ET: Almanac

The permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in body or mind cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular, in other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment. Whatever they undertake becomes a passionate pursuit; but they never arrive, never pause. They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill which can never lead them to fulfillment.

The most incurably frustrated--and, therefore, the most vehement--among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively, and those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worth while, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger. Eve the wholehearted dedication to a holy cause does not always cure them. Their unappeased hunger persists and they are likely to become the most violent extremists in the service of their holy cause.

Eric Hoffer - The True Believer

Read More

Abide With Me by Thelonious Monk

I'd never heard Monk's version of this until it was pointed out to me by my ever-favorite lit-blogger Patrick Kurp.

The similarity to the finale of Mahler 9 has been pointed out many times. When I was at my most ambitious with the old chorus, I thought of taking the whole text of Abide With Me (every verse) and setting it as a hymn to the music of Mahler 9's last movement. But you'd certainly need a 50-member chorus of steel in order to make it happen. Some things are probably best left dreams...but the dream abides.

Read More

800 Words: The Many, Many Times I've Been Wrong

“And then there’s the still more amazing Glagolitic Mass - described by Milan Kundera as 'more an orgy than a mass.' It’s just the plain Church Mass which so many Christian denominations use to this day, but it’s in Old Church Slavonic rather than Latin or Greek or Russian. Oddly, the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) section is missing, with its invocation ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ (Give us peace). It’s fruitless to speculate, but my guess is that Janacek did this deliberately, and substituted in its place a war cry. Specifically a war cry played by the Organ, to sound a note of defiance for the Czech people who had been under Austro-German subjugation for so many centuries (and would soon be again).”

(The Agnus Dei of Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass.)

The evidence on this blog keeps piling up that I’m either a fraud or going senile. I’d hope that anyone who knows me well enough would think it more likely to be the latter. The Glagolitic Mass is a piece I could probably write out in full score with reasonably impressive accuracy (both in original and revised versions – just don’t expect me to remember the text…). And yet I’d written that there’s no Agnus Dei section. No doubt, any number of experts would read that statement and conclude that I know absolutely nothing about Janacek…perhaps I don’t if I make a mistake that obvious. But if that’s the case with a composer I love as much as Janacek, then there’s probably no hope for me to opine reliably on any other subject either. Perhaps my memory for facts and figures is going the way of my memory for everything else, aka arguably non-existent. As my brother Ethan reminded me last night, I seem to remember any fact I’ve been told once over my lifetime, yet I seem to be locked out of my apartment once every three days.

I’d like to think that this is the single worst transgression against easily confirmable facts which I’ve ever committed on this blog. But I know myself too well to ever believe that. During the last couple weeks I referred to Walther Rathenau as Walter von Rathenau, I claimed that life under British Imperialism was easily the most tolerable of all imperial rules because I’d forgotten about the French ‘mission civilisatrice’ which allowed imperial subjects to become French citizens and even stand for Parliament; I entitled a post ‘Culture of Offense’  after I’d devoted an entire jeremiad on this blog to the misuse of the term ‘culture’ as a way to describe anything people dislike about other people. But the single worst mistake was when I wrote an entire post about Istanbul, or 'Istambul' as I spelled it...for the entirety of the post. I'd even visited Istanbul (for a day) when I was 17. I genuinely didn’t realize the mistake I’d made until Der Koosh pointed it out to me, at which point I truly didn’t believe him until I googled the city, and then realized that I’d been spelling it wrong my whole life.

This particular mistake only occurred to me yesterday as I was biking, alone with my thoughts and the good weather. In a fit of dread, I nearly doubled back to my apartment correct the error the moment I realized it. And then I thought… why bother? The damage is done; just another in my series of easily correctable mistakes, most of which I probably haven’t yet noticed.

