Janácek’S Eternal Love

By George M. Cummins III

In the last decade of his life, starting when he was a sixty-two-year old curmudgeon in a backwater Slavic country, Czech composer Leo Jancek produced operas and chamber music that would stun the music world, one masterpiece on top of another.

In Janceks Eternal Love, author George M. Cummins III presents a biography focusing on the life of Jancek (1854-1928) based on original Czech sources, with special attention to detailed analysis of the last four operas and biographical focus on the composers relationship with his muse, Kamila Stsslov. In 1916, Jancek was known only as a local ethnographer specializing in folk music, but he acquired international fame with the operas and chamber pieces he composed after the age of sixty-two until his death at seventy-four.

Cumminswith both a personal and scholarly knowledge of Czech language, history, and culturenarrates a personal biography that includes detailed, insightful descriptions of Janceks compositions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491758113

George M. Cummins III

George M. Cummins III studied literature and linguistics in New England. From 1972 to 2010 he taught Slavic languages at Tulane. Retired, he now writes, hikes, travels, and camps on the Tuxachanie Trail in Saucier, Mississippi. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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Copyright © 2015 George M. Cummins III.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-5812-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-5813-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-5811-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015902631

iUniverse rev. date: 04/16/2015

Contents

Acknowledgments

Part I

Teaching, Theory, Ethnography

Introduction and Chapter One

Chapter Two

         Janáček’s Brno

Chapter Three

         Homeland. Lachia

Chapter Four

         Hukvaldy

Chapter Five

Queen’s Monastery, Brno

Bluebirds, Apples, Gypsy children

Early compositions, studies abroad

Chapter Six

         Zdenka

Marriage

Chapter Seven

         The Organ School

Ethnographic Studies

Šárka

Chapter Eight

         On the Home front. Children

Rákós Rákóczy Dances

The Beginning of a Romance

Chapter Nine

         A Trip to Russia in 1896

The Queen of Spades

Amarus

Photographs from the Nineties

Chapter Ten

         Marie Stejskalová

Olga

Chapter Eleven

         Její pastorkyňa

Chapter Twelve

         Olga Janáčková’s final journey

Chapter Thirteen

         Jakobson and Janáček

On Speech Melody Theory

Chapter Fourteen

         Jakobson and Janáček (suite)

PART II

Estrangement from Zdenka, New Creative Paths

Chapter Fifteen

         Bleak Years

Chapter Sixteen

         Fate

Chapter Seventeen

         Moving Out

Chapter Eighteen

         Along an Overgrown Path

Chapter Nineteen

         Social Themes

Janáček in his Fifties

Chapter Twenty

         The Fiddler’s Child

Chapter Twenty-One

         The Excursions of Mr. Brouček

Chapter Twenty-Two

         The Great War

Chapter Twenty-Three

         Její Pastorkyňa Resurrected

Max Brod

Chapter Twenty-Four

         Gabriela Horvátová

Analysis of Zdenka’s Neuroses

Estrangement and Divorce

Part III

Kamila and a New Birth of Creative Transformation

Chapter Twenty-Five

         Enter the Heroine

Chapter Twenty-Six

         The Diary of One Who Disappeared

Chapter Twenty-Seven

         Káťa Kabanová

Chapter Twenty-Eight

         Janáček Describes his Favorite Káťa

Chapter Twenty-Nine

         Káťa Kabanová: The Music (1)

Act I

Chapter Thirty

         Káťa: Act II

Chapter Thirty-One

         Act III

Chapter Thirty-Two

         About Ostrovsky’s Play The Storm

Chapter Thirty-Three

         What is Káťa Kabanová?

Chapter Thirty-Four

         Štrbské pleso

Chapter Thirty-Five

         Liška Bystrouška

Chapter Thirty-Six

         The Language of Liška Bystrouška

Chapter Thirty-Seven

         Liška Bystrouška: The Music

Chapter Thirty-Eight

         Wells

Chapter Thirty-Nine

         A Third New Opera in Four Years

First String Quartet

Chapter Forty

         Seventieth Birthday Year

Chapter Forty-One

         Spondeo et polliceor

Concertino

Venice

Chapter Forty-Two

         Sinfonietta

Voyage to England

Capriccio

Nursery Rhymes

Chapter Forty-Three

         The Makropulos Case

Věc Makropulos

Chapter Forty-Four

         Věc, Act I

Chapter Forty-Five

         Věc, Act II

Chapter Forty-Six

         Věc Act III

Chapter Forty-Seven

         Kamila and Věc.

Chapter Forty-Eight

         Věc. Conclusion

Chapter Forty-Nine

         Love in Bloom

Chapter Fifty

         Three Cantatas

Chapter Fifty-One

         From the House of the Dead

Chapter Fifty-Two

         Love in Triumph

String Quartet n Two, Intimate Letters

Chapter Fifty-Three

         Chronology of Major Works

Chapter Fifty-Four

         Summary and Final Remarks

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to friends and colleagues in the Czech Republic, especially Miloš Pospíchal, who found and photocopied Kamila’s album, and Laďa and Beata Hrbek, all of Brno. Inestimable support came from the Interlibrary Loan Department of Tulane University and its loyal staff members Annie Kemp, Patti Windham and Arely Martinez. I thank Ellen Sandberg of the Granger Collection, New York City, for permission to use the photograph of Gustav Böhm’s 1926 oil portrait of Janáček. Last but not least, I thank my map designer, Lillian Smith, for her unique cartographic portrayals of Moravia.

Part I

Teaching, Theory, Ethnography

Introduction and Chapter One

How to Say ‘Janáček’. Janáček is my subject, Leoš Janáček, Czech musician and composer (1854-1928), christened Leo Evgen, that is, Leo Eugene. The š (pronounced sh) of his given name is a Moravian suffix, and he was known everywhere as Leoš Janáček (yan-AH-chek). The surname seems to come from the Christian given name Jan, which is John.

This man is the third in the constellation of Czech nineteenth-century musical geniuses, following Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák. He is less well known in the world than Smetana, the nationalist composer, author of My Country with its familiar dashing Moldau river, and of the opera The Bartered Bride. He is less well known than Dvořák (dvor-shAk), the favorite abroad, beloved of the English and the Americans, author of the New World Symphony with its melancholic spirituals and many works that are immediately accessible to the contemporary listener.

