LEOS JANACEK (1853 – 1928)

There are those who say they find Janacek odd. The fact is that to appreciate this particular composer you have to realize that Janacek was a weirdo. He was a right weirdo in his personal life and also a weirdo in his compositional output. Understand that and all falls into place with this most individual of geniuses.

 Janacek hailed from Moravia in the south east of the Czech Republic. For many years he devoted himself to teaching and researching folklore. He was a latecomer to celebrity. Yet little was known of him or his lifestyle for nearly the first fifty years of his life. He was reputed to be a talented pianist and organist. Most of his time was as a provincial music teacher in Brno. It is surprising to find that his teachers had found him too orthodox. His own pupils were later to find him strict and odd. Until 1879 he hardly stepped out of Brno which was his home. No capital cities for him. He did not seek the glittering gas lights of Prague, let alone Vienna. He was to Brno what L S Lowry was to Manchester.

In October 1879 he had studied piano, organ, and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory. Dissatisfied with his teachers and turned down from a studentship with Saint-Saëns in Paris, Janáček moved on after three months to the Vienna Conservatory where he studied composition for three months. Still not satisfied with his teachers he gave up composition classes and further piano study when he was criticised for his piano style and technique. Janáček left the conservatory in June, 1880, disappointed despite a very complimentary personal report. He returned to Brno where in 1881, he married his young pupil Zdenka Schulzová. Back in Brno he established a foundation for musical education, with violin and singing classes, an orchestra and later piano classes. In 1884 with the Provisional Czech Theatre opening in Brno, Janáček founded a journal containing critical reviews, through which he made known his feelings about the works of his contemporaries. His relations with individuals and establishments were never easy, and resulted in resignations in his working sphere as well as a separation from his wife for a couple of years after the birth of their first child, Olga in 1882.

He was torn apart by the death of Olga, in 1903. Her pain and suffering had been the inspiration for for his opera, Jenufa, first performed in Brno in 1904 and dedicated to Olga’s memory. Her death put strains on the marriage. Jenufa did not achieve national recognition until it reached Prague in 1916. Even then it only got its first performance there after the director of the Prague Opera, Karel Kovařovic, insisted on re-orchestrating it himself. Despite this it was acclaimed and brought Janáček recognition at the age of 62. Following the Prague première, he began a relationship with a singer, Gabriela Horváthová, Zdenka took it badly and attempted suicide. This in turn was followed by an informal divorce whereby the couple lived separately in the same house. A formal divorce would have been ignominious. A year later, at the age of 63, he met Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman, 25 years old, 38 years his junior. That did not prevent Janacek proclaiming his feelings, not once but some 730 times in a series of letters written over the next eleven years until his death in 1928. He might have done better spending his time writing programme notes. She is said neither to have encouraged him nor responded! His obsession for her was unrequited and his belief in her feelings for him is thought probably to be imaginary. We have to be thankful that this relationship, that never was, inspired his song cycle “The Diary of One who Disappeared”; she was also the model for Katya in the opera, Katya Kabanova, and this odd one sided communication gave birth to his late string quartet, “Intimate Letters”. Now do you wonder why I call him weird? Little wonder his music is also somewhat eccentric.

At the outset he was an admirer of Dvorak but don’t expect to hear Dvorak mark 2. I would venture to suggest that his influences came more from the Slavic east than the Bohemian west, in particular, Mussorgsky. It is difficult to describe his style. There is no such thing as sonata form. The music is wild, erratic, full of non-sequiturs, jagged interruptions, sweet moments, strange irrelevant outbursts, fanfares for twelve trumpets. Its charm lies in its enigma in that you never know where it is going next. But don’t be misled. Janacek knew exactly what he was doing. As a professor of music he wrote several books on musical theory. His genius is in sounding improvised. My Latin master at school used to say “Livy Can Do It. You Can’t”. Well likewise I can imagine a music student being corrected with , “Janacek Can Do It . You Can’t”. Perhaps you may remember the television programme, “Face the Music” with Joseph Cooper who would play a well known tune dressed up in the style of a famous composer. Well one thing is certain. No-one, but no-one, can impersonate Janacek’s style. Well, perhaps Matthew Taylor can.