Fortunately, very few people regularly read this blog. If they did, I’d have long since been discredited as a credible source for just about anything – and that’s precisely why it stings so badly when I’ve been blamed for things I know I’d done correctly. During the extremely brief period I was a fourth-string music critic for the Washington Post, I apparently got the facts wrong on the price of a ticket – and the ticket price was the crux of my entire review. But there remains another fact that I’d found three separate websites which listed the ticket price I listed (one of which changed the listed ticket price for the group’s concert a mere hour after I called to inquire, thereby sabotaging my claim to the Post editors). Meanwhile, my old editor at our college webzine is a rising star at the Washington Post. He recently did a profile about the likely next Senator from Maine, Angus King. He referred to King as a thoroughly independent-minded politician in the tradition of such other iconoclastic Maine politicians as Olympia Snowe, Margaret Chase Smith, and George Mitchell…George Mitchell was a Senate Democratic Majority Leader. When George HW Bush tried to paint Bill Clinton as another ‘tax-and-spend liberal’, it was George Mitchell (along with Ted Kennedy) to whom he most liked to compare Clinton.

I’m a family business factotum; he’s a star at the Washington Post. Life isn’t fair, and people who are far worse off than I could complain with much more authenticity than I can.


So what can I possibly say in my defense except that like any writer entertaining enough to be worth reading, I’m wrong at least as often as I’m right? Like any blogger, the onanistic pleasure of bloviating to the wind is but a click of a mouse away. Who needs facts when you have opinions? I don’t claim to be smarter than everyone else, just that I try to be J. 

Read More

ET: Almanac

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves…

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his religion, his race or his holy cause…

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business

This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national, and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor’s shoulder or fly at his throat…

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowing selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless…

Eric Hoffer - The True Believer

Read More

800 Words/Late Friday Playlist #18: Janacek - the Good Stuff

Let's start with some of the operas:

To see some of the extraordinary stuff in Jenufa, scroll down to end of the last post. But here's one more gorgeous clip. 

The opera after Jenufa was Osud. A hall of mirrors in which the main character is a composer who is putting on an opera. Listen to the music here and try to tell me why the hell is this music not performed more often?

Next came his sci-fi/fantasy opera The Excursions of Mr. Broucek. Mr Broucek gets drunk and finds himself first on the moon and then in the 15th century. If I told you that an opera with a plot this awesome was merely the 7th-best opera by Janacek, you'd have no reason to believe me. It's not at all a bad opera, Janacek is just that good. 

After the premiere of Jenufa, Janacek ran off with the mezzo who played Kostelnicka (the older lady who drowns the infant), and even brought the singer home with him – insisting that she stay as both his mistress and a houseguest. Understandably, this caused Janacek’s wife, Zdenka, to attempt suicide. Leos and Zdenka remained separated for the rest of their lives, rarely ever seeing each other. It’s said that the turbulence of his first string quartet, the “Kreutzer Sonata” (based on the Tolstoy novella about a husband who murders his wife, not Beethoven’s sonata) is based upon the turbulence of his marriage. In a letter, he confides about the work “I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata.”

Janacek was a Moravian Czech, not a Bohemian Czech. While this distinction may mean very little to us, it meant a great deal to him. The Bohemians (among them composers like Dvorak and Smetana) hailed from the Czech lands’ Western half, and were oriented to Central Europe. Their capital was Prague, the second city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their culture modeled itself on the polished sophistication of Vienna and the German capitals. The Moravians hailed from the Czech east, with the comparative backwater Brno as their capital. The Moravians were very much Slavophiles who hoped that Russia would unite the Slavic peoples. Their lifestyle was more rural, coarser, more peasant-rooted. This is reflected in Janacek’s music, which is far less refined than Dvorak’s and must have disturbed many German listeners, who thought even Dvorak an exciting Czech barbarian. True to his pan-Slavic beliefs, Janacek created an orchestral rhapsody called Taras Bulba, based on a Gogol novel about a militant Cossack feudal lord in the Middle Ages who must sacrifice his two sons in his pursuit of Russian glory. In addition to being a very political work, one can’t help but notice the symmetry to Janacek’s personal life, in which he lost both his children before adulthood.

