Notes for: July 28, 2009
The music of Leos Janácek has come into its own in the United States only since World War II, but he was a revered figure in his native Moravia long before his death in 1928. In fact, his 70th birthday in 1924 was an occasion for celebrations in his honor and commemorative performances of his music all around Czechoslovakia of which Moravia was a part. For that occasion, he composed a number of new works, including the wind sextet Youth, written in July, his birthday month.
As in the case of Gounod’s Petite Symphonie, Youth was inspired by Paul Taffanel’s Société de Musique de Chambre pour Instruments á Vent. Janácek heard the French group perform at a contemporary music festival in Salzburg in 1923 and then again in Brno, the Moravian capital. The group played Albert Roussel’s Divertimento for winds, and Janácek decided to write an informal piece of his own for wind ensemble – flute (alternating in the third movement with piccolo), oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, horn and bassoon.
Youth is a 70-year-old composer’s reminiscence of his years, from 1865 to 1874, as a scholarship student at the St. Augustine Abbey at Brno. The subject may have been suggested to him as he was collecting material about his childhood for a biographer and for a commemorative almanac. Another possibility is that the composer was working on his opera, The Makropoulous Case, which deals cynically with a 300-year-old woman who has discovered the secret of eternal youth, and that he intended Youth as a contrasting hymn of praise to youth in its true form.
Janácek’s years at Brno were an important formative period in his life. Here he received his intensive musical training, and here he first was exposed to the spirit of Czech nationalism that became a life-long interest. The years were also tinged with loneliness – the year after his entrance, his father, a schoolmaster, died, and he was never close to his mother. All of this is reflected in the music.
But the years at Brno also had their share of childhood fun and games. A few months before he wrote Youth, Janácek composed a little piece for piccolo, flute, bells, tambourine and piano, and called it “March of the Blue-Boys”, blue being the color of the uniforms worn by the Brno pupils. The manuscript bore the following inscription: “The little singers of the monastery cheer as they march – blue like bluebirds.” The thematic material of the march is re-employed in Youth’s third movement.,
Janácek often made use of what he called “speech melody” – melody whose contours were inspired by the characteristic rhythm and cadence of the Czech language. In the jaunty first movement, which is in the form of a free rondo, the principal theme is said to have been derived from the speech melody of the wistful sigh, “Youth, golden youth.”
Paul Affelder, a Janácek specialist, suggests that the soberer, almost dirge-like, second movement is a reflection on the unhappier moments in the monastery with its isolation and strict regulations. Here, the chief theme, which is ultimately subjected to four free variations, itself sounds like a solemn variation on its counterpart in the first movement.
Such suggestions of gloom are dispelled in the third movement, a scherzo with a perky piccolo tune taken from Janácek’s little March of the Blue-Boys, who sang and whistled as they marched along. A more relaxed trio section is a variation on the latter half of the blue-boys tune and alternates twice with the main section.
In the buoyant, affirmative finale, the principal theme of’ the opening movement is recalled once more in combination with new material. After further variations, the tempo slows and the wistful sigh of “youth, golden youth” is repeated several times. The pace quickens, the horn and the flute muse on the theme, and the sextet winds up at breakneck speed.