Another very important aspect of Janacek’s musical style is said to be the assimilation of the rhythm, pitch, contour and inflections of normal Czech, especially Moravian, speech. (I have yet to meet a Moravian in my wanderings who is ready, willing and able to verify this assertion). One expects this in operatic recitative as with Mussorgsky in Boris Godunov but with Janacek it extends also to his orchestral and chamber music melodic line. In orchestral music the nineteenth century produced the programme symphony and the symphonic poem. The string quartet remained however pure music unaffected by narrative except, so far as I can make out, in the case of Janacek’s two string quartets, the Kreutzer Sonata or Intimate Letters. The Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, is based on a Tolstoy novella of the same name. It is of two people talking to each other on a train and what you get with Janacek is a musical dialogue somehow reflecting the sound of speech. These quartets sound on a first hearing for someone steeped in the orthodox traditional quartet structure a bit odd but in the hands of Janacek it is marvellous stuff, a bit like a Harold Pinter play adapted for String Quartet.

Janacek was to continue teaching until he was seventy. It was only after that that he produced in his last years some of his greatest works, the Sinfonietta (with its twelve trumpets), the Glagolitic Mass (one of the greatest of requiems written by an atheist) and the quartet, Intimate Letters, already mentioned.

He achieved celebrity in Czechoslovakia only in later life. His late flowering coincided with his fame from Jenufa, his one way relationship with Kamila, the independence of Czechoslovakia from Austria in 1918 and his retirement from teaching. His music only began to get known in England in the 1950’s thanks to a young Australian who had studied in Czechoslovakia and who then became an assistant conductor at Sadlers Wells. His name? Charles Mackerras.

BOHUSLAV MARTINU (1890-1959)

 One day in about 1956 I went to the Royal Festival Hall for a Royal Philharmonic Society concert of 20^th century music conducted by Rafael Kubelik. I cannot remember the whole programme but I do remember it contained Hindemith’s Philharmonic Concerto which, like the rest, was disappointingly dull. There was no inkling musically as to whether the various composers came from Serbia or Golders Green. And then came the final work of the concert, the first performance in England of The Frescoes of Piero della Francesa by Martinu. It started with a deep orchestral surge followed by a tapestry of multi-divided strings over a piano obligato, then full wind and percussion. It was spacious and electric and suddenly the concert had come alive. I was hooked and have been ever since.

 Martinu is the last of the five composers in this series by Matthew and differs from the others in a number of ways. First of all, from 1923 onwards he was to live the rest of his life as a Czech émigré in France and in the USA, first by choice, later by circumstance. Thus for much of his output of the twenties and thirties he gets linked with the French school. Secondly, he was a prolific composer with some 400 opus numbers of every type and genre. Here often lies the problem. It has led a number of commentators to describe his output as uneven (as if every work by Beethoven or Shostakovich were a masterpiece). Even more unjustified is a critical habit of labelling Martinu as derivative, a charge that simply overlooks, indeed ignores, the composer’s striking originality. The other adjective frequently encountered from the critics is “eclectic”. The trouble is that one is left wondering whether their programme notes have been reproduced from the same common source. Anyway what I ask you is wrong with being eclectic?

Martinu’s life was as remarkable as his music. He was born in 1890 in Policka in the Bohemian-Moravian highlands, where his father was a cobbler, firewatcher and church bellringer. The family home was a single room at the top of the church tower. Policka had been a mediaeval town but in 1845, following a disastrous fire, it had burnt down and its ancient facades destroyed. Thus it was that the bell ringer was appointed fire watcher. In the small room of the tower of the church of St. Jacob, Bohuslav was born with the sound of church bells ringing joyously all round him.

The young Bohuslav, who was tall, thin, and weakly, often had to be carried by his father up and down the 193-step staircase. He spent the first twelve years of his life looking at his village from this bird’s-eye perspective. The memory of this view of the world was to impress itself upon his mind and remained with him all his life, strongly influencing his ideas of composition. As he was to write later in life, it was “not the small interests of people, the cares, the hurts, or the joys” that he saw from that great height, but “space, which I always have in front of me.”

