Leos Janacek’s musical voice is unique. No other music behaves or sounds like yours. There are no long lines or tunes. His harmonies are unlike anything you’ve ever heard. He wrote two mature string quartets. He destroyed a juvenile third. He wrote Quartet No. 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 experimental percussive like Bartok. It is not the neoclassicism of Stravinsky. Janacek is unique. Exceptionally passionate.
I have written the first paragraph as 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 that way, both in music and lyrics. His style is almost musical cubism, where you see a form, a form, a subject, but it breaks into pieces that don’t come together. The pieces appear to repeat, but they are never exactly 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 are never simply repeated. In this first quartet you will hear a sweet phrase, somewhat sad, of only two measures. It is unmistakably feminine. This contrasts with a nervous, repeated motif of short staccato notes and the regular use of ponticello, sharp bows near the bridge. This is male. He is angry and jealous. The contrast between feminine vulnerability and sincerity and masculine impetuousness and pride develops throughout the play. But in Janacek these ideas and associated phrases are brief. They’re gone almost before you hear them. Musically, Janacek’s sound is more like Bruckner than any other composer. This is not surprising, since he studied in Vienna when Bruckner’s works were performed. The difference is that the repetitions and variations in Bruckner last several minutes. At Janacek, everyone is done in seconds and sounds more like Puccini.
The quartet’s subtitle, Kreutzer Sonata, is not an homage to Beethoven, although there is a quotation from the Beethoven sonata, brutally compressed by Janacek, in the third movement. The quotation has both 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 trying to analyze his marriage. His attitudes are conservative and macho. His wife, however, developed independent interests, a quality he himself could not understand. For him, a wife must be submissive and obedient. But this wife devoted herself to music and learned to play the piano. She often played alongside her 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 master violinist. In Tolstoy, the fact that these single people play music together is problematic.
As the couple rehearses, they play better together and the husband’s jealousy grows. He needs to feel in control of his wife’s experience. He confronts her, gets mad at her, and stabs her in a fit of rage. She dies, but he is not severely punished because he was her husband and he was suspected of adultery. 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 quartet’s second violinist, composer Jozef Suk, believed that Janacek intended the work to be a moral protest against mens. 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. Therefore, his opinion would have been informed. Whereas Tolstoy’s story suggests that music is sensual and quite dangerous, Janacek does just the opposite. Here music is human consciousness. He presents emotional liberation through music and wonders if it should also represent women’s social liberation and independence.
This is an interesting point. Janacek did not treat his own wife well. He had adventures. As early as the 1920s he was obsessed with Kamila Stosslova, a married woman thirty years his junior. He wrote over 700 letters to her. She replied twice. Much of what he wrote was inspired by his extramarital longing for Kamila. Perhaps he wanted to free her through this music, so there is plenty of evidence of her own guilt and selfishness in her seemingly liberal message. In contemporary terms, Janacek’s obsession with Kamila was close to “stalking”, but the creative energy generated by his obsession resulted in fifteen years of intense musical activity.
He was almost sixty years old before his first success. He had lived the life of a teacher, devotedly 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 other music, all of which, like the Kreutzer Sonata, tell 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 a voice of his own.
