Leos Janaček (1854-1928) Choruses for Male Voices The Czech composer Leos Janaček is now widely regarded as being one of the most important and...
Leos Janaček (1854-1928) Choruses for Male Voices
The Czech
composer Leos Janaček is now widely regarded as being one of the most
important and original artists of the early twentieth century. A distinguished
musical dramatist, he wrote a total of nine operas at least five of which are
considered to be major works that have become a regular part of the repertory -
Jenůfa (1894-1903), Kalya Kabanova (1919-21), The Cunning
Little Vixen (1921-23), The Makropulos Affair (1923-25) and From
the House of the Dead (1927-28). Janaček was a multi-faceted artist, a
composer, conductor, organist, teacher, writer and a significant authority on
folk-music, and the stylistic trait that is central to an understanding of his
work is the unique treatment of melody resulting from his intensive study of
Moravian speech, and more specifically the subtle fluctuations of spoken
intonation brought about by the speaker' s changing inner emotional state. The
composer was of the opinion that 'a fragment of national life is attached to
every word uttered by the people; the melody of their speech should be studied
in every detail'.
Both
Janaček's grandfather and father were teachers and musicians and at the
age of eleven Leos entered the Augustinian Monastery in Brno as a chorister.
Here he benefited greatly from the encouragement of the choirmaster and
composer Pavel Křizkovský, eventually succeeding him as choirmaster in
1872. Janaček's excellent work with the choir led to a request the
following year to conduct the Svatopluk (a post he held from 1873-77), a
working-men's choral society for which he wrote his first compositions. In 1874
he undertook further music studies, first at the Prague Organ School then at
the Leipzig Conservatory and in Vienna, before returning to Brno as a music
master at the Teachers' Institute An added incentive to write for chorus came
with the formation in 1903 of the Moravian Teachers' Choir (the same choir as
on this recording). Janaček established a close friendship with its
conductor, Ferdinand Vach, and it was this choir that gave the premieres of
most of his works in the genre.
Following an
early period of romantic works the language of which was indebted to earlier
Czech composers, notably Dvořak, the formation of Janaček's
individual style dates from the composition of his third opera Jenůfa. The
final, intensely creative decade of his life coincided with Jenůfa's long-overdue
snccess, the birth of an independent Czechoslovakia, and his love for a young
married woman, Kamila Stosslova. To this utterly remarkable late period belong
some of Janaček's finest works including the orchestral rhapsody Taras
Bulba (1915-1918), the song-cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared (1917-19),
the Sinfonietta (1926), the two String Quartets (1923 and 1928),
and the Glagolitic Mass (1926), as well as his operatic masterpieces.
Apart from opera the only other genre that Janaček worked in throughout
his life is the one featured on this disc, the unaccompanied chorus.
Of the four Čtyři
lidove muzske sbory (Four folk male-voice choruses) only one is not based
on a folk text, Coz ta nase břiza (Our Birch Tree, 1893). Its text
is by Smetana's librettist Eliska Krasnohorska and likens the trembling of the
birch leaves to the palpitations of the heart. Orani (Ploughing, 1873)
was not only Janaček's first ever work for male-voice chorus but also his
earliest known composition. In Vinek (The Garland, 1893) Janaček
uses the original folk melody in its entirety, whilst the witty Peřina (The
Quilt, 1914) catalogues the many useful attributes of a quilt!
The Čtvero
muzských sborů (Four male-voice choruses) date from 1885 and bear the
following dedication on the title page. 'Dedicated to the esteemed master Mr
Antonin Dvořak in token of unbounded respect by Leos Janaček'.
Dvořak was actually rather taken aback by the work's audacious
modulations. The Čtvero muzských sborů moravských (Four
Moravian male-voice choruses) were composed in 1904 and are dedicated to the
Moravian Teachers' Choral Society The highly chromatic Komafi (Tbe
Gnat's Wedding) and Rozloučeni (Parting) are both based on Moravian
folk-songs annotated by the renowned collector Frantisek Susil, whilst the
texts of the passionate Dez vis (If you knew) and the humorous Klekanica
(The Evening Witch) were written by Andřej Přikryl.
The next three
works form the zenith of Janaček's achievements in the genre of
unaccompanied chorus - Kantor Halfar (Teacher Halfar; 1906, rev. 1917), Maryčka
Magdonova (1906-7) and Sedmdesat tisic (The 70,000) (1909,
rev.1913). They represent a trilogy of sorts in that all three are based on
texts drawn from Petr Bezruč's Silesian Songs, a collection of 61
poems the bitter critique of which, detailing social exploitation and poverty,
found a particularly sympathetic recipient in Janaček. Whether the text
concerned a people as a whole (The 70,000) or the more personal tragedy
of an individual (the protagonsists of Kantor Halfar and Maryčka
Magdonova are both driven to suicide), Janaček responded with some of
his most powerful music. AII three works are cast in a free rondo form, with
complex polyphonic webs created by the accumulation of numerous motifs. The
70.000 is a quite extraordinary work about the revolt of Silesian miners,
with almost all its material drawn from the opening eight-bar melody. The
forceful climax, a series of passionate, agitated shouts from the chorus, packs
a hugely visceral punch.
The impetus to
write Česka Iegie (The Czech Legion, 1918) came from a momentous
event in the history of Janaček's native land: the aforementioned birth of
an independent Czechoslovakiaon 28th October 1918. The inspiration for the
highly regarded Potulný silenec (The Wandering Madman, 1922) for male
chorus and solo soprano came from a quite different source, setting an
allegorical text by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore whose poetry reading in
Prague in June 1921 made an enormous impression upon the composer.
Tři muzske
sbory (Three male-voice
choruses) date from 1888, although the third chorus Zarlivec (The
Jealous Man) was only rediscovered in 1940 amongst Dvořak's papers after
Janaček had sent it to the composer to ask for his opinion. Finally, the
youthful Laska opravdiva (True Love) is notated without time signature
or key signature although the key of G major is adhered to throughout.
Peter Quinn
Moravian Teachers Choir
The Moravian Teachers Choir ranks as one
of the best known Czech chorus ensembles. It was established in 1903 and its
first members were graduates of the Teachers College in Kroměřiz.
From the flfst the choir embarked on an active programme that included works by
many distinguished Czech composers from the tum of the century and involved the
ensemble in concert appearances at home and abroad. The founder and first
principal director of the choir was Ferdinand Vach, who was succeeded in 1936
by Jan Soupal, who worked with the ensemble regularly during the Nazi
occupation and continued his activities after the war, with further concert
engagements that took the choir to Belgium, the Netherlands, the Soviet Urtion
and Great Britain and brought a number of recordings for Supraphon.