Leos Janacek’s musical voice is unique. No other music behaves or sounds like yours. There are no long lines or tunes. Their harmonies are unlike anything you’ve ever heard. He wrote two mature string quartets. Destroyed a juvenile third. He wrote Quartet number 1, Kreutzer Sonata, in nine days in 1923, some ninety-five years ago. He was 69 years old. This is modern music that is not modern. It is not atonal like Schoenberg, nor is it percussively experimental like Bartok. It is not Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. Janacek is unique. Exceptionally passionate.
I have written the first paragraph as a series of almost disjointed statements. But it goes back to its own beginning and repeats itself, or almost repeats itself. The style is a deliberate choice because Janacek wrote that way, both in music and lyrics. His style is almost musical cubism, where a form, a form, a subject is visible, but it is broken into pieces that do not come together. The pieces seem to repeat themselves, but they are never exactly the same, and the shapes are probably never complete. There are always questions, rarely statements.
Like Wagner, Janacek uses leitmotifs, little musical germs that signify a character, an emotion or an action. They reappear throughout a play, but they never just repeat themselves. In this first quartet you will hear a sweet and slightly sad phrase of only two bars. It is unmistakably feminine. This contrasts with an edgy, repeated motif of short, choppy notes and the regular use of ponticello, harsh bows near the bridge. This is masculine. He is angry and jealous. The contrast between female vulnerability and sincerity and male impetuosity and pride is manifested throughout the work. But in Janacek these ideas and associated phrases are brief. They are gone almost before you have heard them. Musically, Janacek’s sound is more like Bruckner than any other composer. This is not surprising, as he studied in Vienna when Bruckner’s works were being performed. The difference is that the repetitions and variations in Bruckner last several minutes. In Janacek, they all finish in seconds and sound more like Puccini.
The subtitle for the quartets, Kreutzer Sonata, is not a tribute to Beethoven, although there is a quote from Beethoven’s sonata, brutally compressed by Janacek, in the third movement. The quote has musical and pictorial intentions, because the Kreutzer Sonata in the subtitle actually refers to a Tolstoy tale of the same name. The quartet is not a literal program of history, but rather the impression of a cubist painter.
In the story, a man spends a lot of time and energy analyzing his marriage. Her attitudes are conservative and male-centered. His wife, however, developed independent interests, a quality that he himself could not understand. For him, a wife must be submissive and obedient. But this wife took up music and learned to play the piano. He often played alongside his teacher, a violinist who regularly visited the family home. The couple decide to rehearse Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for a performance and the husband becomes jealous of his wife’s musical bond with the violin teacher. In Tolstoy, the fact that these single people play music together is problematic.
As the couple rehearse, they play better together and the husband’s jealousy increases. You need to feel in control of your wife’s experience. He confronts her, gets 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. The music was to blame. This story takes place during Janacek’s String Quartet No1, but it’s not exactly the same story.
This work was first commissioned and performed by the Bohemian Quartet in 1924. In his biography of Janacek, Jaroslav Vogel describes how the second violinist of the quartet, composer Jozef Suk, believed that Janacek wanted the work to be a moral protest against the mens. s despotic attitude towards women. Suk would have been reasonably close to Janacek, by the way, because he was married to Dvorak’s daughter and Janacek and Dvorak had been close friends. Therefore, their opinion would have been informed. While Tolstoy’s story suggests that music is sensual and quite dangerous, Janacek does the opposite. Here music is human consciousness. It presents an emotional liberation through 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. I had adventures. As early as the 1920s he was already obsessed with Kamila Stosslova, a married woman thirty years his junior. He wrote more than 700 letters to him. She replied twice. Much of what he wrote was inspired by his extramarital longing for Kamila. Perhaps he wanted to release her through this music, so there is a lot of evidence of his own guilt and selfishness in his seemingly liberal message. In contemporary terms, Janacek’s obsession with Kamila was close to “stalking,” but the creative energy his obsession generated resulted in fifteen years of intense musical activity.
He was almost sixty years old before his first hit. He had lived a life as a teacher, devoutly developing the music school in Brno. He became obsessed with a younger woman. He separated from his wife. And, in those final years, he wrote four great operas, two quartets, several orchestral works, and much more music, all of which, like the Kreutzer Sonata, tell a story. It is your story. He himself is a vulnerable individual. It has flaws. He is also a genius and therefore a modern human being with a voice of his own.