There are three other great works, greater than Taras Bulba, that have to be considered explicitly political. One after the other in 1926, Janacek wrote two of the most exciting works in the concert repertoire. The Sinfonietta, which he dedicated to The Czechoslovakian Armed Forces, and which he said was intended to celebrate ‘contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, his courage and determination to fight for victory'….whatever. I just know that it’s one of the most exciting pieces of music ever written, with a particularly stunning finale.

And then there’s the still more amazing Glagolitic Mass - described by Milan Kundera as 'more an orgy than a mass.' It’s just the plain Church Mass which so many Christian denominations use to this day, but it’s in Old Church Slavonic rather than Latin or Greek or Russian. Oddly, the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) section is missing, with its invocation ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ (Give us peace). It’s fruitless to speculate, but my guess is that Janacek did this deliberately, and substituted in its place a war cry. Specifically a war cry played by the Organ, to sound a note of defiance for the Czech people who had been under Austro-German subjugation for so many centuries (and would soon be again).

As a sidenote, I will say that the most extraordinary musical experience of my life occurred when I heard this piece performed in London’s Royal Festival Hall next to an old lady who claimed to know Bela Bartok. We spoke about Bartok for a number of minutes, about Janacek, and about the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras – an Australian judged by nearly all music lovers to be the greatest Janacek conductor of all time. I sat in the audience, and wept hot tears for the next forty-five minutes as the most religious experience of my life came over me. At the time, I was unaware that the ‘original’ version of the piece existed – and that it made certain passages sound completely unrecognizable. The Veruju always felt like there was something missing, as though the highest peak had not been hit – and then it most certainly hit that peak. After an experience like that, how could I ever leave music? After the performance, I stood in line to greet Mackerras at a CD signing and I said “Maestro, I hope I should one day be able to conduct ay composer half as well as you do Janacek. Everybody around Mackerras seemed extremely impressed by my gumption, but he beckoned me to say it to him closer. He still couldn’t hear after the second time. I tried one last time, but he still couldn’t hear me and simply said “Yes,…. Janacek’s a great composer!

The third of them is Janacek’s last ‘completed’ work, “From the House of the Dead.” It’s his most advanced piece of music – musically, dramatically, politically. The opera is based on a Dostoevsky novella of the same name about a Siberian prison camp. There are scenes in which prisoners are beaten and humiliated, but the book is meant to show how people are capable of keeping their dignity even under the worst conditions – an opera that proved more and more prophetic as the 20^th century advanced. Musically, Janacek never wrote a more daring score – full of harmonies and instrumental effects which would be advanced even for the 1960’s. But to the end, however much he bended it, Janacek stuck stubbornly to tonal music.

And then there’s his unfinished Symphonic Poem “Danube” (doubtless meaning the Danube River which runs through all the Balkan lands). It very well have been meant as a similarly political statement, but we’ll never know because the always sloppy Janacek left Danube in such an incomplete mess that it had to be reconstructed. Even in its reconstruction, it’s a shame this piece isn’t better known – it has some of Janacek’s most daring writing, perhaps that’s why he couldn’t complete it.

And now comes the Kamilla story…

In 1917, the 63-year-old Janacek developed an infatuation for an unsophisticated girl he met at a spa. Kamila Stosslova was thirty-seven years Janacek's junior, married anything but his intellectual equal, and it’s probable that their relationship was never consummated – in spite of the hundreds of letters Janacek sent her, nearly all of which Kamila saved. Many, perhaps most, of these letters contain melodramatically passionate declarations of love. It’s probable that Janacek’s feelings were unrequited, but Kamila kept a very close correspondence with him all the same and made Janacek a close family friend. It was Kamila who was with Janacek at his bedside when he died in 1928, after going out into the woods at night to search for her son.

One also has to wonder whether Janacek’s own feelings were quite as erotic as he claimed. Janacek developed a similar infatuation for another young woman (also named Kamila) shortly after his daughter died – it’s possible, though perhaps unlikely, that Janacek was in fact seeking a psychological substitute for his deceased daughter Olga.

