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Bibliography Ades, Thomas. "Janacek's Piano Music." Janacek Studies, ed. Paul Wingfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Mach, Elyse. Great Pianists Speak for Themselves. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1980. 75-87. Warrack, John. Liner notes to Deutsche Grammaphon 449-764-2. |
Leos
Janacek's Piano Pieces: An Exploration for Students of All Levels —Jacob Greenberg Leos Janacek (1854-1928) is the most important Czech composer of the twentieth century, and a towering figure in opera, orchestral, and chamber music. Why is it that concertgoers hear so few of his works for piano, and why are these works not better known? There are many reasons: Janacek's quirky music, while well-written for the instrument, is not always accessible. No catchy Rachmaninov-like tunes appear in Janacek's piano pieces. Their mode of expression is extremely personal, yet also elusive; it takes concentrated listening to these works to get a sense of what they can offer, and I believe all piano students can benefit from making their acquaintance. Also, until the mid-1990s, no reliable critical edition of the piano works had been available. We are now at last able to study Janacek on his own terms. Janacek was born in Moravia, which became Czechoslovakia after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I. He studied in Prague, Vienna, and Leipzig, and his early career was spent founding a college of organists in the Czech city of Brno. Beginning in the 1880s Janacek made a formal study of the pitch contour, rhythms, and inflections of Czech speech, and these things soon found a way into all of his compositions. Janacek was a late bloomer. His mature style did not truly begin until the early years of the twentieth century, and his first mature opera, Jenufa (1904), was completed when he was fifty! The astonishing series of works that followed from 1904 until the end of his life makes Janacek a truly unique figure in music, a composer who started writing masterworks late in his career but kept getting better until the very end. Known as being difficult in person, Janacek was irascible and not one to mince words, but at the same time he was warm and passionate to a fault. Both extremes of his personality can be heard in his works, often in rapid alternation. Janacek's operas, through which he finally gained public appraisal in the United States in the 1970s, give a sense of Janacek the man. They contain extremely unusual plots and characters, yet always pack an emotional punch: for example, the character of Emilia Marty in The Makropulos Case (1927) is a three-hundred-year-old opera singer who drinks an elixir of life and yearns to die. Or the heroine of The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), a female fox who dies for her right to steal and eat chickens because giving up that right would be against her nature. All of Janacek's piano pieces can be heard as character portraits, and those characters are always fascinating. Some are simply sweet: the easiest of the pieces I have recorded for this feature is a setting of a Bohemian Christmas carol, "Christ the Lord is Born," which Janacek wrote on Christmas Eve in 1909. The short piece, which gently alternates two-note figures between the hands, is harmonically unusual; it takes just a minute to settle into the G-major tonality. Even with a few tricky fingerings, this piece is completely suitable for a child who has studied piano for a few years. Christ the Lord is Born (click to enlarge)  A witty musical miniature is "Palaces of the Kleinseiten" (a district in Prague). This fragmented piece from 1927 uses many of Janacek's trademark harmonic stamps. Its main musical figure, heard against a staccato repeated-note accompaniment, is an impish, gently dissonant idea always suddenly cut off, as if in mid-sentence. After a relaxed resolution to G-flat major and a descent down the keyboard, the theme is further broken down and then, as the repeated-note accompaniment suddenly crescendos on a syncopated rhythm, the piece charmingly just ends. A beautiful piece at the same moderate level of pianistic challenge is "In Remembrance," an early piece from 1886 that sounds very much like the mature Janacek. This piece, based on a melodic figure with a double-dotted rhythm, is one of the composer's first piano pieces to show the duality of his temperament. It opens serenely in A-flat major, the melody faintly reminiscent of the swelling river music of Smetana's The Moldau. After eight bars it suddenly takes a startling harmonic turn (by use of a common tone) to a B-seven chord, now in mezzo-forte. After this short moment of crisis, perhaps a painful memory, the music slips back to the opening tonality. The rest of the piece, marked ppp, presents the opening theme again, a memory of a memory, until a short outburst at the end, which threatens to derail a peaceful resolution--a rolled forte D-flat chord (IV in A-flat major). This harmonic surprise, comparable to the earlier interruption, quietly resolves, but the harmony lingers in the ear after the piece ends. Typically for Janacek, this little piece is full of contradictions, and the story it suggests is fascinating. What or who is being remembered? The great Czech pianist (and longtime Juilliard faculty member) Rudolf Firkusny, who studied piano and composition with Janacek starting when he was five