A Bayreuth at Brno

Czechs lovingly launch a yearlong Janacek revival

Down came the technological slogans in the square of Brno, Czechoslovakia (pop. 365,000). Up went huge posters of an intense-looking, white-haired man who could be a commanding commissar but who, in Brno at least, is more venerated than any socialist leader: Czech Composer Leos Janacek. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of its composer's death and the 125th of his birth, Brno has opened a yearlong Janacek celebration, beginning with 27 musical events in a two-week-long gala festival. Students, soldiers and scores of foreign scholars jammed six concert halls for the performances, including fully staged productions of all nine Janacek operas. Workmen bawled the great man's songs in local bars. Interpreters translated learned musical discourse in three languages (Czech, German and Russian). "If the old man ever scribbled graffiti on walls, we will probably hear that too," said one visitor.

It was an impressive display for a composer whose first memorable work was completed at age 48 and whose musical merit was debated for years. An ardent nationalist and legendary eccentric, Janacek composed music full of short, abrupt but harmonically lovely melodies that built from one another into a driving whole. His symphonic works called for more brass and slashing power than many an orchestra could muster. Because Czech consonant clusters are so prickly, his operas were considered hopeless tongue twisters by singers outside his country. The subjects--time warps, prison-camp life, child murder--left audiences pining for the heraldic posturing more familiar to opera. "Atrocious drama," huffed one New York critic after a 1931 performance of From the House of the Dead, a powerful musical rendering of Dostoevsky's novel.

Today Janacek is ranked among the most original of 20th century composers. His bristly textures seem attuned to the turmoil of modern life; his fascination with the melodic patterns of speech, bird calls and animal cries appeals to contemporary music's interest in sounds. Janacek's chilling opera, The Makropoulos Affair, about a glamorous woman cursed with a 300-year life span, has recently been performed in San Francisco and at the New York City Opera. The Metropolitan Opera and Santa Fe have also staged major Janacek productions.

The residents of Brno promote Janacek's work as hard as they play down his life--a chronicle so scandalous that, after 50 years, Brno still blushes and changes the subject when anyone mentions it. A choir director, conductor and organ teacher, Janacek at age 27 married one of his students, 16-year-old Zdenka Schulz, and lived unhappily ever after. Despite two children, Janacek humiliated his wife with his spectacular philandering. In less amorous moments, he found time to compose three minor operas and The Excursions of Mr. Broucek, a light, satirical tale about a flight to the moon and the Hussite wars of the 15th century. He also wrote one powerful but somber verismo work: Jenufa, the story of a village girl made pregnant by the local womanizer, whose formidable foster mother kills her baby.

Janacek's musical genius did not really bloom until he was 63. Then he fell madly in love with Kamilla Stoesslova, the pretty young wife of an antique dealer. Although the composer always contended that their love was platonic, hundreds of steamy letters, discreetly tucked away in the local Janacek Museum, seem to belie his claim. The affair inspired a unique musical outburst. By the time he died at age 74 (some say while pursuing a woman through a nearby woods), Janacek had written four blazingly original operas, orchestral pieces and chamber music and the immense, superbly spiky Glagolitic Mass, a pantheistic hymn.

Gathered at the Brno festival was a formidable array of 2,860 performers.

Much of the talent was from Czechoslovakia: the Brno State Theater, which originally staged most of Janacek's operas; the Brno State Philharmonic; the Czech Philharmonic; scores of folk singers and choirs. The Czech Philharmonic, one of the grander Old World orchestras, offered a smoothed-out, spruced-up version of the composer's music, while the more regional Brno orchestra left the burr in Janacek's rough edges. Lacking singers of international caliber, the Brno ensemble fared poorly in such star vehicles as The Makropoulos Affair. But Mr. Broucek was a crowd favorite, both because of the sensuous, tuneful music and the lavish production mounted in the 1,400-seat, ultramodern Janacek Theater.

Ironically, the hottest tickets in town were to Janacek's three weak operas (Sarka, The Beginning of a Romance, Fate), collectors' items so rarely performed or recorded that they virtually had to be heard in Brno or not at all.

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