CHAPTER 6
JENŬFA
Introduction
The Story of
Act I
The Music
of Act I
The Story
of Act II
The Music
of Act II
The Story
of Act III
The Music
of Act III
Introduction
It can be
very risky, even dangerous, to combine the
functions of music-critic and composer, particularly
when the critic/composer comes to depend at
some later period in his life on the goodwill
of a former victim who has attained the power
and position to revenge himself, if he is
so disposed, on his one-time critic. The tables
are turned - the criticized is now the critic
and, human nature being what it is, it would
take an exceptionally big-hearted person to
have generous feelings towards the critic/composer
who, on an earlier occasion, once damned his
creation.
Janáček, always
fiery, tactless, impulsive and embarrassingly
iconoclastic, wrote in the 15 January 1887
issue of the Brno magazine Hudební Cesty a
review of the first performance of a comic
opera The Bridegrooms by Karel Kovařovic:
Can you
remember any tunes from this comic-opera,
this so-called original novelty? Can you
call it dramatic in any sense whatsoever?
Story and music are "staged simultaneously",
but in reality each is quite independent
of the other. One of two things can be
done-either write new music to the libretto
or write a new libretto to the music-this
so-called music, filled with menacing
obscurities, desperate screams and dagger
stabs. It is true that one sometimes laughed,
but this was at the absurdity of the story,
nothing more. The Overture, with its instability
of key sense and wavering harmony gave
proof of the composer’s genius-to induce
deafness.
Up till this
time, Kovařovic, a composition pupil of Fibich,
had been harpist in the Prague National Theatre,
and had toured Russian Poland as pianist with
the violinist František Ondricek. Besides
the Bridegrooms he had written another comic
opera Cesta Oknem in 1886 (The Way through
the Window) and the ballet Hasis in 1884,
rather in the style of the highly successful
Delibes ballets. He had, therefore, no great
reputation as a composer and his talents as
an orchestral conductor were as yet undiscovered.
Thirteen years
after Janáček had so thoroughly damned Kovařovic’s
opera and on other occasions criticized his
ability as a conductor, Kovařovic was appointed
Opera Director of the Prague National Theatre,
where from 1900 till his death in 1920 he
wielded almost unlimited power.
In 1903 Janáček
sent him the scores (full and vocal) of Jenůfa
as soon as he had completed the opera, waited
several months for an answer only to be told-at
second hand-that the National Theatre had
rejected the work. After the smaller Brno
company had bravely launched the opera, many
invitations were sent to Kovařovic to attend
a performance: only after the ninth invitation
did he condescend to accept, but appeared
little impressed with either the opera or
its presentation. He spoke of "very serious
reasons "(unspecified) why the National
Theatre could not perform the opera in Prague.
As a matter
of fact, Kovařovic kept hedging about Jenůfa
for a period of twelve years: indeed, it was
only after considerable direct and indirect
pressure had been exerted on him personally
that Jenůfa first saw the boards at the National
Theatre on 26 May 1916. Much ingenuity was
displayed by Karel Sipek, librettist for some
of the Kovařovic operas and his intimate friend,
and by the talented singing wife of Dr. Veselý,
Maria Calma-Veselá, to induce Kovařovic to
change his mind: he was bombarded by Jenůfa
arias sung by Maria Calma-Veselá when he was
taking his bath at the Bohdanec Spa: another
director of the National Theatre who happened
also to be spending his holiday at the same
spa was forced to listen to the eager Madame
Calma-Veselá singing to him privately the
main musical numbers. He liked them and became
an immediate convert to Jenůfa.
Eventually
a meeting was arranged between the two deadly
antagonists and a reconciliation was successfully
manoeuvred. It was even said that Janáček
and Kovařovic embraced one another, but at
any rate the latter agreed to put Jenůfa on
at the National Theatre and himself conduct
the performances.