In any event, even if Kamila was never Janacek’s lover, she was certainly his muse. The first fruit of his infatuation was an unforgettably beautiful song cycle: The Diary of One Who Disappeared. It is a diary in poems which tells a story about a village boy who comes across a gypsy girl (re: the worldly Leos and the unsophisticated Kamila) and decides to leave his family and village to be with her. The song cycle has parts for both tenor and alto (and an almost unbearably haunting offstage ensemble of three female singers). In one letter to Kamila, he wrote “…And the black gypsy girl in my Diary of One Who Disappeared – that was you. That’s why there’s so much emotional fire in the work. So much fire that if we both caught on, we’d be turned to ashes…And all through the work I thought of you!”

If that declaration was embarrassingly intimate, there is also his second quartet, which he subtitled ‘Intimate Letters.’ In case there is any doubt what’s meant by that title, he wrote in another letter to Kamila “You stand behind every note, you, living, forceful, loving. The fragrance of your body, the glow of your kisses – no, really of mine. Those notes of mine kiss all of you. They call for you passionately…” ….yowza! Well, even if this is dirty old man music, it’s breathtaking. The two middle movements contain some of the most gorgeous music written in the twentieth century.

And then, finally, there are the three operas in which Janacek claimed to represent Kamila in his protagonists:

The first was Kata Kabanova, which Janacek explicitly dedicated to her – which tells story in a drab, provincial town (not unlike a smaller version of Brno) of an extra-marital affair and the woman’s eventual suicide. The music representing Kata, the protagonist, is both pure and ecstatic – like a perfect fusion of religious and sensual feeling, but set against her is oppressive music that at times sounds like apocalyptic brutality. The fusion between these twocreates the greatness of this opera – the contrast between all life’s savage tribulations and all that makes life worth living – is what makes the opera work so miraculously. The tragic ending is made that more poignant because she’s clearly an oasis of something lovely in a drab place.

 For the moment, we’re going to skip over the next opera chronologically and move on to The Makropulos Case, an opera based on a play by Karel Capek (better known as science fiction’s inventor of ‘robots’). In this opera, Kamila is represented by the world-famous singer: Emilia Marty. While Marty seems young, she is in fact 338 years oldand possesses a potion which keeps her perpetually young. Like so many great performers, Emilia’s core of vulnerability is concealed by an emotionally frigid exterior – treating subordinates and lovers alike with terrible indifference. The layers of psychological meaning in this opera are unbelievably thick. Is Emilia Marty in fact a portrait of Kamila, or is she a portrait of Janacek himself – a great artist, coldly indifferent to those around him (like his wife) and with great sexual bravado into old age? Or is Janacek represented by Hauk-Sendorf, the senile old man who recognizes Emilia as Elina, a girl he had an affair with half-a-century before when Emilia assumed a different identity.

And now we come to the greatest opera of the last 200 years – if we still don’t count Sondheim musicals as opera then I’m deadly serious. Since Mozart, there has been no opera composer but Janacek who could possibly match him in the ability to create living characters, diversity of emotion, and sheer musical wonders. At the top of the opera heap, it’s just Mozart and Janacek, there is no third.

Mozart beats Janacek in his seamless ability to blend the emotional content and intellectual content to the point that they’re one and the same. In Mozart, just as there’s no musical effect that overwhelms the dozen others that are happening simultaneously, there is no character who overwhelms any other (except of course Don Giovanni – the exception who proves the rule because that’s exactly what Mozart set out to do). But not even Mozart (nor Beethoven) proved himself capable of writing a piece of music that showed an entire cosmic view of all life – birth to death, highest forms of life to lowest, highest tragedy to lowest comedy. There are four musical works I can think of which achieve this (obviously with extra-musical help) – The Creation by Haydn, Mahler’s 3^rd Symphony, arguably Into The Woods, and The Cunning Little Vixen. And of those four, The Cunning Little Vixen clearly does it best. For profundity, there is not a single piece of music in all creation that equals it – and it’s an opera based on a comic strip!