Bohuslav was surrounded by music as the sound of the organ from the church below penetrated the tower. He was a dab hand with a one string violin and the local tailor, Josef Cernovsky, who was a music teacher on the side, was to realize the boy’s potential with the violin and encouraged him to try composing. The people of Policka believed that they had in their midst another Jan Kubelik (star violinist of his day and father of Rafael). With the backing of sixteen wealthier citizens the town council agreed to finance Bohuslav’s violin studies in Prague. Lewisham and Greenwich councils could learn a thing or two! So at 16 he entered the Prague Conservatoire, taken to Prague by his mother with his violin and an early quartet,the Four Horsemen, written when he was twelve, and as delightful as the young Mozart.

But things did not go as well as were expected of him. He did not see himself pursuing a career as a solo violinist even if he did have the ability. He displayed little interest in the rigid teaching or the hours of practice required and was far more interested in exploring and learning on his own, attending concerts and studying scores. He read books on every subject and composed daily. He imposed on himself a personal discipline for hard work. His interest undoubtedly lay in composition but he was not a member of the composition class. He dropped out of the violin course and moved to the organ department because it taught composition. Unfortunately you don’t go to an organ department without having some interest in the organ and Martinu was finally dismissed in 1910 for “incorrigible negligence”. Martinu, not only then but for a number of years to follow, sought further tuition and guidance, even when his compositions began to receive acclaim. It was as if he knew his talent but lacked that extra degree of self confidence.

In those days Prague was a crossroads of culture. One could hear works by Strauss, Bruckner, Debussy, and even Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartók performed in its concert halls. Martinu’s compositions during this time, largely influenced by the impressionism of Debussy, were beginning to be received with favourable response among many of Prague’s musicians. The outbreak of the first world war was to bring this to an end. Martinu was not fit for service and returned to Policka where he was not exactly flavour of the month. He had become a school teacher and continued composition. He would return to Prague as the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra had become depleted and his close friend, Stanislav Novak, who was the orchestra’s leader, invited him to play as a deputy.

After the war he led the second violins where he learned to master the composition of music for a large orchestra. His Czech Rhapsody for solo, chorus, and orchestra written to celebrate the independence of Czechoslovakia was given a performance by the orchestra in 1919 and was hailed. Martinu had consciously positioned himself within the Czech nationalist tradition of Smetana, Dvořák and Josef Suk (with whom he briefly studied). It at least restored his kudos in Policka. Another great influence in these years was Vaclav Talich, the great conductor of the day with the Czech Philharmonic. His repertoire with the orchestra was varied and modern and from this Martinu was learning his compositional ropes from within the orchestra. Talich was also in a position to introduce Martinu’s output which included notably a Debussyan dreamy, exotic song cycle, Nipponari and a comedy ballet, Who Is the Most Powerful in the World? The answer is a mouse….but I do not have the space to explain.

His Prague period produced unbelievably some 145 works few of which are played today. Yet here lies perhaps the source of Martinu’s individuality. The creative tension between Martinu’s Czechness (the Czech Rhapsody) and the more cosmopolitan influences would continue throughout his life, and provide a key to his wonderfully quirky musical language. However, Martinu’s modern style which included elements of jazz as well as impressionism did not match the more pre-war conservative styles in Prague where he completed his first string quartet, and two ballets, Who is the Most Powerful in the World? and Istar.

After a European orchestral tour, Paris became a magnet for Martinu and the mecca for the new modernism. Having received a small scholarship from the Ministry of Education he left Prague in 1923 and arrived in Paris where he found lodgings. Within days he was ringing the doorbell of the composer, Albert Roussel (1869-1937) , whose individualistic style he respected. There followed every week a series of discussions between them and informal meets

which would continue until Roussel’s death in 1937. Roussel was helpful in influencing Martinu to focus and order his composition, and in particular to concentrate mentally on developing his own style as opposed to instructing him in any specific style. They both of them possessed individual styles of their own but both completely different in character, comme de la craie et du fromage, excusez-moi mon français.

