Table Of ContentFrontispiece: The late Dr. Erik Chisholm
THE OPERAS OF
LEOS JANÄCEK
by
ERIK CHISHOLM, MUS. DOC. EDIN.
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DVORAK MEDALLIST OF
THE CZECHOSLOVAK PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC
PERGAMON PRESS
OXFORD - NEW YORK · TORONTO
SYDNEY . BRAUNSCHWEIG
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Copyright (5; 1971 Pergamon Press Ltd.
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First edition 1971
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 68-22491
Printed in Hungary
This book is sold subject to the condition
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00 012853 X (ilexicover)
08 012854 8 (hard covei^
FOREWORD
IN 1947 I sat with my young student wife in the gallery of
the National Theatre in Prague, listening for the first time
to a Janacek opera. It was Katja Kabanovd, conducted by
that greatest of Czech conductors, Vaclav Talich, with
whom I was studying at that time, and the cast included
several famous Czech singers, such as Bcno Blachut, Marta
Krasovâ and Ludmila Cerzinkova.
What a revelation this performance was to me! Here
was a composer whose very name I hardly knew, who
had been dead 20 years, writing an opera in an entirely
different idiom from anything I had ever known, who
used the human voice and the inflexions of his strange-
sounding language in an absolutely original way, and
whose instrumentation and harmony produced colours and
sounds unlike anything I had heard before. We were so
impressed with Katja Kabanovd that we determined to see
every possible Janacek opera while we were in Czecho-
slovakia. So shortly after the war German composers were
not popular, and there was an astonishing wealth of
Czechoslovak music to be heard; in fact the selection was
greater than it is today. We saw nearly all the Janâéek
operas "during that year, sometimes travelling to other
towns to see them in several different productions.
With every hearing, my admiration for the genius of
Janâëek grew. I took vocal scores of several operas of this
virtually unknown composer back to London in 1948, and
was fortunate in being able to interest Norman Tucker
of Sadler's Wells in Janacek's work. Of course, these piano
ix
X FOREWORD
scores gave little idea of what Janaöek's orchestration
sounds like, and even one's ecstatic descriptions of Janâéek's
operas as " a sort of mixture between Mussorgsky, Bartok,
Debussy, Sibelius and Mahler" could not create even to the
expert mind much idea of the actual sound of a Janâoek
score. Not that Janâéek was particularly "advanced" in his
methods of composition—after all, Schoenberg had written
Pierrot Lunaire before Janâèek's Katja—but he had the
knack of expressing absolutely new ideas with apparently
conventional means. I managed to secure a tape of Katja
through the B.B.C., and during a playback gave a sort
of running commentary to Norman Tucker and Desmond
Shaw-Taylor, who had heard a lot about Janâoek, but very
little of his actual music! They were as enthusiastic as I
had always been, and the first English performance of a
Janâoek opera was given on April 10, 1951 at Sadler's
Wells (Katja Kabanova).
There lias seldom been a time since when a Janâôek
opera has not been in the Wells repertory; Rafael Kubelik
also brought Jenufa to Covent Garden during his time as
Musical Director there, and in more recent years some
American companies have taken the plunge. In Germany
there have been pretty regular productions of Janâcek,
and in the .last few years there have been magnificent
productions in Sweden, France, Italy and even South
America.
Janâoek could now be said to have "arrived" outside
his own native land, and there is sufficient interest in the
purely operatic side of his output to make Erik Chisholm's
book not only welcome but positively overdue. Dr. Chis-
holm was a fanatical propagandist for a greater apprecia-
tion of Janâcek's art and no-one could have been better
qualified than he to write the first comprehensive analysis
FOREWORD XI
of Janâcek's operas in the English language, indeed one
of the few books on this subject in any language.
Dr. Chisholm's rather unusual idea of commencing his
analytical essays with Janâcek's last opera and working
back to his earlier ones seems particularly appropriate in
this case, with Janâcek's very unusual musical background
and development as an operatic composer, so that we
plunge straight into his most mature work. It was also a
splendid idea on Dr. Chisholm's part to write a complete
thematic analysis of at least one scene from a Janâcek
opera, in the Appendix, so that the reader can follow the
development and transformation of every small thematic
organism, watch the composer's methods as it were under
a microscope, and see how these methods lie at the very
core of Janâéek's operatic thinking.
I am quite sure that all lovers of Janâéek will find this
book an essential part of their library, and I hope that
it will also awaken the interest of many more who do not
yet know the work of this most fascinating of opera com-
posers.
CHARLES MACKERRAS
EDITORIAL NOTE
THE problem of transliteration always arises in dealing
with languages using many letters or symbols not found
in English. Here I have taken expert advice and retained
the original Czech form of names, some of which, e.g.
