I have written the
first paragraph like a series of almost unconnected statements. But it returns
to its own beginning and repeats itself, or almost repeats itself. The style is
a deliberate choice because Janacek wrote like this, both in music and words.
His style is almost musical cubism, where a shape, a form, a subject is
visible, but it is broken into pieces that do not join. The pieces seem to
repeat, but they are never quite the same, and the shapes are probably never
quite complete. There are always questions, rarely statements.
Like Wagner, Janacek
uses leitmotifs, tiny musical germs that signify a character, an emotion or an
action. They reappear throughout a work, but never simply repeat. In this first
quartet you will hear a sweet, slightly sad phrase of only two bars. It is
unmistakably feminine. This contrasts with a nervous, repeated motif of short,
staccato notes and regular use of ponticello, harsh bowing near the bridge.
This is male. It is angry and jealous. The contrast between female
vulnerability and sincerity and masculine impetuosity and pride is played out
through the work. But in Janacek these ideas and associated phrases are short.
They are gone almost before you have heard them. Musically, the sound of
Janacek is more like Bruckner than any other composer. This is no surprise,
since he studied in Vienna when Bruckner´s works were being performed. The
difference is that the repeats and variations in Bruckner last for several
minutes. In Janacek, they are all finished in seconds, and they sound more like
Puccini.
The quartet´s
subtitle, Kreutzer Sonata, is not a homage to Beethoven, though there is a
quote from the Beethoven sonata, brutally compressed by Janacek, in the third
movement. The quotation has musical and pictorial intentions, because the
Kreutzer Sonata of the subtitle actually refers to a short story by Tolstoy of
the same name. The quartet is not a literal programme of the story, but more of
a cubist painter’s impression of it.
In the story a man
spends much time and energy trying to analyse his marriage. His attitudes are
conservative and male-centred. His wife, however, developed independent
interests, a quality he himself could not understand. For him, a wife should be
submissive and obedient. But this wife took up music and learned the piano. She
often played alongside her teacher, a violinist who regularly visited the
family home. The pair decide to rehearse Beethoven´s Kreutzer Sonata for a
performance and the husband becomes jealous of his wife’s musical bond with the
violinist teacher. In Tolstoy, the fact that these unmarried people play music
together is problematic.
As the pair rehearse,
they play better together and the husband’s jealousy grows. He needs to feel in
control of his wife’s experience. He confronts her, becomes angry and stabs her
in a fit of rage. She dies, but he is not severely punished because he was the
husband and adultery was suspected. Music was to blame. This story unfolds
during the String Quartet No1 by Janacek, but it is not quite the same story.
This work was
commissioned and first performed by the Bohemian Quartet in 1924. In his
biography of Janacek, Jaroslav Vogel describes how the quartet´s second
violinist, the composer Jozef Suk, believed that Janacek wanted the work to be
a moral protest against men´s despotic attitude towards women. Suk would have
been reasonably close to Janacek, incidentally, because he was married to
Dvorak´s daughter and Janacek and Dvorak had been close friends. His opinion
would thus have been an informed one. Whereas Tolstoy´s story suggests that
music is sensual and rather dangerous, Janacek makes entirely the opposite
point. Here music is human conscience. It presents an emotional liberation via
music and asks if it should also represent the social liberation and
independence of women.
This is an interesting
point. Janacek did not treat his own wife well. He had affairs. He was already
by the 1920s obsessed with Kamila Stosslova, a married woman over thirty years
his junior. He wrote over 700 letters to her. She replied twice. Much of what
he wrote was inspired by his extra-marital longing for Kamila. Perhaps he
wanted to liberate her via this music, and so there is much evidence of his own
guilt and selfishness in his apparently liberal message. In contemporary terms,
Janacek’s obsession with Kamila came close to “stalking”, but the creative
energy his obsession generated resulted in fifteen years of intense musical
activity.
He was almost sixty
before his first success. He had lived a teacher’s life, devotedly developing
the music school in Brno. He became obsessed with a younger woman. He became
estranged from his wife. And, in those final years, he wrote four great operas,
two quartets, several orchestral works and much other music, all of which, like
the Kreutzer Sonata, tells a story. It is his story. He, himself, is a
vulnerable individual. He is flawed. He is also a genius, and thus a modern
human being with his own voice.