Janáček is not easy listening and he is not very melodic. It is hard to sing or hum him. More melody, Dvořák urged him, but he would not obey. Had he died in 1914 at age sixty, he would today be unknown outside a narrow circle of Czech folklorists. It is a miracle that he is known today at all, and his international fame rests largely on operas and chamber pieces he composed after the age of sixty-two until his death at seventy-four. How this came about is the subject of this book. Its title, Janáček’s Eternal Love, contains a secret part of the answer. This book is not so much about the composer as about his international triumph.

This book is not designed for Janáček specialists. It is for lay readers, people interested in music, in musical biography, in opera; it is for lovers of music who have never heard of this man. I have been overcome and laid ill by the fever for this man’s music and want to tell you what it means to me and how that music seems to have come about. I am not a musicologist and so most of my focus is on the amazing figure of this stubborn man — old man, I want to say, because I have in mind the snow-white windswept head of hair, those quizzically raised eyebrows, that fearless stare into the eye of the camera or the artist, or the viewer of future times. An honest man, a man often angry and aggrieved, but much subtler and more educated than you might think by the look on his face. He was at heart a gentle man, for all his impatience, his pistol-fast temper, his unreasonable grudges, a gentle man who said he could never compose anything without love. A man so uncompromising in his principles that he could not prevaricate, he could not lie, and the single love affair he had while married he openly admitted, so openly that the world wrongly thought of him as a philanderer, and he did not give a damn about that.

The material I present is true to fact and documented by contemporary witnesses and by Janáček himself in his letters and his invaluable feuilletons, as the French call those newspaper articles that are meant to be non-scholarly essays written to entertain and to instruct. I write substantive footnotes at page-bottom to introduce important material not necessarily germane to my immediate point. At the end of each chapter I list my sources in detail in paragraphs entitled REFERENCES, indexing them by author and date as they are listed in my Selected Bibliography and identifying them as they relate to the text.

This book is about Janáček’s oeuvre and his relationship with his muse Kamila. I quote my own translations, and exclusively my own private translations, from the letters of Janáček to Kamila in the last eleven years of his life, as they have been compiled by the exacting and self-effacing bibliographer Svatava Přibáňová. I translate Janáček myself and do not use anyone else’s translations. Excerpts from these letters appear in Part III of the book, when Kamila makes her appearance in his life. Other than the words of the musician — and the words of his essays resound throughout my book — I quote or translate little or nothing. These essays, dating back to the newspapers of 1920s and before, are public domain material; again, I use exclusively my own personal translations. (There is a recent critical edition of his writings, which for the convenience of my readers I also reference.) Janáček is as expressive and original in language as he was in his music. It is a pity that we have so little film or recorded material of Janáček — for example, his remarks to English musicologists during his trip to London would have been a revelation. We have, however, dozens of eloquent photographs, compiled by Přibáňová and presented in a single volume devoted to them. I describe many of these in the course of my text.

My translated text is enclosed in double quotes; titles of works are in italics in the original and double quotes in English at the first mention, but generally in italics thereafter. For example, Věc Makropulos The Makropulos Case, thereafter variously The Thing, The Makropulos Case, Věc Makropulos, and more. Note that second mention in English of his works are without quotation marks, which would be gratuitous. Works include operas, symphonic rhapsodies, choral works, chamber music, cantatas, folk songs and dances, piano works, scholarly editions. Literal translations of single words or phrases are in single quotes, as in the style of linguistic glosses. Phraseological glosses are frequent, and they are enclosed, as I say, in single quotes. Where I discuss and present a portion of one of Janáček’s feuilletons, I enclose all directly translated material in quotation marks, and give additional remarks, explanations or summaries outside quotation marks, as though from the composer himself. The absence of quotes indicates that I am giving his thoughts in my own words. Where I am explaining, interpolating, editing or commenting on my own, I use brackets. I have tried to make this procedure consistent throughout.

I have chosen to include in this work three of my own original essays (written for this book) on the last operas, on which he believed his fame would rest. So the reader will encounter multiple chapters on Káťa Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, and The Makropulos Case. They include some analysis of the music, and as I am not a musicologist by training, I have undoubtedly permitted mistakes to invade my text. In any case, Janáček never cared much for that sort of thing. He wanted his listeners to hear him without explanation or commentary. I welcome the reader to correct me and send me your remarks.

As for my qualifications, my years of study and work in Czechoslovakia and now the Czech Republic have helped me toward a good education in the language and culture of this landlocked nation in the heart of Europe. Where I am not sure of a dialect word I do not hesitate to ask an educated Moravian who knows. I will give a simple example. In an essay entitled Seven Ravens Janáček has the urge to call out to the birds přijďte zas narok! which in standard Czech might mean ‘come again for a year!’, but not here. Here narok is dialectal for za rok ‘in a year’s time’, and that is the kind of thing I needed to double-check, and I thank Miloš Pospíchal of Brno for his invaluable aid. By the way — readers of the time (1922) and place (Brno) were expected to know this sort of thing. Za rok appears in a popular essay. Today, some of the early writings of the composer seem a kind of antiquated, nineteenth-century Czech. He was, after all, born in 1854.

About Czech. The writing system is limpid and much easier for us than Polish. Czech uses diacritics and writes them vertically; Polish uses compound letters to write horizontally, e.g. Czech ještě ~ Polish jeszcze ‘still, yet’. We owe Jan Hus a debt of gratitude for this. The diacritics include the háček, of which there are two in the Czech word above, and the accent aigu or acute accent, as in Janáček. This diacritic signals a long vowel, not a stressed one. Czech word-stress is always on the first syllable. Thus the composer’s name has a very light stress on yan and a long vowel on ah, but for our purposes I recommend simply yan-AH-chek. When you see a long mark over a Czech vowel, you know it is long: Smetana has three shorts, Dvořák, a short followed by a long. The fricatives and the affricates are spelled š, ž, č, c (the fourth with no háček) and pronounced sh as in short, zh as in azure, ch as in church, ts as in plates or tse-tse, this one an African bloodsucking fly and not a usual English affricate. There is a velar fricative, spelled ch and pronounced somewhat like German ich, and there is a voiced pharyngeal h, reminiscent of English h but not identical. There is also a strange sound, ř, as in Dvořák, which is a strident liquid r, sounding like an r and a sh or zh simultaneously — very unusual in languages. The emigré writer Josef Škvorecký recommended pronouncing the composer’s name divorce-shack, which is very witty, but as Škvorecký knew very well, not in character for this family-loving, pious Czech. His name may serve for some good examples of Czech spelling and pronunciation.