Like all those cosmic works – it contains every dramatic state within it: tragedy, comedy, clearly there’ irony - we’re  watching animals talk like human beings, and there’s much Romance as well – a we watch foxes marry one another. So why then should a cutsie opera (made still more cuddly than it needs to be by too-cute productions) that skirts a fine line between the ridiculousness of opera and the ridiculousness of Disney be considered the most profound opera ever written? The answer can probably be found by a description of the plot.

It helps digesting all that depth to know that this is one of the world’s most entertaining pieces of music – full of comedy that needs no apologies by saying it’s ‘opera comedy’ and full of romance to balance out the death (and arguably rape) that takes place over the course of the opera. In this piece, Janacek presents us the entire natural world as though it’s an opera by Pixar – anthropomorphic animals seemingly of every genus and species, with opera singers playing foxes, dogs, gophers, chickens, frogs, mice, and insects. And these characters behave much as humans do – discussing matters of the farm and the forest as though they’re political and philosophical issues. It presents us with the life cycle of a vixen named Sharp Ears (Kamila) – independent, strong willed, a sort of female animal version of Tom Sawyer in her younger days who thumbs her nose at all authority. A farmer captures her to be a housepet, but she eats half the hens after luring them out of their coup with a rousing speech about how they are being exploited by the capitalist hen for their work. She then tries to befriend a haughty bourgeois gopher who rejects her, she then she drives out of his burrow by peeing on him.  We then watch as she meets a male fox and falls in love with him, gets pregnant, and summons the entire forest for their wedding – all in the span of twenty minutes.

The first act was comedy, the second act is romance. The third act is tragedy, a death so that the life cycle can begin anew. The farmer, swearing vengeance on the Fox for killing his chickens, hunts Sharp Ears obsessively. But it’s a friend of his who finds Sharp Ears with a tasty Rabbit trap which she escapes easily. But while Sharp Ears has an enormous family to feed, she still feels no compunction about breaking the trap or about scampering as though nothing’s wrong when men are clearly so closeby. And it’s this hubris which inevitably results in her getting shot.

But that only leads us to the most life-enhancing part of this story. Before the final scene, the old gamekeeper notices that the same friend, who married the town beauty every man had a crush on, gave her the fur of Sharp Ears as a present. This double loss causes him to go back into the forest to the place where he first saw the Vixen. He mourns the loss of them both, he despairs the dullness of his marriage and mourns the time of life when he and his wife were vigorous and attractive. But then he sees another Vixen who looks so much like the young Sharp Ears that it's clearly her daughter. And just before he can capture her, a frog jumps into his lap for the second time during the opera. But this frog speaks to him, and tells him that it was his grandfather who'd once jumped into his lap, and that his grandfather told all sorts of stories about the gamekeeper. And thus the opera ends on a note which says that life will always go on, even after death.

What makes Janacek so extraordinary is that he belongs in that elite cadre of artists for whom anything is possible – and nothing is predictable. So many artists have infinite intellectual reach, yet their intelligence precludes any emotional give – along with ditching traditional forms they ditch the emotions those forms housed. Other artists have a bottomless well of emotion to give us, yet their music is predictable – hewing to the same formulas again and again. But there is an exceedingly rare group of artists whose work suggests more things in the heavens and the earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy – if I wanted to count the number of musicians who master both playing fields consistently, even Mozart and Sondheim can’t make it on here – too rigid: I think of Beethoven, Schumann, Mahler, Janacek, Ellington, Schnittke, The Beatles, … and then my mind draws a blank. Janacek is one of the very few geniuses of music who can open up the entirety of the cosmos. If you’ve never heard his music, it’s a large part of the cosmos which you’re missing.

…And I haven’t even gotten into the piano or a cappella choral works….

