WITH the year now marching into the home straight, I have to watch out for loose ends in this space.
WITH the year now marching into the home straight, I have to watch out for loose ends in this space. So, as I left last week??s column on Fate, serendipity, synchronicity or whatever you want to call it hanging fire, I??d better finish it this week before it gets lost.
Last week, in dealing with the effects of Fate and happenstance on the very different lives of Beethoven, Schumann and Tchaikovsky, one clear pattern emerged. Each of these men experienced a crisis, the resolving of which seemed to release in them a tremendous surge of creativity and composition.
It might boil down to the age-old human formula of tension and release, but the music that streamed from them was in each case nothing short of a phenomenon: all those hundreds of songs from Schumann in 1840 and onwards; the torrent of epochal and revolutionary music, with symphonies, concertos and every genre of chamber and instrumental music that erupted from Beethoven from about 1802/3; and those incredible last three symphonies from Tchaikovsky, with the autobiographical Fourth and the equally personal Sixth, about whose story the composer was deliberately enigmatic, but whose ending, I have always felt is about Death, probably his own, and in graphic detail.
But there??s another musical character whose story fits exactly into this scenario, and that is the Czech/Moravian composer Leos Janacek, whose life took an extraordinary turn in 1917 which had a seminal effect on the music that followed from his experience.
Janacek had had some local success with his first attempts at writing opera, but nothing that particularly brought him recognition or success. Not until 1916, and the successful premiere of his opera Jenufa, did the spotlight begin to shift in his direction. But Jenufa had taken him nine years to write, and by 1916, Janacek was in his sixties.
During that long period of creating Jenufa, Janacek had armed himself with the musical language he was looking for to write his distinctive music, which is gritty and earthy: he immersed himself in the study of his native Moravian folk culture. But getting the music fashioned, created and out of his head was slow and laborious: nine years is a long time to write an opera when there is much more you want to say.
Then, in 1917, Janacek met a woman called Kamila Stosslova. He was 63; she was 25. He was married, though unhappily and effectively separated; she was married, to an antique dealer. Janacek was swept off his feet by Kamila. He was intoxicated, infatuated. To what extent she reciprocated is not entirely clear: there seems to have been a degree of distance. None the less, late in his life, she became his muse, and a voluminous and deeply personal correspondence ensued.
The effect of this relationship on Janacek the composer was immediate and seismic. Suddenly, the music that had been so difficult, laborious and slow in its production began to pour from him, beginning in 1919 with his unique song cycle, The Diary Of One Who Disappeared, followed in quick succession by three of his greatest operas: Katya Kabanova in 1921, The Cunning Little Vixen in 1924 and The Makropulous Affair in 1926.
But Janacek??s obsession with Kamila went much further than the provocation of a creative catharsis: Kamila is actually in all of these works. She is the bewitching gipsy girl, Zefka, in The Diary Of One Who Disappeared, for whom a young village lad, named as Janacek, throws away everything. Janacek wrote explicitly on that to Kamila: ??The gipsy girl in my Diary; that was you. You are my Zefka; all through the work I thought of you. That??s why there is so much emotional fire in the work: so much fire that if we??d both caught on, we??d have been burned to ashes.??
And Janacek went even further when he wrote the three great operas mentioned above: he projected Kamila??s persona onto the three heroines; and she later appears, inspirationally at least, in his two string quartets, The Kreutzer Sonata and Intimate Letters.
This is all way beyond the catharsis of creativity experienced by Schumann, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky; and doubtless some might find Janacek??s obsession with Kamila unhealthy if not disturbing. But the immense release of creativity it triggered in Janacek led to the production of a string of works that are regarded as absolutely unique and among the greatest masterpieces of the early 20th century. Janacek died in 1928. Kamila Stosslova died in 1935. Real people; real lives.
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