There are also three pure palatal consonants in Czech, ď, ť, and ň, with diacritics (they also occur before i). We hear this sound in děkuji ‘thank you’ (derived from German danke), which is approximately dyek-u-yee, stress, by rule, on the first syllable dyek. Prosím is ‘please’, ‘you’re welcome’, ‘come in’, ‘pardon me’. It is like Italian prego. Prosím is pronounced pro-seem, stress on pro. ‘Goodbye’ is na shledanou, na-sled-a-know. The last vowel is a diphthong and therefore a long vowel, pronounced very like English ‘oh’ or ‘no’. To intimates and friends one says ahoj, sounding like ah-hoy.

That is all I will say here about the standard Czech language, except to add that it has no nominal articles, an exceptional problem for Czechs learning English, who want to say ‘I go to store’, ‘man is in room’, and the like. And one more thing. Czech has free word order, supported by a rich case system to signal what the role of noun phrases in the sentence is. So Czechs say things like this book read to me my mother, with the object fronted. This word order is facilitated by the theme-rheme semantic structure of Czech.

REFERENCES

Seven Ravens, L.n. 30, č. 600, 30.11.1922, Literární dílo 2003, 515-517.

MAPA.jpg

Czech Republic; rectangle in the East is Lachia

Chapter Two

Janáček’s Brno

Introduction. Moravia (Mähren in German, Morava in Czech) is the second of the Czech lands, with Bohemia (Böhmen, Čechy) and Silesia (Schlesien, Slezsko) forming today’s Czech Republic. Together with the cigar-shaped, picturesque mountain land to the east, Slovakia, they make up the Czechoslovakia fashioned out of Central Europe after the Great War by the philosopher-president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Until 1918 Moravia was under Habsburg dominion, German the administrative language and Czech the cultural organ of the people. For a time in the ninth century the Great Moravian Empire was the cradle of the burgeoning Slavic nations. Janáček was a Moravian, a Czechoslovak citizen and a Czech musician, more narrowly, a Moravian musician. Moravia is a beautiful land of uplands, hills, mountain chains and lowlands, divided from Bohemia to the west by the NE - SW Vysočina uplands and from Moravian Silesia by parts of the Jeseníky hills to the north. The Eastern Moravian Beskydy mountains extend to the spur of the White Carpathians that divides Poland from Moravia and Slovakia. This is a stubbornly independent land with its own styles of speech and distinctive folk dress. The Moravians and their neighbors, the wealthier Czechs with their caput regni, Prague, understand and speak the same language, but differently, and out of differences come mutual misunderstandings and hatreds that extraordinary personalities, like President Masaryk, a Moravian who loved all Slavic nations and who fashioned Czechoslovakia in 1918, are able to overcome.

IMAGE2.jpg

Capuchin Square, Brno

Queen Eliška Rejčka. As I write this, eighty-five years of violent and hectic central European history have blown away like a leaf in the wind since Janáček rushed off to the station to meet Kamila, with an uncanny prescience in his chest that he would never return. The city, his city, has today sprawled out to all directions of the compass, now with thirty separate named quarters within the catastral limits of the dark old Moravian metropolis, and a population of four hundred thousand, several times over what it was in 1928. As Prague is wealthy, bright and glorious, Brno is poor, dark, sour. Yet it is Moravian, which, the people believe, gives it a leg up in character and purity of soul. Praguers are false, goes the Moravian saying, and I know a Prague cabdriver who agreed with this when I mentioned it to him, but he turned out to be originally from Moravia. There is a healthy suspicion and hatred of one’s neighbor across the highlands in all the Czech lands — a healthy suspicion, as it has helped keep everyone alive and breathing, although with a certain spirit of nepřejícnost, not wishing for your neighbor the good thing he dreams of acquiring. If your neighbor gets a new barn, you do not desire for yourself an equally new barn; you wish in your heart of hearts that his barn will burn down.

Once upon a time, when Brno was young and only recently bearing the bureaucratic title of město, city, the Castle of Špilberk was young and bright, or perhaps was an earlier Romanesque version of its present self. The grass was green and the air was pure and the blood of kings and nobles fertilized the lands. The princedoms ruling the feudal dominions of their estates struck coins of the realm and the city of Brno became important as a fortified trading center halfway between Prague and Vienna. The oldest Czech historical chronicle, the Latin Kronika Kosmova, mentions Brno in the eleventh century, Brno called Bruna, adjective brunensis.

This is a story of one of the most famous of Brno’s medieval citizens, whose name is the first to be encountered in any brief history of the town. She was very intelligent and very beautiful, and became the wealthiest person, or the second wealthiest, in all the land. Her partner was the wealthiest, and they lived together in blissful happiness, respected by the citizenry though they never married — perhaps out of superstition, as in those days so many noble marriages seemed to end in violent death. She lived to be forty-seven, died a natural death, and did many good things.

This was Eliška Rejčka, born Richenza or Riksa, twice Czech queen and twice widowed, a woman with royal blood from Poland and Sweden in her veins, daughter of the Polish king Přemysl II, called Piastovec, and the Swedish princess Richenza, born September 1, 1288, in the merry thirteenth century. Her mother was murdered, and her father sought the throne of Krakow, which he attained when she was seven. He, too, was murdered, reputedly by Brandenburg margraves. In 1297 the wife of the Czech king Václav II died, leaving him a widower, Václav, the son of the famous Czech King of Iron and of Gold, Otakar II. Václav saw the advantages in marriage over those of the sword, and with the help of Czech silver from the mines at Kutná Hora and the support of a Habsburg prince, he soon received the twelve-year old Richenza in marriage. She had been betrothed to the fierce Ota the Long, who plundered Bohemia after Otakar’s death. Václav, known for his attraction to young women, gave her, fortunately for her, to an aunt to bring up. It was not lost on the girl that she now was close to the thrones of three nations. Václav, meantime, attacked Poland, and, they say, stuffed the church with armed knights for protection for his coronation. He survived.

