Speaking, Singing, Dancing Music for Violin and Piano, Piano, or Violin
Wo l f g a n g S t ä h r
But That Tone! Leoš Janáček, the master from Moravia? His com positions do not sound masterful at all, some of them are provocatively imperfect. Janáček’s anarchic art is hard to reconcile with form, at least western, classical, erudite form. He did not complete his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory, did not even keep two violin sonatas he began to write at that time, and when he started to compose another sonata for violin and piano more than 30 years later—technically his “Third”—he could hardly finish it, shifting the movements around or switching them, changing, adding, and rewriting over a period of eight years, until 1922. Janáček began writing his only (surviving) Violin Sonata in 1914, “at the beginning of the war, when we were already expecting the Russians in Moravia,” the Slavic brothers-inarms and longed-for liberators. Janáček confessed writing the sonata with the “shimmer and roar of sharp steel” in mind, even celebrating the advance of the Russian troops in the finale. But does one actually hear war in this music? Or the militant patriotism of the composer, who experienced the founding of the Republic of Czechoslovakia on October 28, 1918 as a day of “national rebirth,” the longawaited and hard-won independence from central Habsburg rule and the hegemony of German culture? Janáček’s Czech nationalism occasionally came questionably close to fanaticism and hysteria, as seen, for example, by his embittered refusal to use the tram in Brno as long as the cars displayed signage in German. But his almost obsessive exploration of the everyday Czech language, in its wording and melodic phrasing, exceeds the patriotic cause, the realm of folklore, home province, and Moravian pride. “You know, it was odd— somebody might speak to me, and I might not even 12
