It would be interesting to examine Janaceks influences, since far more
than many other composers, his life and and work are deeply entwined.

The Second String Quartet (1928) called the 'Intimate Letters' summarized
Janaceks relationship with Kamila Stosslova.  He wrote to her daily for
11 years though only some 700 letters survive, so we shall never know the
real extent of their relationship.  He poured out his innermost thoughts
to her, some fairly explicit, even though she didn't like music, probably
didn't understand him and in later years she and her husband were not
averse to exploiting his fame and wealth.  However, like many of his
previous mistresses, she had what his wife called Junoaugen, officially
translated as 'Ox-eyed Hera' - cow eyes!  Dark, gypsy like and strong, she
symbolised for him a sensuality and wildness that defied conventional
restraints.  The First String Quartet, is based on Tolstoy's Kreutzer
Sonata, and although it's non vocal, it is in effect a drama without
words.  Why this obsession with infidelity?  It runs like a recurrent
theme in nearly all Janaceks work, like the image of the Danube.  Janacek
had turned against his child bride (blonde) while still on honeymoon and
treated her and her family with extreme callousness.  His numerous extra
marital affairs were always with married, though independent, women and
he himself pulled back from the threshold of divorce several times.   The
women in Janaceks work have 'colourful' sides - Jenufa has an illegitimate
child and Elina Makropulous has 20! The women who don't give in to this
end up warped like the virtuous Kabanicha.  The men don't come out well:
Laca's a wimp, and the brutish Dikoj  crumbles.  However, the peasant boy
in The Diary of One Who Disappeared completely  reverses the 'seduced and
abandoned' cliche - he's the one who gets taken against his will, but to
his credit, embraces freedom and rebellion.   It's as if Janacek needed
the symbol of people breaking out of repression to liberate the floodgates
of his own creativity.

Another dominant influence is that of folk song.   Were there other
composers at his time who spent as much time in the field collecting
folk songs and immersing in folk culture?   What about Dvorak, Martinu,
and others?   I suspect RVW and Butterworth aren't in the same league.
For people of Janaceks time and position, nationalism wasn't something
xenophobic but a form of cultural survival.  No surprise that his
popularity came with the birth of the Czech state.  Moravian folksongs,
according to Mirka Zemanova, (2002) 'are much freer and more irregular in
their metrical and rhythmic structure, and more varied in their choice of
melodic intervals: they also make liberal use of minor and modal scales.
The character of these modes gives the music its distinctive sound, more
exotic to western ears than a melody in a major scale, whenever Moravian
folk songs do not employ modes, they frequently modulate to quite remote
keys'.  Janacek believed that speech and music were related, and developed
a system of notation which expressed the rhythm and cadence of speech.
Not only did he collect folksong, dance and antique embroideries but also
patterns of speech.  He even notated animal and bird sounds.  Currently
I'm listening to the choral songs, the Nursery Rhymes, Kaspar Rucky, the
Wolfs Tracks and so on, and I imagine that they reflect the ebb and flow
of speech, the way themes are repeated with variation, exposition and
reiteration, and little unexpected touches popping up, like the strange
flute like thing in the Hradcany Songs.  They are so different, but sound
nothing like kitschy imitation folksong.  Indeed, these patterns seem also
to haunt the Moravian Songs for piano. Perhaps other works?  Few of us
are Moravian speakers so we can only wonder how much the music reflects
the nuances of language: but since we have no idea what the words mean,
perhaps we can think of them as a kind of music with a different logic?

Anne Ozorio <[log in to unmask]>