A contributory
factor was undoubtedly the growing national
feeling that there should be a united political
and cultural front between Czechs, Moravians
and Slovaks and that the time had arrived
when plays and operas in the Czech language
and in Czech folk-idiom should be encouraged
and performed.
Kovařovic
decided to make certain "improvements"
to Jenůfa which consisted mainly in cutting
out repetitions of a sequence of words, "tightening
up of the action" by shortening the orchestral
"symphonies" between voice entries and
touching up the orchestration. It was for
these unasked-for and unwanted alterations
that Kovařovic received 1 per cent of royalties
on all performances of Jenůfa at the Prague
National Theatre without the knowledge or
consent of the composer, and which Kovařovic’s
widow asked to be continued after her husband’s
death.
It is little
to be wondered at that Janáček rebelled against
this state of affairs, which must have appeared
to him to be merely adding insult to injury;
he generously agreed, however, to pay the
widow 1 per cent on royalties to help her
in her straitened circumstances-but not for
services rendered to Jenůfa, which he denied
and rejected.
So far as
one can judge, Jenůfa had only been performed
in Janáček’s home town, Brno, exactly as the
composer wrote it: after 1904 all subsequent
performances following the 1916 Prague première
(and including the current Supraphon recording,
observed Kovařovic’s 'improvements'; these
small, fussy cuts of a few bars in length,
frequently distort, and sometimes downright
ruin Janáček’s formal balance of phrase-lengths
as much here as would similar high-handed
treatment damage the satisfactory musical
formalism in a Mozart opera.
As a conductor
of Jenůfa at the Prague National Theatre,
Vladimír Vogel has had the opportunity not
only of comparing Janáček’s original instrumentation
with Kovařovic edited scoring, but of trying
out the two versions: he reluctantly came
to the conclusion that Kovařovic’s alterations
are nearly always an improvement. He mentions
in particular Kovařovic’s replacement of horns
for Janáček’s almost continual use of trombones,
and his extending of the beautiful canonic
lovers’ reconciliation scene at the very end
of the opera. It was, of course, Janáček’s
contention that Kovařovic attempted to justify
his continual rejection of Jenůfa by maintaining
that the original score was a second Boris
requiring another Rimsky-Korsakov (Kovařovic)
to put it in order.
It is high
time that his own country, which acknowledges
Janáček to be their greatest opera composer
of his era and Jenůfa his one universally
acknowledged operatic masterpiece, offers
a performance of the work as he wrote it scrupulously
observing the intentions of the master with
the respect due to him. One therefore welcomes
the good news that the Universal Edition are
in the course of publishing an orchestral
score of Jenůfa using the composer’s original
orchestration.
As we have
seen, Janáček used existing plays by Čapek
and Ostrovsky to make librettos for his seventh
and ninth operas. This is true also of Jenůfa,
Her Step-daughter which, since 1916, has been
performed more than 200 times on the stage
of the Prague National Theatre and has won
international acclaim in most opera houses
of the world. It is the one undisputed masterpiece
of Janáček.
Gabriela Preissová,
the author of the play with the same title,
which she later turned into a novel, was born
at Kutna Hora (Kuttenburg, Central Bohemia)
in 1862. While residing in Moravia after her
marriage, and with only one year’s residence
there, she was able to assimilate the local
dialects sufficiently well to write a series
of plays based on Moravian peasant life. Her
play Her Step-daughter
was produced
in Brno in February 1892: it is assumed that
Janáček saw this production, and after reading
the play began adapting it as an operatic
libretto.
Janáček was
vague about the year in which he actually
began composing the music. He recalled that
the copyist finished the second act in July
1902 and the last act six months later. A
servant in the Janáčeks' home corroborates
that he was working on it in the year 1896:
the fact was, that at the time he began composing
the opera, he was leading an exceptionally
busy and active musical life as choir-master
and organist and music-teacher at the Brno
Training College, Director of the Organ School
and conductor of a series of public concerts
and could only devote spare moments to composition.
