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Article Excerpt
Today, half way through the first decade of the 21st century, what is the best way to approach the peculiar and still not fully explored phenomenon of Janacek's operas? After all, it is nearly a hundred years since the premiere of one of the most important, Jenufa, and they are among the most curious and brilliants works ever to have eventually found a lasting place in world opera repertoire ...
A conventional approach might well be to take a few general historical or musicological concepts in music and then look at the whole set of Janacek's operas in terms of the applicability or otherwise of these concepts, but in the relatively small space I have here I am not sure that the answers would be satisfactory ... In other words, I have not chosen the method that would bracket all the operas together in one set and analyse them altogether in terms of labels like "verism", "radical folklorism", "impressionism and the field of sound and literary impressions", "expressionism", or--if we go on to structural phenomena--"montage", "collage", "monologue-dialogue" and so forth. What I shall do instead is simply take each opera individually and ask the question of how far we really have a grasp of what really informed the opera in terms of musical context and subject. Here the input of directors plays an important role, since their interpretations are what often provoke us to wonder how far directors can go, what is still part of Janacek's musical and literary poetics, and what has been simply more or less effectively tacked on ...
Sarka
The two versions of the opera were written in the years 1887 and 1888. The author of the libretto Julius Zeyer refused to allow his text to be used and so the opera could not be staged. Sarka's plot is taken from Czech mythology and it is in this light that it is usually regarded, with the assumption that Janacek was here at his closest to an opera with a Czech national theme partly inspired by material from the Zelenohorsky Manuscript (a supposedly ancient manuscript later proved a fake but in its time taken up by Czech national revivalists). In Zeyer's Sarka, however, we find elements foreshadowing the decadence that was to make a remarkable breakthrough into Czech literature with Vrchlicky's trilogy Hippodamie (1889-91). Almost no attention has been paid to the affinity between the poetic image of Hippodamie and Wilde's Salome or other decadent subjects, and in Zeyer's text we actually find these tones more than once. Right at the beginning Premysl declares that, "Morana the pale calls! She has the form of Vlasta who wields a sword". Even more suggestive, however, is the image of Ctirad ascending into Libuse's tomb. Zeyer writes, "In the middle stands a golden throne, on which rests the dead Libuse, wrapped in a thick veil, on her head a golden crown." At the end of Act 1 Ctirad's words: "And pleasure and death my soul convulse!" offer a remarkable decadent union of bliss and death.
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In his monograph Leos Janacek (Obraz zivotniho a umeleckeho boje. V poutech tradice. [A Picture of Struggle in Life and Art. In the bonds of tradition) (Brno 1939) Vladimir Helfert noticed the composer's consistent tendency to turn away from the prevalent two-, four- or eight-bar phrasing ("this three-bar pattern then becomes a particularly distinctive phenomenon in Janacek's musical idiom"). Quite surprisingly, Helfert considers that "in this musical sensibility in three-bar patterns [there is] undoubtedly a folk influence". Janacek generally treated Zeyer's text respectfully. Once I made the attempt to summarise all the metrical deviations and peculiarities (In: Janacek a Zeyeruv vers v opere Sarka. SPFFBU, H 21--1986, pp. 41-49). For the sake of brevity all I shall report here is that Zeyer's free verse varies in line length by as much as 10 syllables. This will perhaps be evident from the following data taken from the first hundred verses of the 1st Act of the libretto. In this sample we find 2 two-syllable lines, 3 three-syllable, 9 five-syllable, 18 six-syllable, 12 seven-syllable, 26 eight-syllable, 15 nine-syllable, 11 ten-syllable, and 2 eleven-syllable lines. Zeyer keeps to an iambic metre by using anacrusis, which Janacek declaims generally on the last arsis of a bar or else neutralises by using corresponding values: "Kles s tebou" as a half-note triplet, Tam najdes as three quavers and sometimes, in fact quite often, even prolonging the anacrusis as against the subsequent text.
To make an automatic connection between the Wagnerian attributes of the text (Siegfried's sword and Trut's flail) and the music of assumed Late Romantic orientation, is to express the situation in only very approximate terms. The musical logic of Sarka is in fact already close to interest in the melody of speech. Janacek was to start recording these speech melodies systematically only subsequently, but the interest was already fundamentally formed in his mind. We should remember that in his monastery boarding school years and during his studies Janacek had already showed an unusual concern with phonetics and declamation, so that the ground was already laid for the basic change that came when he finally immersed himself in folklore, taught himself to make fast, precise records and then used this ability for the continual recording of the situations that fascinated him in the form of speech melodies. The period of his life in which he as it were retreated into the world of folksong and music followed the composition of Sarka and is one of the most interesting features of Janacek's creative development and of the evolution of Czech music as a whole at that time. Figuratively speaking, the composer progressively wrapped himself up in the protective case of a musical activity that involved...
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