In time he had Richenza crowned Czech and Polish Queen, in Prague, before the altar of St. Vitus. The responsibility of wars and fiefdoms occupied the king. While in Hungary rescuing his son Václav III he was obliged to return home to save his country from a Hungarian attack in Kutná Hora, where Albrecht of Habsburg was in pursuit of the silver mines. Legend has it the miners were able to poison the attackers with dross from the silver mines — cyanide poisoning. The chronicler writes: They thirsted for silver and they drank slag. In 1305 Václav succumbed to tuberculosis, dying in Prague in the house U Kamenného zvonu ‘At the Stone Bell’ on Old Town Square.

Eliška, now a young widow with a baby daughter, Anežka, was expected to enter a convent and spend her days in mournful prayer, but Albrecht married her off to his son Rudolf Habsburg, who became Czech king, known mockingly as Král Kaše ‘King Porridge’. In 1306 Kaše died under suspicious circumstances, supposedly of dysentery. Young Richenza was now eighteen and already twice a widow. She had a double inheritance of forty hřivny, or half-weights of gold. She was immeasurably rich. She was given the East Bohemian town of Hradec, known henceforth as Hradec Králové, Queen’s Redoubt, just NE of Kutná Hora. Czechified, her name became Rejčka. She soon founded the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit and became the town’s leading citizen.

And then, at last, she fell in love. After all, she was eighteen. Elle était fille, elle était amoureuse. He was an amazing man, no longer young. In 1303 he accidentally killed the Brandenburg noble Herman of Barba and had to leave the court for a time, but redeemed himself by his cunning and prowess in the military service of the king. His name was Jindřich of Lípa (Lípa is a middle-sized north Bohemian town). Jindřich had supported King Porridge after the poisoning, or death from dysentery, of Václav. He was handsome, sensitive, and intelligent. This man Jindřich Rejčka loved. He was the love of her life, love at first sight and forever sight.

Now, the present king was Jan Lucemburský, who discovered an apparent plot with a nobleman named Vilém Zajíc of Valdek to dethrone him. Eliška was implicated. For a time the king was planning to kill Jindřich, but he once again proved himself valiant and indispensable to the throne. Eliška was exiled. She went to Brno, of all places, joined at last by her lover Jindřich. She set herself up in a house on Rybí trh ‘Fish Market’, now Dominican Square right in the heart of Old Brno, a house, by the way, given her by the king, who had a forgiving nature and was clearly taken in by her dazzle. She proved herself a model citizen, although she was living in sin with the great nobleman. We cannot blame her, as life had proven dangerous for so many around her.

For some years, after Jindřich, too, had again found his way back into the good graces of the king, they lived in happiness together. She founded the Cistercian convent and the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin in Brno, originally not far from what was called Convent Square, or Monastery Square, and furnished it with her rare collection of illuminated manuscripts, one of which is adorned with her image and that of a crouching lion. In the Jihlava Zbraslavská kronika we find her stylized portrait in drawing. Crowned, as králová, or Queen regnant, she holds a scepter like a wand in her left hand and the royal sphere in her right. Her curly hair falls to her elbows. The artist has made a valiant attempt to depict the beauty of her expressive face. She wanted to leave a lasting monument in Brno, and decided to found a Cistercian convent. The gossips have it (Janáček despised gossip) that she did this to confound her royal rival and stepdaughter Eliška Přemyslovna, who, they say, was hysterical with envy, as she too had tried to start up a convent in the Moravian metropolis but had not found financial support. As it transpired, Eliška Přemyslovna, wife of King Jan of Lucemburg, earned a silent revenge on our Eliška in the figure of her brilliant son Václav, named Karel IV, the magnificent King of Bohemia and Moravia and Holy Roman Emperor from 1346 to 1378. He became the greatest of all Czech sovereigns.

To determine the site of her convent, in good medieval fashion she (our Eliška) ascended to the gallery of Špilberk Castle and released three pennants into the stiff breeze. The first flew off to Komín, the second, to the vicinity of the Castle Veveří, and the third fell a stone’s throw from Špilberk in Old Brno. Here, then, she built the Cathedral of the Ascension and the convent, called the Hall of the Virgin Mary.

All men are mortal. The chroniclers document Eliška’s inconsolable grief at the death of Jindřich at age sixty, in the magnificent residence they shared in Old Brno, more elegant, so they believed, than the palace in Hradčany in Prague. For his death his Queen Eliška, called Hradecká, wept so much and mourned so, that everyone who saw her grief was amazed, writes the chronicler, for all we know a man who had never loved and lost. And as in life, also in death she did not wish to be parted from him, she decreed that his body lie in the Convent alongside her own. She died on October 18, 1335, at forty-seven, and lay next to her partner in life, the lady twice Queen of Bohemia, and her consort, the richest and most powerful Czech nobleman.

Now, in due time the dour Augustinians acquired the cathedral and its convent, called still Klášter Králové, Queen’s Convent. The convent school was founded and endowed by Countess Sibylla Polyxena of Montani, née Thurn-Wallesessin in 1648, for the education of poor orphans. Our two lady founders, wrote Janáček, thinking that Sibylla and Polyxena were two sisters. At the age of eleven he spent his first night in Brno with his mother on Capuchin Square, just adjacent to the Dominican Square where Eliška had lived. At Capuchin Square stood the imposing seventeenth-century Church of the Discovery of the Holy Cross. In the crypt mouldered the bones of many great saints of the Capuchin order and others as well. Up the road from the road was the hill where the city Cathedral of Peter and Paul stood on a promontory with a view of all that could be seen. The promontory presents to the visitor one of Brno’s characteristically steep climbs, and a beautiful one, as it passes through the marvelous park then called Františkov, now Denisovy sady ‘Denis’s Gardens’. The people of Brno have their own unique slang built largely from Austrian imports into the local Hanák Moravian dialect. The slang was called hantec, and in that slang they called the park Francisperk. Nowadays that secret language is falling into disuse, as are so many local dialects.