It seems to
be generally agreed, however, that Janáček
wrote two versions of the opera-the first
between 1894 and 1897, rather light in character
and possibly emphasizing the love interests:
the second version between 1899 and 1903,
much more tragic and intense on account of
Janáček’s own personal tragedies at the time.
It has already been mentioned that Janáček’s
beautiful daughter died at the age of 21.
She had always taken an exceptional interest
in her father’s work on Jenůfa: never strong
from birth, she developed a joint ailment
which eventually proved fatal. Feeling her
end was near (she had received extreme unction)
and that she would never live to hear the
opera, she asked her father to play its music
to her.
"That
evening we were all sitting together in her
room ", wrote Janáček’s wife. "My
husband had newly completed his opera: he
had frequently said that he identified the
heroine of the opera with Olga, his own daughter.
'daddy’, pleaded Olga, lying on her bed, ‘do
play me the music of Jenůfa, I may not hear
it any more.’ Leos sat down at the piano and
played through the entire score to her.
Janáček was
devoted to Olga-they shared many interests
together, including a love of Russia and the
Russian language. His 2-year-old son had died
in 1890: little wonder then that he was heart-broken
when his beautiful Olga passed away. The first
printed vocal score of Jenůfa is inscribed:
"To the Memory of Olga Janackova"
and the libretto, in Russian, "To you, Olga".
One can well
understand, therefore, that the second rewriting
of the score was overloaded with personal
tragedy and poignant sadness. As Janáček wrote
in his memoirs: "I can only attach the
black ribbon to the illness, pain and suffering
of my daughter, Olga, and of my baby boy,
Vladimír, to the score of Jenůfa!"
The opera
was premièred in Brno by the enthusiastic
but limited resources of the Opera Company
there, on 21 January 1904. During rehearsals,
conductor and producer quarrelled, there was
a rumpus in the orchestra when one of the
bass players became obstreperous and infected
the rest of the orchestra; but "Bad rehearsal
means a good performance "again proved
true and composer and author of the play had
to take numerous curtain calls. Janáček was
hoisted shoulder high from the theatre to
the Artists’ Club (Umelecka Beseda/Society
of Artists.-Ed) where a party was held. Jenůfa
was rightly acclaimed as the first true Moravian
opera.
Janáček’s
own students held rival views on its merits:
some felt and admired the complete newness
of its musical style; others, who judged opera
according to Wagnerian standards, found it
lacking in Wagnerian properties, suggesting,
for instance, that the wedding chorus in Act
III made a poor comparison to the bridal march
in Lohengrin.
Janáček was
now 60 years of age and decided to retire
from his appointment at the Teachers’ Training
Institute in Brno: "I am really unable
to cope any longer with teaching those dreadful
rudiments of music!" At the same time, he
was offered the post of Director of the Warsaw
Conservatory and even visited the capital
of Poland to discuss the matter with the authorities,
who turned out to be "mainly military gentlemen";
unfortunately (or fortunately) they disagreed
about salary and so Janáček returned to Brno,
delighted to receive an award of 400 crowns
from the Czech Academy for his pioneering
work in noting speech melodies, and now could
count on receiving a pension from the Teachers’
Training Institute.
The Brno orchestra
which performed the opera in 1904 must have
been little better than a good amateur one:
flutes were missing and several of the strings
were amateurs.
'I never go
near the Brno Theatre to hear Jenůfa’, the
composer wrote to a friend: "it is agony
for me to listen to it in such a state. Heaven
knows what an unsympathetic stranger must
think of it! "
Jenůfa was
the only opera Janáček wrote intended to be
dressed in Moravian folk-costumes.
Are there
any Czech folk-songs in the opera? Janáček
wrote some works using folk-song themes which
he incorporated into his music, for example,
the alternative section in the choral work
"Zelené sem sela"-which is identical
with the chorus "Far and Wide" (Daleko
siroko) on p. 50 of Jenůfa’s vocal score (Universal
Edition).