 During his first Paris years, Martinu immersed himself in all the latest avant-garde developments: dadaism, cubism, surrealism and, inevitably, neo-classicism and the music of Stravinsky. Works from his early years in Paris include a surrealist opera, Les Larmes du Couteau (The Tears of the Knife), and a jazzy ballet score, La Revue de Cuisine, which features dancing kitchen utensils. Martinu’s keen humour was also evident in The Revolt (1925), a ballet in which musical notes call a strike, critics commit suicide and Stravinsky takes refuge on a desert island. Ballets were his favourite medium for experimentation, including also The Butterfly That Stamped (1926), Le Raid Merveilleux (1927) as well as La Revue de Cuisine (1927), and Les Larmes du Couteau (1928). Martinu’s use of jazz is natural and he himself claimed that jazz rhythms were similar to those of Moravian folk music. Use of or flirtation with jazz can be found in Kurt Weill, Darius Milhaud, Ravel and Constant Lambert but none, not even Gershwin, came more naturally than Martinu in the 1920’s. La Revue de Cuisine, after a dark opening, contains a tango and a Charleston that are great fun sounding as if Bix Beiderbecke himself had joined the group. Yes, I would have that on a desert island rather than the company of Stravinsky.

At the same time Martinu was continuing to compose chamber music for various combinations including the second string quartet which Matthew will discuss. This starts as a serious troubled work but in the last movement builds momentum which may owe a little to Roussel. His reputation was also spreading with orchestral works such as Half Time – (Martinu was keen on watching football) – and La Bagarre (“The Brawl”).The latter, a symphonic allegro, was the first of his works to be played in the USA and conducted by Koussevitsky who was to commission further works from Martinu over the years, notably the first symphony in 1942. The work depicts the movement of the crowd. Later Martinu would add a postscript to the score “In memory Le Bourget”, an allusion to the landing there by Charles Lindbergh after his solo trans-Atlantic flight – but in fact the work was completed a year before the Spirit of St Louis took off.

In 1926 Martinu visited a marionette theatre in Pigalle where he found himself next to a young lady, Charlotte Quennehen, a French seamstress at a couturiers. They teamed up and lived together for five years and found that two could live in poverty as happily as one. Still, no way could Martinu take Charlotte with him to visit his widowed mother in Policka. Having at the age of 40 first obtained his mother’s consent, he and Charlotte married in 1931. She was the stabilising factor in the relationship although there were difficulties from time to time. For his social life Martinu mixed with the Czech speaking artists and writers in Paris. He would continue to visit Czechoslovakia regularly where his works were being performed . After 1938 he was never able to return there.

 With the 1930’s Martinu began concentrating more on his neo-classicism or perhaps better described as neo-baroque, concentrating extensively on the concerto and particularly also concertante works, the concerto grosso, although only one work is so called. Earlier in his Prague years he had discovered the English madrigal and a number of works concentrate on its influence, particularly instrumental works for two violins or violin and viola. His concerti grossi have something of Bach about them such as the Tre Ricercare. His orchestration has becomes leaner; the music less 19^th century influenced, emotionally restrained but more motoric. The piano begins to form an omnipresent accompaniment from within the orchestra, a prominent feature in Martinu’s orchestral style.

 In 1932 he entered for the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge prize a string sextet which he wrote within a week. Out of 145 entrants he came first putting him more on the international map. He was also able to put the thousand dollar prize money to the purchase of his own Pleyel piano.

 In 1935 he was awarded a Czechoslovak State Prize for The Miracle of Our Lady, a compilation of four operas, based on French and Flemish religious legends around Mariken of Nimegue. What was now emerging as a source for his inspiration were Czech tales and legends derived from his Policka years and his own roots. This would synthesize into his neo-classical style. More famous was his opera, Juliette, or The Key to Dreams, which was first performed at Prague that same year. Based upon a surrealist play by Georges Neveux, it is set in a town where “the thread of memory has been cut” and only one character has any sense of the past. In an enchanting, dreamlike fantasy an ice cream vendor appears with his kiosk selling his wares in the middle of a forest but it all ends up in a Kafkaesque Ministry of Dreams.

