Notes for: August 6, 2013
About the Tolstoy Links
As explained in the program notes below, there are links between the next two works on this evening’s program to the controversial novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Published in 1889 and promptly censored by Russian authorities, the novella is an argument for sexual abstinence and a first-person description of jealous rage by the main character Pozdnyshev.
During the course of the story, Pozdnyshev’s wife takes a liking to a violinist, and the two perform Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata. Pozdnyshev kills his wife with a dagger, arguing that such music is powerful enough to motivate such extreme action. He is eventually acquitted of murder in light of his wife’s apparent adultery.
In the history of Czech music, Janáček was the heir of Smetana and Dvořák, and like them he was strongly influenced by the folk music of his country. However, Smetana and Dvořák were Bohemians from west of the Morava river, while Janáček was a Moravian from east of the river, and this difference in geographical origins was of substantial musical significance.
The region west of the Morava, which cuts the country into approximately equal segments, was industrialized and urbanized, and it had long maintained close political and cultural ties with Western Europe. Its folk music, consequently, shared in the development of Western music, absorbing the concepts of tonality, harmony based on the major and minor scales, the regular division of melody into four- and eight-bar groups, and a musical language primarily instrumental in character.
In contrast, the region east of the Morava was agricultural, conservative, even feudal, and was politically and culturally isolated from the West. Its folk music clung to the archaic modes of the Middle Ages and escaped the discipline of tonality, conven-tional rules of harmony, and melodic regularity. Furthermore, the music remained essentially vocal, its instruments subordinated to the expressive inflections of the human voice.
Janáček was a pioneer in the systematic collection and analysis of folk music – he anticipated Béla Bartók in such research by some 20 years – and his music reflects the folk characteristics of his immediate region. Instead of the long “hummable” tunes we hear in Smetana and Dvořák, Janáček’s themes tend to be short melodic fragments or cells, which are expanded and developed, in the folk fashion of the area, through continuous variation, contrast, modal inflections and shifting rhythmic patterns.
Like Bartók, Janáček blended his folk-type musical materials into a highly original personal language. But the two composers were dissimilar in an equally important way. Bartók, though born in 1881, was a composer of the 20th century, and he typified that century’s restless search for new forms and modes of expression. In his hands, folk elements were refined and abstracted into a musical idiom far removed from their roots. Janáček, though living until 1928, was essentially a composer of the 19th century; despite his continuing efforts to break new musical ground, he remained a late Romantic in his concern for emotional expression and his preference for folk elements close to their natural form.
What other music, in fact, has had more romantic inspiration than Janáček’s two quartets, written at the ages of 69 and 74 and inspired by his love for a woman more than 30 years his junior. Kamila Stősslová was the uneducated wife of a Jewish antique dealer. From their first meeting in 1917, there were regular meetings between Janáček and Kamila, at first formal and later passionate, at least on his side. The twelve years of their relationship were the most productive of his life, and in the copious letters he wrote to her, he represented her as his constant inspiration.
The first quartet, heard this evening, was further inspired by Tolstoy’s strange and haunting novella, The Kreutzer Sonata. In Janáček’s vision, Kamila became the heroine of the novella as well as the recipient of the composer’s second string quartet entitled “Intimate Letters.” While the novella has philosophical overtones, Janáček’s interest was apparently in its macabre plot. “I had in mind,” he wrote to Kamila, “an unhappy, tortured, beaten woman, beaten to death as Tolstoy described her.”
Beyond this, Janáček left no clues as to the music’s meaning, but the emotional conflict of the novella is clearly reflected in the quartet’s periodic outbursts and passionate surge to a final climax.
The first movement, adagio con moto, is in sonata form, but with a difference. The principal theme, heard at the outset, has two elements: first, a two-measure motive consisting of two short notes and one long note ascending and the same pattern descending, all richly harmonized; second, a folk-like tune stated initially by the cello against drone harmony. The two elements are repeated three times, followed by the second theme, a spinning out of the opening motive.
The second movement, con moto, is an intermezzo consisting mainly of the interweaving of two folk-like phrases.
The third movement, con moto, is based on a canonic phrase played first by the first violin with the cello echoing it a half-measure later. After a contrasting theme, the canonic phrase is freely developed.
The fourth movement, con moto, is a summing up. It begins with a quiet restatement of the opening two-bar motive of the first movement. This is followed by a development of other themes from the preceding movements. The work then ends with an impassioned climax based on the opening motive.