Petroviö (pronounced Petrovitch, the c sound being fami-
liar to most readers here) or Lujza (Louise), are obvious,
while unfamiliar ones like Jan z Rokycan (John ofRoky-
can) and Matej (Matthew) are translated in footnotes
where they first appear. The name Katja I have taken
from the score, although in Czech it can be written as
either Kat'a or Kâtâ, but I revert to Kristina because the
Krista and Christa of the score are, I think, adopted to
save space; she is actually addressed in the text as Kristina.
Vec Makropulos is usually translated The Makropulos Affair,
"affair" having a wider significance than "case", but as it
was an actual legal case in the story, I have adhered to
Dr. Chisholm's title, which was also used by Sadler's
Wells. Dostoevsky's novel, in Czech Z mrtvého domu (From
the House of the Dead), was used exactly by Janacek for
his opera, but is often quoted without the "From", and
here I have retained Dr. Chisholm's choice which often
reads more easily in a discursive text.
Czech inverted commas, as often in German, are thus:
„Nemâm psa", and exclamation marks precede as well
as follow a phrase thus : i... ! I have used the English
simpler method. Incidentally, as Miss Margaret Cox points
out, the above two-word sentence typifies the Czech
characteristic of brevity. Nemam psa means in colloquial
xiii
XIV EDITORIAL NOTE
English "I have not got a dog"—in our shortest form it
would be "I have no dog". This characteristic poses prob-
lems for those translating Czech libretti into English (or
German) for singing; Norman Tucker has proved himself
an adept at the task.
His evocative references to orchestral effects come
straight from the professor rather than from the pedagogue
— for instance, the"ostinato chuckling figure", "violins
screaming at the top " or a certain " theme gnawing awya
in the lower octave ", likewise the " shimmering triplets " and
the reference to the idiotic " tidli-tidli figure". And such
homely phrases as "amorous goings-ön" and "he makes
a pass at her" constantly remind us of Erik the down-to-
earth human, the man of humour whose delightful précis
of the Osud story is quoted on page 359.
The sad fact that Dr. Chisholm's sudden death robbed
him of an author's opportunity for a final revision of his
book has imposed heavy responsibility on myself as his edi-
tor. Many a time while scanning these pages I have longed
for his personal clarification or instructions. The 263 musi-
cal quotations, all sketched in his own hurried hand and
often with barely decipherable alterations or annotations,
sometimes even with a misplaced numbering, called not
only for reference to vocal scores but also for help from
musicians with practical knowledge of the music. The help
was readily given by Charles Mackerras, who knows it
as both Czech scholar and as a practical opera conductor,
also from his colleague David Lloyd-Jones. To both of
them I am immensely grateful, especially to Mr. Mackerras
for his Foreword.
I wish also to acknowledge the fine professional work of
Mr. Jack Lugg who, in preparing all these music quota-
EDITORIAL NOTE XV
tions for the press, discovered he had undertaken a task-
more demanding in time and patience than even the
transcription of a complete manuscript symphony by one
of our least legible composers !
Miss Margaret Cox, an expert in the Czech language
and unusually knowledgeable on Czech music, has given
invaluable help by going through not only the music and
its accompanying lines of text, but also the proofs. I am
very grateful for her enthusiasm.
In a work of this kind there is always the problem of style.
A writer who indulges perhaps in no other musical activity
develops a characteristic literary style. Erik Chisholm was
a man of immense enthusiasms, white-hot convictions, and
tremendous energy. A book like this had to be squeezed
in between his lecturing, conducting, administration, and
composing. For him it was more important to pour out
this information as though he were speaking it to his
students, to you and to me: in fact much of it was dictated.
He had no chance to polish it, to weigh up the niceties
of delicately balanced phrases. I often wonder if he did
this with a subconscious knowledge that they would be
his last lines spoken on this earth, as indeed they almost
proved to be.
Knowing him as I did, I can hear his Scots voice speak-
ing the text, with his homely but striking allusions, collo-
quial phrases, and always with humour and humanity peep-
ing through. Therefore I have in the main left his copy
as he sent it, making such slight changes here and there
as I felt he would have made had he lived to see his proofs
—adjustments in words to avoid duplication, corrections
to obvious slips in his hurried quotations from the pub-
lished scores. Those from the early opera Osud he must have
noted in Brno; I have been unable to find singlea copy.
XVÎ EDITORIAL NOTE
I therefore ask the indulgence of those readers who may
find inaccuracies, which, if substantiated, will be adjusted
in later reprints; I trust they will not be serious. Dr. Chis-
holm has minutely analysed Janacek's scores in the tech-
nique he learned with Sir Donald Francis Tovey. As an
opera composer and conductor his analyses are unusually
perceptive, even though some may occasionally find them
pedantic. He believed that the present growing apprecia-
tion of these operas justified such treatment, and he died
hoping, as does the Publisher, that this may prove to be
a valuable reference book for many years to come.
K. W.