Back at the Church in Capuchin Square in 1865, little Leoš Janáček wept inconsolably on his first night, as Eliška had wept, but for his father and his mother and his home in the Beskydy Mountains, in Hukvaldy. They dressed him in the light blue uniform of the blueboys, or bluebirds, or Modráčci, the boy singer choristers on stipend, mostly talented orphans supported by the Convent, all of whom labored hard for their room and board. He had begun his path to becoming a Moravian composer in Brno. His memories of the Convent were not pleasant. "Queen’s klášter in Brno, its dank landings, the old church, the extensive gardens [see his feuilleton For a Pair of Apples?], my poor life as a pre-adolescent, loneliness and homesickness. All of this was my cantata Amarus [Latin for ‘bitter’]." The boy Leoš grew in wisdom and knowledge, watched over by his wise guardians, the chorus master and composer Pavel Křížkovský and his own loving uncle, Jan Janáček. He was so poor he memorized the textbooks he could not afford to purchase and played the organ on a keyboard of chalk drawn on his rude wooden table. I do not romanticize; it was so.

Arriving by bus in Brno in 2013. In 1913 Janáček was an obscure Moravian musician, known about town for his ethnographical studies of folk music. By 1928 he had become an international composing star of the first magnitude, ranked alongside the sainted Czech composers Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák, beloved both at home and abroad. Brno in 2013 is very different from the verdant and dirty burg it was in Janáček’s day. Its urban sprawl is now visible from far away, spread out as on a shallow platter for miles and miles, its terrain relieved by hills. One arrives on the D-1 expressway from Prague, a treacherous thoroughfare where massive, filthy trucks struggle to maintain their balance on the curvy roads and tiny personal autos, the more powerful descendants of the plastic Trabants of the Communist era, wind among them, hoping and praying for a favorable outcome of their journey. The nation is beginning to rebuild its infrastructure at long last, and hope is on the horizon of time. Prague, about two hundred kilometers WNW of the outskirts of Brno, is in another geological typology far across the highlands of the Vysočina past Jihlava, the Moravian town equidistant from Prague and Brno. Eighty kilometers south of Brno one encounters the Austrian border, a land of fertile vineyards around the Castle of Valtice. Brno drinks wine, in its excellent wine cafés, and local or Pilsner beer, in its many pubs, ranging today from the filthy to the luxurious.

Back in the bus, the first whiff of Brno is an acrid smell compounded of gasoline oil and bad local rum, coal smoke and haze. For kilometer after kilometer the gentle verdant fields give way to the leavings of the Communist urban pond of despond, the endless concrete-block apartment houses huddled together in sídliště ‘housing developments’, where all the buildings look exactly alike and all are alike in their shabby discomfort. These are gradually giving way to the capitalist juxtaposition of squalor and higher quality living. One passes through tiny villages resembling Janáček’s nineteenth-century, with names like Kývalka, Popůvky, Troubsko, and then an outlying city quarter, Starý Lískovec. One is still a long way from the city center. Bohunice looms to our left, with its huge old hospital groaning on a hill, and the bus grinds on toward its stop right opposite the old Communist hangout, the Grand Hotel. Not far away is the first real capitalist urban mall, the gleaming Vaňkovka, with expensive shops like those in nearby German cities, and goods you could never find here in the bad old days, and lots and lots of mall restaurants of all ethnic designs. Brnoites today love oriental food and Italian food and American hamburgers. There are many Western firms working in Brno today, designers of adaptive technology and urban architecture. The days of Baťa, Brno’s shoemaker for Europe, are long gone. There are megashopping centers filling up the outskirts of town where there is land and space. Modern Brnoites, like Angelinos, have cars, often German cars. I must mention here that there are beautiful places in Brno that one may take the trouble to seek out. A new quarter, Lesná ‘Forest’, is everywhere a park and its buildings, though Communist and all alike, are more tolerable to look at. The Brno přehrada, the artificial lake for boating and swimming, is a favorite getaway on summer afternoons. Líšeň, a newly incorporated quarter to the east of the city, has a fine park and a lake, the Mariánské údolí. And there are lovely quarters with neatly kept, spacious old homes, Staré Brno is one, for example, which is also the name of the best local beer.

Back at the station, one finds that humble Brnoites can do just as well with the excellent public transportation. Streetcars, which always run on schedule, are safe and clean, as are buses, preferred for their often reckless speed. Senior citizens ride the public transport for free, which is a delight. There goes a story that one fine day the streetcar driver in Židenice came to work drunk, and the streetcar wandered far from its appointed route and was lost for some time. This story is a rarity, beloved of gossips. The end of the story is that the pathetic driver was never heard of again. Citizen passengers, otherwise law-abiding, are stopped by plainclothes inspectors carrying hidden badges, and the penalty for traveling without a ticket has always been horrendous. One despairs of driving by car about the city center, which was built for medieval horse-and-cart traffic. Our bus, perhaps from the yellow Student Agency fleet, an affordable firm servicing all of Europe, stops across the street from the Grand Hotel, and if you have no car awaiting you and your luggage, you will have to trek fifty meters down the street to a taxi stand in front of the Main Station, a crumbling relic of the old days. It is not recommended to take the street car with two suitcases in hand. Your bus may be stopping at the Zvonářka only a block or two away, but, alas, a couple hundred stone steps below the altitude of Station Street. Brnoites of both genders have great physical strength and will often stop to take a stranger’s luggage embarrassing distances for him. From afar they do not seem friendly, but these spontaneous gestures of goodwill are profoundly natural. You profusely thank the person who has helped you; she may mutter something like people in Prague don’t do this.

Just above and to the west loom the twin spires of Petrov Cathedral, which you may find pictured on the brown ten-crown coin. If you are looking for the confluence of the Svratka and the Svitava rivers, which is supposed to be the city’s founding spot, you won’t find it nearby here, but in Janáček’s old haunts at Convent Square you will find River Bank Street (Poříčí) and there runs a narrow little stream, hardly noticeable, the Svratka. And if you seek to view the unimpressive Svitava, you have only to take a bus eastward on Křenová Street ‘Horseradish Street’ from the city center, and look for the Gothic column called Zderadův sloup. A bridge passes over the little trickling stream. This column, of course, is rich in Brno legend, and was built in the fifteenth century to mark the border of Brno at that time, so you can see how the city has spread. The column derives from the murder of the king’s adviser Zderad on the order of the king’s son Vratislav in 1091 during the siege of Brno, immortalized in the Latin Kosmova kronika, mentioned above. Everything in Brno seems to go back to some fog-shrouded legend involving bloodshed. No wonder, I say, that Eliška and Jindřich never married.