years old, had these things to say about the composer: "I can still see his fine features, white hair and incredibly alert and expressive eyes--his relatively small yet dynamic and constantly alive figure. [After I once played a piece at the wrong tempo] Janacek sprang to his feet and exclaimed 'It must be played like this!' as he tossed off the dance at the proper speed... Naturally I also played most of his piano works with him. Here Janacek could be inconsistent, often altering the printed text--probably on account of his impulsive nature." Even disregarding Janacek's later corrections to his pieces (which can be heard in Firkusny's wonderful recordings), many things in Janacek's music leave significant questions of interpretation, and are often confusing. Foremost among these is his habit of barring music in unconventional ways: we see this in the first of his pieces from the collection (in two volumes) called On An Overgrown Path, written from 1901 to 1908. Largely inspired by the composer's grief on the premature death of his daughter Olga, On An Overgrown Path is a moving collection of piano miniatures. There are ten pieces in the first book, all with very evocative titles (one is called "Unutterable Anguish"), and five longer pieces in the second, without titles. An example of Janacek's odd barring is the first piece, "Our Evenings": Our Evenings (click to enlarge)  Assigning one bar to every single quarter note makes it difficult at first to determine the piece's phrasing. But on repeated listening, it becomes clear: the composer simply could not decide on a time signature that could accommodate all the changes in phrase lengths. The first phrase is six bars plus five, the next phrase six plus four plus six. Complicated as this seems to look at, on hearing it the phrasing seems utterly natural, albeit unusual. "Our Evenings" nicely sets the tone for the entire set: wistful, wrought with some pain, but also sweetly melancholic. Many of the pieces are in unusual keys such as C-sharp minor, E-flat minor, and G-sharp minor, lending the pieces a wonderful color. |
 Leos Janacek  Janacek with his wife I recommend that those interested in Janacek's music listen to both books in their entirety. Listeners may be familiar with the pieces from their memorable inclusion in the 1988 film The Unbearable Lightness of Being, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche. A highlight of the first book is the seventh piece, called "Good Night!" A consciously tearful farewell to his daughter, this piece is wrenchingly beautiful in its simplicity. Over a gently syncopated, murmuring rhythmic ostinato, the simple melody never strays far from C major, but conveys a world of emotion. Good Night! (click to enlarge)  Many of the pieces from On An Overgrown Path, including "Good Night!", are appropriate for intermediate-level students. Occasionally awkward passages are easily explained by a teacher, and should not be an impediment to a student gaining exposure to this engaging set of pieces. Not represented here in an audio excerpt is the great two-movement Sonata I.X.1905 ("From the Street"). In a fit of impulsive anger, at the piece's final rehearsal before its premiere Janacek seized the third movement from the performer, tore it up, and burned it. Because of Janacek's self-censorship we will never know what that movement contained, but the remaining two movements, both cast in a dark E-flat minor, have great value as a portrait of a traumatic event in Czech history. On October 1, 1905, a student demonstrating for the founding of a Czech university in Brno was killed by Austrian troops. In both of the surviving movements, the music is filled with unexpected surges of emotion. Janacek has a way of introducing an accompaniment figure at the beginning of a movement that gains importance and becomes the subject of the piece: it is a wonderful way of showing how an underlying sentiment can take hold and become overwhelming. Janacek's piano masterpiece of the 1910s is In the Mists, a four-movement suite of great complexity and emotional contradiction. These pieces, definitely not for the faint of heart, reflect Janacek's growing obsession with his extramarital affair with a woman thirty-eight years his junior. The woman, Kamila Stösslová, was also married and only occasionally returned Janacek's affections. All four of the suite's movements contain wayward, veiled melodies expressing a barely concealed pain--the first and fourth are included here as audio excerpts--and the intensely changeable musical texture reveals an unsettled spirit coming to terms with something unspeakable. The music is rife with interpretive challenges--how does one deal with Janacek's frequent changes of tempo, quirky rhythms, and constantly implied rubato? In this respect, the composer that Janacek most resembles is Schumann. And like Schumann, whose music also appeals to one on a very personal level, no two performances of his piano music are alike. This, however, is a fact to be cherished with Janacek, who contributed so many treasures to the piano literature that, however unusual, should not intimidate. These pieces can provide a lifetime of enjoyment to piano students and music-lovers everywhere. |
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Janacek: Years of a Life: (1854-1914) The Lonely Blackbird v.1
Intimate Letters: Leos Janacek to Kamila Stosslova
Leif Ove Andsnes Performs Janacek