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E. F. Burian: composer.

Article Excerpt
Although Burian grew up in a family that was hugely and indeed famously musical, he took a relatively long time to decide on systematic musical studies. Towards the end of the 1st World War the boy went through a stormy, disturbed period, and even lived on the streets for a while. His father, an opera singer, was at that time working in Pest and the mother couldn't cope with her son. It was only with the post-war stabilisation of conditions that he saw sense himself and embarked on studies at the Prague Conservatory with passionate commitment.

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After finishing his studies there in 1924 he went on to master's school in the composition class of J. B. Foerster, graduating in 1927. His first surviving composition, Variations for piano op. 1 (1920) is still very clumsy. By contrast his opus 2 Beznadejna samomluva [Hopeless Soliloquy] (1922) for vocal quartet, speaker, violin and piano is already worthy of note: not only is it skilfully mastered from the point of view of composition, but it is notable for the balance it strikes between classical music in accordance with the stylistic conventions of the turn of the 19th/20th century, and lighter music (operetta and Anglo-American musical revue--"sweet music"). Furthermore, here Burian emerges as a pioneer of the new way of using the human voice in music. In his instructions for the performers he requires, for example, "1. The vocal parts sing, if it it not otherwise specified, the vowel "a". Where 'in a suppressed way' is specified, the parts should be sung with lips closed (singing through the nose).

2. The musial reciter should not sing. The notes here should not be understood as signs to determine the sung line, but as signs indicating the fall and rise of the voice during recitation." These instructions are the first suggestion of the future voiceband that was to astound the musical public five years later.

In 1922 he also started to compose an opera based on the play Aladdin and Palomid by Maurice Maeterlinck. Burian's interest in this author was undoubtedly inspired by Claude Debussy, who had composed his opera Pelleas and Melissande on one of Maeterlinck's works. The latter opera had its Czech premiere in 1921 and made a strong impression on Burian. In order to come as close as possible to Debussy, he even found a particularly similar play by Maeterlinck. Burian was still searching for his own style at the time and so did not conceal the fact that he had been inspired by the French master both in overall musical dramatic concept and in the composition technique in the details. Thus, for example, he abandoned vocal melodiousness in favour of a declamatory style derived from the cadence of ordinary speech, renounced duets, ensembles, choral passages or simultaneity of vocal parts. He linked up short scenes arranged in mosaic form using several-bar orchestral interludes, and gave the whole score a subdued mood. His choice of compositional techniques also reflected French inspiration. These include, for example, frequent, sometimes even tedious, chromatism, a use of the whole-tone scale, pentatonic scales, fourth-fifth and seventh-ninth chords, fifth and octave parallels and richly colourful and finely differentiated orchestration with conspicuous use of the harp and celesta. Although he soon freed himself from dependence on Debussy, he retained many of these techniques and they became the basis for the creation of his own style.

During his studies Burian composed other pieces in Late Romantic or Impressionist style. In 1924 he wrote a one-act opera, Pred slunce vychodem [Before Sunrise], that involved the biblical characters Adam and Eve, a choir and orchestra. This mystical symbolist and very secularly conceived story of the birth of mankind differed from the previous work only in its more audacious polyphony and permanently modulating harmonies, moving in the direction of Schonbergian atonality. What is more important, however, is that here for the first time Burian presents himself as an innovative director of sound with...

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