The words
of the recruiting chorus are certainly authentic
folk poetry (see the Bartoš Collection
Vol. 2) No. 837, and the melody bears a strong
affinity to a certain Moravian folk-song:
nevertheless Janáček, almost without
exception, transforms a subconscious impression
and prolongation of a folk-song into a consciously
conceived original tune, which perfectly fits
the required operatic situation in his opera.
On the other
hand, Slovakian folk-song profoundly influenced
Janáček’s compositional style and many of
its characteristic features have their roots
deep in the folk music of his country. Short
repeated figures were a feature of Slovakian
folk-song even in the seventeenth century
as may be seen in the Szirmay manuscripts;
repetitions of short phrases followed by their
appearance in melodic variations was a strongly
marked tendency: many songs were in the church
modes-particularly the Lydian mode-as the
result of direct contact with the Roman Church
and Gregorian elements.
The tritone
(augmented fourth) as a melody interval (an
interval considered unsingable or at least
undesirable in the vocal music-both folk and
art of most Western countries) becomes a feature,
almost a cliche, particularly in Moravian
folk-songs: the bagpipes-notably so in the
shepherds’ songs of the Detva region-were
scaled to the mixolydian mode: rhythms of
Slovakian folk-songs were largely determined
by the rhythm of the spoken language: folk-songs
in irregular or mixed times resulted from
following the metrical feet of the words.
Janáček wrote
an overture to Jenůfa (entitled Jealousy)
which does not appear in either the vocal
or full score of the opera and has probably
never been given as a prelude to the opera,
mainly because its contents duplicate the
fifty-odd bars orchestral introduction to
Act I. The overture in its own right (as an
important and characteristic work of its composer)
deserves greater attention at symphony concerts,
for it is an exceptionally interesting and
thoroughly characteristic work.
There are
more "set" numbers in Jenůfa than in
any other of the five previous operas we have
analysed, which is one reason for its great
popularity. It links up with the realistic-verismo
contemporary operas of Verdi, Mascagni, Leoncavallo
and Puccini: the public are on familiar ground.
The last five
operas of Janáček belong to his final and
most intensely characteristic period, when
everything about them is original-the choice
of subject, the compositional technique, the
treatment of voice and orchestra. I think
it is true to say that contemporary audiences
and critics are only now beginning to catch
up with the later Janáček operas, to like
them and to understand them and I to want
to hear them again.
These last
operas of Janáček are, in a sense, probably
stranger to the ear of the average listener
than Wozzeck and Lulu, even than Moses and
Aaron: Berg and Schonberg belong to a "school",
the school of serialist atonal composers;
today a large number of composers from many
different countries write music in a similar
idiom, so that eventually the average listener
comes to accept the way this serial music
sounds, even if he has no particular liking
for it.
On the other
hand, Janáček neither founded or belonged
to any school of composition. He is an individualist,
an isolated phenomenon, and his kind of music
is only to be found in his own work.
Comparing
these later operas with Jenůfa, the latter
must be accepted as a conventional work in
the sense that its harmonies and melodies
make easy listening: the melodies flow-we
remember them! The harmonies are traditional,
the rhythms are smooth and easily grasped:
we can relax, because we are listening to
music on charted ground. Although the music
is continuous, there are definite "sections"
and contrasting "numbers". There
is, too, considerable repetition of words
and phrases, which provide a satisfying classical
balance and shape to the structure of the
music, such as we find, for instance, in the
operas of Verdi and Mozart. Above all, the
music is tonal throughout: we always know
what key we are in, and the melodies move
in flowing, diatonic lines, not as disjointed,
disjunct explosions.
The family
relationship of the persons in Preissová’s
play is almost as complicated as the legal
tie-up between Baron Prus and the other characters
in Čapek’s The Makropulos Case.
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