If one walks about the city center one may see many sights that Janáček knew in his day. Ascend Masaryk Boulevard, the main north-south axis of the city and perhaps its oldest thoroughfare. It is amusing to trace its stubborn name-changes. In 1905, during the uprising that produced Janáček’s Sonata on Street Scene, October 1, 1905, it was Station Square. In 1918 to celebrate the free Republic it became Masaryk. In 1938 it was renamed to Hermann Göring Boulevard, in 1945, Masaryk, in 1955, Victory Boulevard, in 1968, Masaryk, in 1970, Victory Boulevard, in 1989, Masaryk, as it is today. Many older citizens simply called it Masarykova through all the regime changes.

Ascend the steps to the boulevard, take a left at Josefská and you arrive at Capuchin Square, where Leoš spent his first night. Ascend and pass through Zelný trh ‘Green Vegetable Market’, which today, as then, offers fresh vegetables, fruits, and whatever the vendors may have. It is a spacious square where everyone goes to meet friends and shop. Keep to the left and ascend, along Petrská and Biskupská, charming and well-kept streets, winding your way to the tranquillity of Denisovy sady under the walls of Petrov, which you may never reach in your distraction. The view from the garden includes the castle Špilberk to the west, seated on its hill, and directly below, the Protestant Red Church, Komenský Church. Petrov, a Romanesque shrine in pre-history, has over and over been rebuilt, baroquized in the nineteenth century and supplied with its familiar neo-Gothic towers, ninety-four feet above the nave. The gardens, which lead you on winding paths from the old city rampart walls over to Studánka park and down to Husova Street, are dotted with curiosities. There is an obelisk celebrating the victory over Napoleon, such as it was, in the battle of nearby Austerlitz, a colonade where private weddings are held, and there are far more iron benches than are needed. The summer breezes are soft and on a good day one may sit for hours.

Back at Capuchin Square one is a stone’s throw from the Old Town Hall, with its ominous attributes, the Brno dračice ‘female dragon’ and the Brno wheel, swathed in tales and legends that Brno schoolchildren must endure, only to forget the details in later life. The Hall looks like an enormous triumphal arched gate, with its five ornamental Gothic turrets. The middle one is strangely twisted (deliberately, by the vengeful builder). His name was Anton Pilgram, as the schoolteachers will tell you, and he was the erector of the Stephansdom in Vienna and the cathedral of St. Martin in Bratislava. Pilgram, a master stone mason, made the portal in 1510 as a gift to the city, expecting a decent honorarium. Dissatisfied, he returned to Vienna with the twisted cental turret in place forever.

Now, the wheel came from a wager between a great wheelwright and a great smithy. Who was the better artisan? Although completely hungover, Birk fashioned his wheel and somehow rolled it forty kilometers from Lednice to Brno over night. By a miracle he won his bet, but the city fathers were convinced his feat was impossible without the aid of demonic forces. So that was the end of his career and the amazing Birk died of hunger or disappointment. Hanging over the arched doorway of the Town Hall is the magnificent Brno dragon, actually a huge crocodile, which was a form of medieval dragon. We know that the founder of Trutnov was the coalman Trut, who trapped a dragon in his lair and killed him by smoke inhalation. Trutnov thus had the dragon as its emblem. How did the monster make its way to Brno? Legends abound. Was it a circus crocodile that escaped? Moravia loves its circuses, and I was once startled out of my sleep by the roaring of a nearby lion. St. George battled with a dragon and slew it, a dragon that demanded the blood of virgins, like the Minotaur slain by the mythological hero Theseus. We must not lose sight of the mythic reality of the dragon’s dual nature. He is both good and evil, like the Hebrew god Jehovah, and one can imagine the complicated moral nature of a female dragon. The dragon forms the uroboros, for the alchemists the symbol of the prime substance, which took on so many changing forms, including the closed circle of the dragon swallowing its own tail.

The search for the prime substance was the subject of one of Janáček’s greatest choruses, The Wandering Madman, the tale of a man crazed by his search for the ultimate reality, who, unconscious or unaware that he has discovered the secret, casts it aside as though it were worthless, and later, realizing only later to his horror what he has done, succumbs to the frailty of his mortality and dies. The last words of the chorus are inscribed on Janáček’s tombstone in Brno’s Central Cemetery. With spent forces, with his body bent, his heart in the dust, like a tree that has been uprooted.

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Janáček’s Grave in Brno

Janáček, you may be sure, knew the stories of the Brno dragon and the Brno wheel.

We return by way of Šilingrák, slang for Šilingrovo Square, down Old Brno Street back to Dominican Square. Eliška Rejčka, remember, lived right here on this square, then Fish Market. There we see St. Michael’s, rebuilt from its ancient thirteenth-century original, destroyed in the Swedish siege of Brno. Today it is a seventeenth-century Baroque structure, with its facade facing to the east. The pulpit was designed by Josef Winterhalter, who was obsessed by the notion that he must create a pulpit that would make people stop and stare in amazement. After months of uncertainty he had a vision of the Archangel Michael, a radiant sword in his right hand, surrounded by heavenly clouds. Around him on the ground a little band of angels cast out of heaven huddled at his feet. This was his theme presenting itself to him, and so he set about to bring the vision to material form. Those who visit the church and cast eyes on this rostrum bear witness that he succeeded.

Zámečnická Street leads to Freedom Square with its Plague Column, the centerpoint of the city. There stands today a black granite obelisk, the mysterious Brno clock, placed there by the city fathers in the year 2011 and the object of silent opprobrium and derision from passing Brnoites scrutinizing its smooth phallic surface. How one tells the time by this clock is obscure to the visitor. The city fathers with pride compare it to the Astrological Clock in Prague’s Old Town Square. The square is as old as the city, site of fairs and gatherings of the citizenry for nearly a thousand years. Unfortunately the new twentieth century saw the wholesale razing of many old buildings from the distant past and the appearance of a drab neo-Renaissance style. Coffeehouses and restaurants have always lined the sides of the trianglar square, where until recently there has been a MacDonald’s, whose brief popularity is now subsiding. At the northern cathetus three streets emerge, from left to right, Česká (in Janáček’s day called Rudolfská), Rašínova, and Běhounská. The central street leads to another ancient Gothic structure, the church of St. James. Rudolfská on the left housed the offices of Janáček’s favorite newspaper, Lidové noviny, which published a volume-full of his essays, and on the corner of Rudolfská and Jakubská in a private apartment was for a time the residence of the Organ School.

