaves behind him. Since in his lifetime every author has already tried to make public everything essential, the garbage-can scavengers are devotees of the unessential.

A perfect example of the scavenger spirit shows in the recording of the pieces for piano and violin or cello (ADDA 581136/37). On this two-disc set, minor or worthless pieces (folk music transcriptions, abandoned variants, juvenilia, sketches) take up some fifty minutes-a third of the time-and are scattered among the full-scale compositions. For example, there is six and a half minutes of music written to accompany gymnastic exercises. 0 composers, control yourselves when pretty ladies from a gym come to ask a little favor! Your good turn will outlive you-as a laughingstock!

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I go on looking through the bins. I search in vain for certain beautiful orchestral works of Janacek's mature years ('The Fiddler's Child,'1912; 'The Ballad of Blanik,' 1920), his cantatas (especially: Amarus, 1898), and some compositions from the time when his style was taking shape, works notable for their moving

and unparalleled simplicity: Pater Noster (1901), Ave Maria (1904). The most important and serious lack here is his choral works; for in our century there is nothing in this genre to equal the four masterpieces of Janacek's great period: 'Marycka Magdonova'(1906), 'Schoolmaster Halfar' (1906), 'The Seventy Thousand' (1909), 'The Wandering Madman' (1922): works of diabolic technical difficulty, they were excellently performed in Czechoslovakia; those recordings must surely exist on old pressings from the Czech firm Supraphon, but for years now these have been impossible to find.

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The balance sheet, then, is not entirely bad, but it is not good either. With Janacek this was so from the beginning. Jenufa reached the world's stages twenty years after it was written. Too late. For after twenty years the polemical character of an aesthetic disappears, and then its novelty is no longer discernible. That is why Janacek's music is so often badly understood, and so badly performed; its historic meaning is blurred; it seems unclassifiable; like a beautiful garden laid out just next door to History; the question of its place in the evolution (better: in the genesis) of modern music doesn't even arise.