Read More

800 Words: The Disorganized Imagination of Leos Janacek

I have a mind that goes into overdrive all too easily. I find that if I don’t write something – something long - every day, I spend whole hours or afternoons which should be spent at my desk finding ways to be productive in boyish fantasies of being productive – my favorite fantasy is indulging in the thought of being the great Maestro Ivan Tuckerini who made his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic when he was six. Now I spend only eighteen weeks of every year on the podium – six for orchestras, six for operas, six for choruses, and no more than eighteen weeks because any more feels utterly limiting for an artist of such burning creativity as myself. Another eighteen weeks of the year are spent writing Nobel Prize-worthy fiction, plays, poetry, history, and even the occasional symphony if I have a week to spare – every book I write makes the New York Times Bestseller list and my books are said to have initiated a new Golden Era of reading and writing for American society. Inner city children wander the streets quoting my poetry, sexually liberated graduate students hang on my every word when I speak at their colleges. The rest of the year I spend touring around with my grammy-winning classical/jazz/blues/roma/bluegrass/soul band for which I’m lead singer, violinist, and co-songwriter. The rest of my band consists of a Jewish folk-song expert from Minnesota who can’t sing, two Liverpudlian Brits, one of whom’s taken up with a Japanese conceptual artist; a working class New Jersey college dropout, two very sincere multi-instrument-playing Canadian hippies – one guy, one girl; two London art-school kids who love the blues, a New York Jewish son of a dance-band leader (though his singing partner doesn’t make it); and a gay piano player from the London suburbs who loves 50’s rock’n roll.

This life of selfless devotion to my art continues until I die at the age of 95 from complications due to a twelve-hour orgasm brought on by my second, much younger wife (I was an early widower who bravely raised three children by myself) and half-a-dozen groupies who accompany us from show to show. In my unauthorized biography, it is revealed that I negotiated peace in the Middle East and cured lymphoma.

Unfortunately, I have a mind that operates on spontaneous combustion, and order is utterly anathema to my brain. Even if I wanted to,I wouldn’t know how to organize my thoughts, and believe me I’ve tried. One can either beat oneself up for one’s faults or accept who one is, and above all else, I am thoroughly disorganized.

In art, as in life, my mind tends toward the disorderly. Give me the diverse ramblings of Chaucer, not the well-ordered tiers of Dante. Give me the mad confusion of the Marriage of Figaro any day over the plastic perfection of The Magic Flute. Give me Beethoven fugues, not Bach’s. Give me Bellow, not Nabokov. Give me Turner, not David. Give me Howard Hawks, not Stanley Kubrick.

It’s very easy to admire orderly things – well put together art, well organized buildings, well-built people. But perfect order is beyond us – humanity is not perfect, and perfect things are cold, distant, and unobtainable for us mortals. No matter how much we long to possess it, to understand its perfection, the experience of perfection eludes us every time - something is always in the way. Perfection, if it exists, needs nothing but itself, and no matter how much we try to love it, we ultimately fail because something perfect is incapable of loving us back - if it's perfect, it has nothing to do with us because we could only besmirch it. Perfection demands everything of us, only to give nothing back in return.

This is why Leos Janacek is such a necessary composer for classical music (a disorganized preamble if ever there was one…). In a century of composition that nearly banished all concerns but structure and design, Janacek stands out as one of the few great composers whose primary concern was human expression. The form of his music, such as it was, had no reason to exist except to fit the content. And if the content was too diverse for any form to fit, that was OK too.

I remember reading a music critic – Greg Sandow if I’m not mistaken – who compared classical music’s obsession with form to people who complement a woman for having beautiful face because her skull is perfect (why is this post so sexual?). To appreciate the design without the content which the design provides is to utterly miss the point of why music, why art itself, exists - it exists for us to love, not to worship.

I remember a harmony class with a professor I was (unsuccessfully) trying to win over. Like most music theory teachers, his mind went unfailingly towards the orderly and well-kempt. He was an organist who loved Bach and sacred music, so naturally we weren’t meant to get along. At the time, I was just falling in love with Janacek and I asked him what he thought of my new favorite composer. His response was instant, “He’s the best third-rate composer I know.”