Following Česká to the ring street, Koliště, brings us to Žerotínovo Square and Veveří Street, where in 1884 there opened the first Czech theater in Brno, a significant event for the Czech patriot Janáček, who founded his own periodical, Hudební listy ‘Musical Pages’ for reviews of the performances at the Czech National Provisional Theater, as it was called, though it certainly was permanent, as it turned out. The theater was the musical and entertainment center of every Czech town, large and small. Film actors of today invariably learned their craft in the theater. Czech dramatic productions on television for children still today resemble puppet fairy tales.

Until 1884 all the theaters in good old Brno were German, among them the Reduta on Green Market, which burned in 1870, and the modern structure on nearby Malinovský Square, called the German Theater on the Ramparts, which predated the Czech theater in 1882. An architectural amalgam of neobaroque and neoclassical styles, its construction attracted the attention of Thomas Edison, who designed a project for its electrification. When in 1918 the Theater on the Ramparts passed into Czech hands with the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic, it was called the Mahen Theater. Behind it on Theater Street stands one more theatrical building, a monster of 1960s Communist tastelessness, a theater with a revolving stage now named after the man whose outsized statue stands on the square braving the winds of Brno winters in an overcoat with up-turned collar, Leoš Janáček. On Česká Street we have failed to mention Joštova, where there stood yet another provisional theater. Joštova is located in Komenský Square, where stands Brno’s Besední dům, the Municipal Cultural Center.

One street over from Veveří runs Kounicova, formerly Leninova, in Janáček’s time Giskrova. Only a few blocks up the street, between today’s Antonínská and Smetanova, stands the old Greek villa, as they called it, which was bought for the use of the Organ School in 1907. In time the composer took up residence in a cottage on the grounds. This became his last permanent Brno residence. In those days that section of Giskrova was more rural than urban.

His pastime was taking walks about the city. He especially favored parks, among them the eighteenth-century Lužánky, a long-time Brno favorite, with its pavilions, monuments, and gentle green spaces, only a short walk from the Organ School, and the park of the grim castle Špilberk, a spacious green area surrounding this ancient fortress. To get there we must retrace our steps to return to Freedom Square and cut over to Husova Street, where the hill of Špilberk looms directly before us.

Ascending the hill is a winding serpentine path that seems to go on forever, until at the peak we arrive at the battlements of one of Europe’s most infamous castles — a bastion, prison, house of suffering and death through the centuries. Today the site is perfect for summer Shakespeare festivals, wine cafés and restaurants. The slopes are covered with vineyards and fruit gardens and are richly decorated, and Janáček loved coming here either from his nearby Convent Square apartments or from the Organ School on Giskrova. The Castle was founded by the Iron King of the thirteenth century, Otakar II and for a time served as residence for royalty, until after a few hundred years it inevitably fell into disrepair and gradually assumed its covert function, that of a prison. It was tested after the 1620 defeat of the Estates rebellion by the Catholic forces of the king, when Moravian leaders of the rebellion were interned in its casements. A glance at this fortress from below is enough to convince the visitor that it would be impossible to successfully besiege and impossible to escape. In good time it became the home for civil as well as political prisoners, and in its infamous lower casements moldered the bones of those with lifetime sentences. The Italian patriot Silvio Pellico made Špilberk world-renowned in his book My Prisons. During the Second World War thousands of Czech patriots were housed here, of whom many died. The Nazis conducted a romanticized reconstruction of the facility during their six years in charge. The Castle and grounds are today a museum. We now repair to our hotel, the Continental, on Kounicova a few blocks from the Organ School.

Janáček’s Brno apartments. Close by Špilberk, to the south, is Convent Square, today’s Mendel Square, so named for the abbot whose experiments in genetics made Brno famous. Here we find Eliška’s Church of the Ascension of the Virgin and what remains of the buildings where the boy Leoš learned music theory. His disgust for churches and organized religion notwithstanding, all of his life he lived close by the church where his mentor Pavel Křížkovský had watched over his development in the middle of the nineteenth century.

To the northwest of Convent Square lie Žlutý kopec ‘Yellow Hill’, the Masaryk Quarter, and a dense section of old homes and the villa district, many buildings here dating to the nineteenth century, single-family dwellings alongside impressive multi-residential stone buildings with huge damp cellars, presenting a face of Brno of the past quite different from the shabby Communist-era apartment houses, generally rapidly and poorly built, with thin ceilings and few amenities.

For a time before his wedding in 1881 he was a boarder on Hlinky Street, a long avenue running east to west below Yellow Hill. South of Hlinky lie Pisárky and the Brno Exhibition and Fair Grounds, inaugurated in 1928, nestled in a crescent of the Svratka close to St. Anna’s Hospital. After their wedding Zdenka and Leoš lived on Měšťanská Street, today Křížová, off Mendel Square. When Marie Stejskalová was taken in as housekeeper in 1894, she already knew Janáček by sight from his walks to the nearby Teachers Institute with his colleague František Dlouhý. Brno had horse-drawn trams, called koňky, and a miniature locomotive called Karolinka pulled a passenger train. In 1884 a steam-powered tram ran from the suburb of Královo Pole in the north to Pisárky and the Exhibition Grounds, thence to the Central Cemetery. In 1900 electric trains were introduced.

In 1894 the Janáčeks lived at 11 Klášterní náměstí ‘Convent Square’, today Mendel Square, near the Augustinian monastery. It was a large apartment, but there was no bathroom and for a time, no laundry room. There was a water pipe on the landing of each floor, and a toilet. All water for cooking and washing came from this pipe. Stejskalová would take the water out each day. On the landing near the entrance were the pantry and Olga’s room. She was twelve at the time and quickly formed a friendship with the housekeeper, who lived in the kitchen. The kitchen and Olga’s room were divided from the rest of the apartment. Doors led to the dining room and to the master’s study, with a sitting room beyond. When Olga was little he would work in her room at night, at a little night table. When he worked all night, they shifted the furniture and put a bed, desk and piano into his study. The apartment was heated by tiled ovens, always decorated with a local folk design. The window opened onto the square. The family and the housekeeper would sit together in the dining room, where there stood an easel with a reproduction of Beginning of a Romance, the painting by Jaroslav Věšín depicting the kernel scene of Preissová’s story of the same name, on the theme of which Janáček wrote an unsuccessful one-act opera. Olga’s room had two beds, one for Zdenka. Stejskalová slept in the kitchen, where she and Olga would sit long hours on a coal box and she would comb Olga’s hair.

