The sweetest music of the spheres is a chorus 11WeI re saying, "Snshsh ________ ~" to itself working." It begins to feel
like my old blanket
again.
Linus Oct. 28, 1965
Performance Week Schedule: October November
31
Sunday
S:00 p~m.
All
1
Monday
7:30 p.m.
All
(with orchestra)
3
Wednesday
7:30 p.m.
All
(with orchestra)
4
Thursday
7:15 p.m.
All
Perf.
'v - Janacek
6
Saturday
7:30 p.m.
All
Perf.
'v - Janacek
7
Sunday
2:30 p.m.
All
Perf.
'v - Janacek
SLAVONIC MASS by Leos Jana.eek There is a true story told toward the end of his life, he hotel the shout of a page boy, the shout, and said, "There is
about the composer Leos Janacek: that in 1926, visited England, and overhearing in a London he noted down the musical tones and rhythms of the real England."
It is an enlightening story. First, because it demonstrates what Janacek accepted as reality, and second, because it was no isolated instance of its kind in his life, For years Janacek had notated all sorts of things: the songs of birds, the growls of his pet dog, the sounds of leaves rustling in the wind, the cries of wild animals, the folk songs as they came from peasants in his native north Moravian village of Hukvaldy, and, perhaps most significantly, the musical and rhythmical inflections of the spoken Czech language. It all made highly unconventional raw material for a composer to draw on for his musical inspiration, and it was highly unconventional and personal music that Janacek wrought from it. Janacek's musical style is at once easy to recognize and difficult to describe. His music sounds like that of no other composer and, like the work of most strongly individual composers, it sounds very different from the way it looks on paper. One can say that his harmony is usually conservative and frequently modal, that his melodies are short, striking and strongly rhythmic, that his rhythms seem exceptionally free but are always palpable, that his orchestration is totally unorthodox but very effective, that he avoids formal development of his material and prefers patterns of repetition with continual change, that he does not write fugues, canons, passacaglias, sonata-forms or rondos, and that his music is eminently singable without sounding in the least like Wagner or Puccini. And having said this, one still has not conveyed the least idea of the music. Janacek's style is difficult to describe because the words we have to describe it are those that have grown from the "mainstream" of music, and Janacek's mature woFk stands outside that mainstream. His technical devices are not those inherited from Liszt, Wagner or Brahms, or even from Smetana and Dvorak, but were painstakingly built from a foundation of speech inflection, folk song and natural sounds. In Janacek's musical domain, a fu8ue is something that has never even been invented. Hence, it becomes both tricky and misleading to talk about "conservative" harmonies, "free" rhythms and development. His considerations are elsewhere and entirely different. Janacek's music is concerned neither with architecture nor emotion, but with sounds. Even his orchestration is based on other principles; he was one of the few composers who did not look upon an orchestra as strings plus. But it was not always thus. Janacek's early training was thorough and traditional, and he at first seemed destined for a career as an obscure local teacher, organist and conductor. He venerated the music of Smetana, and he was a friend of Dvorak. His early Suite for String Orchestra could easily trade a movement with Dvorak 1 s Serenade forstrings with no resulting inconsistency of style. He was at that time, in effect, a true nineteenth-century composer, and a minor one at that. Had he died at the age of fifty, he would be so considered today.
-2-
Leos Janacek was born on July 3, 18.54, only twnety-one years after Brahms, a terribly early date for a "modern" composer to have been born. He completed what we now recognize to be his first major work (the opera Jenufa) in 1903, at the age of forty-nine. He died on August 12, 1928, at seventy-four, and virtually all his best music was composed during the last ten years of his life. This kind of late flowering is rare in music (Cesar Franck is the only other example that comes immediately to mind), and there is no one to say how this talented but minor musician suddenly evolved into a fire-breathing genius. It took his countrymen several years to understand that such a thing had happened, and it will probably take the rest of the world several more. His star, nevertheless, has been continually ascending. The Slavonic Mass, for all its flaming ardor, was not intended to be a religious work, but a national one. "I wanted to portray the faith in the certainty of the nation, not on a religious basis but on a basis of moral strength which takes God for witness," said the composer in a magazine interview in 1928, He had just released the work for performance (December 5, 1927), although the composition had been finished almost two years earlier. The Mass is based upon the text of the ancient Glagolitic rite, brought to Moravia in the ninth century by the Saints Cyril and Methodius, and extinct in the churches of that country since the fifteenth century. The work, like the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, was never meant to be performed in a church. In spite of the composer's intentions, and his well-known aversion to churches in general, a misled critic wrote that the "old man" had become deeply devout, and that he had finally come to realize that his life work would be meaningless without a musical expression of his belief. "Neither old nor devout," was the terse answer inscribed by Janacek on a postcard. A friend commented that the work might have been composed by an aged Slav of bygone times. "It was composed, and could only have been composed, by the musician Janacek," was the composer's retort. In composing this brilliant, festive mass, a 11primitive 11 work in the way Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps is primitive, Janacek knew precisely what he was doing, andnoone was going to say that he had done something else. . (Notes by James Goodfriend, Masterworks Literary Editor, Columbia Records)
SUGGESTION: Scotch taping narrow strips of paper over the printed text of the Janacek, and then writing in our transliteration was the solution found by one of our number. It has worked for her, and certainly looked clear and easily re1dable. It very well might help you too. Ed.