Composers like Janacek will never appeal to the orderly mind. It still amazes me that certain classical musicians have overcome their hatreds of Mahler and Ives, composers of disorganized genius if ever there were any. But in some ways Janacek is on a level of disorganization entirely above even Mahler and Ives – even above Schumann and Mussorgsky (ok…maybe not Mussorgsky). In Janacek, there is no such thing as musical development. A theme can be non-chalantly thrown in only for another theme to replace it instantly, then another, and another, with no sense that one theme has anything to do with the other. At least in Italian opera, the various melodies and motifs are divided into arias (songs) and recitatives (sung exposition) - but no such division is necessary in Janacek. All that mattered to Janacek was to capture the right music to suit the expression of that particular moment, and if the music had nothing to do with the music that came before or the music that came after, that was perfectly acceptable. His only compatriot in this regard is Modest Mussorgsky - but Mussorgsky did not live long enough to stretch this technique to Janacek's extent. Other modern composers, like Debussy and Stravinsky, mostly rejected the very ‘German’ idea of developing the same musical themes. But of those who rejected musical development, only Janacek and Mussorgky made emotional expression their primary goal.

Like Ives, Janacek toiled for his entire career as a virtual unknown in the provinces – not acquiring a name for himself until he was retirement age. He made his living as nothing but a mere provincial organist and musicmaster, and came home every day to a disastrous lifelong marriage and children he eventually had to bury. In an era when Vienna was still the center of music, Janacek couldn’t even live in the second city: Prague. He lived in Brno, Prague’s grimy industrial counterpart in the Czech-speaking lands.

 (For me, the most terrifying scene in all opera, even if it's in the wrong language here - German rather than Czech. The old town sacristan convinces herself to drown her ward’s newborn bastard son in a frozen lake.)

It was in Brno, at the age of fifty, that Janacek penned his first masterpiece. As his daughter lay dying in the next room, Janacek wrote the opera Jenufa. In doing so, Janacek finished the job begun by Mozart to take opera out of the stylized realm of Gods and legends and put it squarely in the realm of human beings. For Janacek, opera was not poetry – it was everyday prose. Every emphasis of the words, every rise and fall in the melody, is as precisely notated as possible to correspond with everyday speech. When a person grows angry, he speaks in a different manner than he does when he’s happy, or sad, or ambivalent. Janacek’s great insight is to find the appropriate speech pattern for each psychological state. The result is a dramatic expression every bit as heightened as in any other great opera, but with a naturalness and believability that is only Janacek’s. Of course, for melodic passages he slows down the speech patterns, but they are still the same speech patterns, just done in half-or-quarter time.  This is musical organization of a type every bit as precise as anything in Monteverdi, but in a manner so different that to certain people it seems like a jumble of musical sludge in which one musical motif has nothing to do with any other.

(The astonishing finale of Jenufa from the astonishing third act of Jenufa. Just watch.)

To the end of his career, Janacek remained utterly devoted to his speech method. He would notate people’s speech precisely as he heard it, with cadence, rhythms, and notes on the page existing exactly as they were when they came out of people’s mouths, and in his papers there exists a page on which he notated his daughter’s dying breath.

There is not a single great opera composer since Janacek who has taken up his mantle. Britten and John Adams occasionally let their music speak through prose, but mostly as buildup to another poetic section. With the exception of Berg, none of the high modernists from Schoenberg to Birtwistle have cared a fig for making characters sing as people would speak. One can only surmise that had more composers followed Janacek’s example, the story of 20^th century music would have been very, very different.

Read More

ET: Almanac

...prose is not only a form of discourse distinct from verse; it is also an aspect of reality, its daily, concrete, momentary aspect, and the opposite of myth. This goes to the deepest conviction of every novelist: there is nothing so thoroughly disguised as the prose of life; every man seeks endlessly to transform his life into myth--seeks, so to speak to transcribe it into verse, to shroud it in verse (bad verse). If the novel is an art and not merely a "literary genre," the reason is that the discovery of prose is its ontological mission, which no art but the novel can take on entirely.

- Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed

Read More