Czech Music
Wilfrid Mellers writes in preparation for his
Fibich CD review tomorrow
Currently, we are once more agonisingly aware of how 'Central Europe'
has been, through the ages harking back to Shakespeare's 'dark and abysm
of time', a hotbed of violence, stemming from ancestral conflicts between
forces pagan and Christian, Christian and Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox,
and especially from the hegomony of the (Catholic) Austrian Hapsburg Empire,
imposed on communities culturally and linguistically diverse. Unsurprisingly,
we find this reflected in the folk traditions of these regions, and more
dimly in art musics that competitively sought a place in 'the consort of
Europe'. Bohemian, Moravian, Hungarian, Czech and the like composers were
usually trained at Leipzig Conservatory, or in Mannheim or Vienna, and made
a music related to the traditions of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner,
Brahms, and Wagner, the idiom being modified only by vestiges of local colour
accruing from each region, sometimes affirming political distinctions with
fervour.
Of the three major composers who affirm this tradition the earliest in
date, Smetana (1824-84) was primarily a composer of operas, who established
his identity in tales of peasant life (The Bartered Bride) or of
epic destiny (Dalibor), working technically, from the precedents
of Verdi and early Wagner. Later in life he embarked on a series of symphonic
poems hymning his cultural tradition, starting from the model of the internationally
adventurous Hungarian, Liszt, rather than from the Austro-German symphonic
tradition. The second member of the triumvirate, Dvorák (1841-1904),
sometimes wrote operas, dealing however in myths and dreams rather than
in low life or national epic. Unlike Smetana, he for the most part followed
the Austro-German symphonic tradition, converting Schubertian nostalgia
into rural reverie with a delightful affability occasionally stiffened by
the example of Brahms. The third member of the group, Leos Janácek
(1854-1928) wrote most of the music we remember him by in the 20th century.
By far the most radical of these composers, he made only fleeting visits
to Leipzig when he was a student, working mostly in Prague. His childhood
education at a Moravian monastery gave him a thorough grounding in plainchant,
which probably fostered his interest in the relationship between language
and musical line, and so became a basis for his skill as an opera composer.
When, having grown famous, he opened his own musical academy at Brno, he
initiated a curriculum that stressed relationships between human behaviour
and musical and choreographic gestures as manifest in the sequence of his
operas. They profoundly metamorphosed his Moravian peasant culture in the
light and dark of our century, reinvoking the instinctual springs of a community's
life, while at the same time confronting the fearsome social and psychological
traumas that have made us what we are.
Janácek's cycle of operas thus bridges gulfs between past, present,
and future, and now makes an electrical impact on our awareness of ourselves,
both as social beings and as private individuals: so much so that he means
to many people, including me, the opera composer who most potently reveals
the 'genesis' of 'modern man'. The realism of his fate-ful operas (Jenufa,
Katya Kabanova) is countered by the startlements of his ventures
into something like science-fiction (The Excursions of M.Broucek,
The Makropoulos Case): so that his operas define our condition and
may even seem to be our natural birthright. They are a part of our current
repertory, as the operas of Smetana (except for The Bartered Bride)
and of Dvorák are not.
Since Janácek is by definition sui generis, he did not
found a 'school' of composers collateral to those of the Smetana-Dvorák
succession. But when once a Janácek has happened, it becomes more
difficult for traditional nationalists, especially those of nostalgic inclinations,
to survive. Of course, Smetana and Dvorák are by now firmly established;
but another talented regionalist, Zdenek Fibich, immensely famous in youth,
seems to have gone the way of all flesh, despite the exceptional precocity
of his gifts and the prolificity of his output, amounting to more than 600
compositions in most media, generously produced over a life of merely fifty
years, from 1850 to 1900. Trained, particularly, at Leipzig Conservatory
(and later in Mannheim and Paris), under teachers of imposing academic repute,
he displayed no desire to break away from the models favoured by Smetana
and Dvorák, and composed operas mostly with German libretti, involving
internationally famous authors like Schiller, Byron, and Shakespeare. Yet
none has survived as a repertory piece; nor does his symphonic and chamber
music often crop up in concert schedules. Has, we may ask, the poppy of
oblivion obliterated him justly, or arbitrarily?
Copyright © Wilfrid Mellers, April
10th 1999
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