It was a Czech apartment through and through, with excellent furniture from Zdenka’s parents which she cared for well. The painted floors shone. There were good rugs, richly embroidered curtains. The house belonged to Julie Fantová-Kusá, a wealthy protector of the Vesna society and school for young women, where Olga was trained. It was a big corner house, a two-story structure, with a main entrance from the square. A gallery ran around the first floor, which housed an elementary school. The Janáčeks occupied the second floor. The stone staircase was wide and pretentiously painted to look like marble. Lighting was by gas lamps. The only building with electricity was the Stadttheater, built in 1882 in the place where the grim Soviet-era Janáček Theater now stands, built in the early 1960s. Their building was infested with sewer rats from the runoff of the mill. They were everywhere in Brno. The Janáčeks used to bang on the doors and floors to frighten them away.

The Convent was right across the street, where Janáček originally served as choir director. The Teachers Institute and the Gymnasium, where he also taught, was a short walk down Měšťanská (today’s Křížová) to the Svratka. At the corner of Měšťanská and Ugartova (today’s Václavská), there was a famous pub, U Modrého lva ‘The Blue Lion’, where musical events and dances where held. The Organ School was farther away, on Old Brno Street off Green Market and then later in an apartment on Rudolfská (Česká) and St. James. It was a climb up to Šilingrovo náměstí and beyond, either by Úvoz Street ‘Farm Track Road’ on the west side of Špilberk, if he wanted a more rural walk, or, more directly, along Pekařská ‘Baker Street’. In the park area in front of the Convent there was a carousel and a noisy circus. He especially disliked the fair music blaring from the square, interfering with his composing.

The Convent Square apartment was his home until 1907, when the Association for the Advancement of Church Music bought the so-called Greek villa on Giskrova on two subventions as a permanent site for the Organ School, later Brno Conservatory and now the Janáček Regional Moravian Museum. His cardiologist suggested he find a residence closer to the Organ School — he was now retired from the Institute — where he could avoid the long climb up. He was at that time boycotting the trams because the signs were all in German. For a time he considered a house in Královo Pole or in Černá Pole (in slang, Blek fild, its English translation). At last his proposition to the Association that it build a permanent cottage for the director on the grounds of the Organ School was approved, with the Association agreeing to Janáček’s stipulations: he wanted an area of garden between the house and Giskrova Street, a salon and veranda for Zdenka and a roomy, warm study for himself. A separate room for Stejskalová and a bathroom were also in the plans, as well as electricity. In the end the budget totaled 20 000 crowns. They moved from Convent Square to Giskrova in July, 1910.

The planning and building consumed Zdenka and brought her happiness for a time. Janáček had fourteen box trees planted in the garden, with ferns. Čertík, the black poodle bought for Olga during her final illness, was now a large guard dog. Janáček had not only a desk but his bed in the study. In her bedroom Zdenka had the Mater dolorosa and the last photographic portrait of Olga, from Rafael Studio in 1902. Anežka Uprková, the malérečka ‘folk painter’ who had decorated his Slovácko trunk, was invited to return and renew her work. They filled the house with folk embroideries, of which he had become an amateur expert (Zdenka tells that they had to exchange much of this treasure for provisions during the war). Sunday morning concerts of the Organ School were given in the nearby Lužánky park hall.

Moving was a time for burying bitter memories. He went through stacks of letters and old concert playbills, and directed Stejskalová to burn the one surviving manuscript copy of his still unheralded opera Její pastorkyňa ‘Her Stepdaughter’. Here Olga had suffered and died, here little Vladíček had gamboled in his straw hat, humming music that came into his head, and here he, too, had died, and with the children the Janáčeks’ marital happiness.

After 1918 his memories of the old town got suddenly rosier. In My Town he recalls good days and bad days. It was 1866. From St. Anna’s hospital on Baker Street to the Queen’s Convent was a walk this way and that way. Cholera was rampant, there were a lot of graves and we choristers alongside them. Convent Square was filled with Prussians, like a black horde. And just yesterday our men were there. They fled.

Neighboring the Lužánky park was Hurter’s pond. There was a city cemetery right across Smetanova. The Elizabethan sisters cared for the chronically ill on Stone Street. The Organ School had one of its seats on Old Brno Street 7, in the garden area. The building was razed and at the beginning of the century there was a new apartment house built. Today it is a Smíchov beer hall. So much has changed.

The Organ School was housed in a gloomy dark room like a cellar at 7 Old Brno Street [right off Masaryk Boulevard]. Could a person fall in love with the city of that day? And behold, one day he saw the city transformed. His disgust at the dark Town Hall, his hatred of the hilltop prison of great suffering (the Castle Špilberk), his revulsion at the street and its swarming masses — it all vanished. Over the city reigned the enchanted glow of freedom, the rebirth of October 28, 1918. "I saw myself in it, I belonged to it. And the bang [třesk] of victorious trumpets, the holy calm enveloping Farm Track Road, the Queen’s Convent, the shades of night and the breath of the green mountain and the vision of expansion and the greatness of the city was born in my Sinfonietta out of this transformation. Out of my city Brno!"

REFERENCES

Zamilovaná královna vdova ‘The Widow Queen in Love’, Fišer 2111, 56-69. My story follows his account. On Amarus, see Vogel 1963 (Czech version, my translation), 120, where he quotes from a letter to choirmaster František Linda in 1924. Arriving in Brno by bus. See his feuilleton on Brno, Meine Stadt - Moje město, Prager Presse 4.12.1927; ‘My City’, L.n. 35, č. 648, 24.12.1927, L.d. 2003. 604-607. Here in the flush of the Czechoslovak First Republic his past in Brno seems rosier. On the Old Town Hall, Fišer