 By the late thirties, Martinu was identifying himself with fellow Czechs in France opposed to the growing threat from Germany. The prevailing mood began to reflect in his music particularly the Concerto for Double String Orchestra Piano and Timpani which was written for the conductor Paul Sacher and completed on the very day the Munich treaty was signed. This work reflects not only the gathering storm but also his feelings for Vitzlava Kapralova. She was a talented, young Czech composer-conductor who had arrived in Paris in late 1937 to study with Charles Munch but who also sought to study with Martinu. Their relationship soon developed beyond that of student-teacher, and at one point they planned to move to America together. It had caused a strain in his relations with Charlotte which she capably handled. His relationship with Vitzlava began deteriorating in late 1939.

 With the outbreak of war, young Czechs were joining up. At nearly 50, Martinu was too old for active service, but he produced The Field Mass, a work dedicated to the Czechoslovak Division in France. This was for open air and not church performance and included, in addition to baritone and male chorus, two piccolos, two clarinets, three trumpets and two trombones; harmonium, piano timpani and percussion including sistrum altar bells. A harmonium is a miniature organ used for church parade whilst a piano can usually be pushed out from some nearby bistrot or barracks. The work is a mixture of part of the mass, Bohemian folk poetry, poems by Jiri Mucha (who was soon to marry Vitzlava) and passages from psalms. The combination of war poems and the mass anticipates some of the ideas in Britten’s War Requiem although the scale is demonstrably smaller.

In 1940, with the German army only days away, Martinu had to be persuaded to leave Paris. His vociferous wake up calls had put him on a black list with the Germans. He arranged for storage of his scores and he and Charlotte joined the chaos on the French roads and rail in June 1940. He had planned to go to a friend in Nevers but it had been heavily bombed. He had had a standing invitation to stay with Charles Munch but his house turned out to be overrun with refugees from Alsace and the Martinus took up occupation on a campsite. Then news broke that Vitzlava had died in hospital in Montpellier which struck a new low for Martinu. Eventually they found a place in Aix en Provence and would travel by bus to Marseilles to try to get an exit visa for America from there. However this was dangerous. Technically Czechoslovakia no longer existed and Martinu, whether he liked it or not, had become a citizen of the Third Reich and the Pétain government had agreed to apprehend any German on the blacklist.   During this time Martinu was still producing scores, writing anywhere and everywhere including on buses. There was the Fantasia and Toccata for piano solo written as were his piano concertos for Rudlof Firkusny; a cello sonata and his Sinfonietta giocosa (originally called Sinfonia Gaie for chamber orchestra and piano. One wonders how he could have produced such felicitous music against the background of the deprivation he was undergoing. Because he could not get out from Marseilles Munch procured two tickets for a steamship leaving Lisbon in December. The Martinus were left with having to make their way across Southern France, Spain (still covered in snow) and finally getting to Lisbon to find their ship had left. Eventually they were able to get on a later sailing for New York. Behind them lay Martinu’s ravaged second homeland with Policka now a more distant memory.

Arriving in America in 1941, Martinu had to work hard to establish himself. In common with other émigré composers he would need to cope with lack of knowledge of English and lack of funds. However he did not suffer from lack of friends. Rudolf Firkusny was there to greet him off the boat. Koussivitsky who had commissioned a number of others to write in memory of his wife Natalie was soon to commission a first symphony from Martinu. Of the American years the outstanding legacy would be the six symphonies. The first five were written in successive years from 1942 to 1946. The sixth written in 1952 is set apart from the others.

With the first symphony there is an inevitable comparison with Brahms as he had taken twenty years in writing and putting off his first. However Brahms wanted to write a symphony but was overawed by the task and would constantly feel the shadow of Beethoven in the way. One can feel the inner struggle in his first symphony. Not so with Martinu. The symphony was not a form that he had avoided or postponed but one in which he had had no previous ambition. He had hitherto concentrated upon concertante forms. Now at over 50 he set to in making a start. The first symphony was written in four months, by Martinu standards an incredible long period, and received its first performance in 1942. What emerges is a richer orchestral sound than previously. The various elements previously mentioned have come together including the prominence of the piano, references to Czech themes such as the Wenceslas hymn, used also in his sixth symphony. From his earlier interest in madrigals he introduced a novel form of development of mutating cells, each musical idea developing into the next, curiously but co-incidentally the method of composition employed at the same time by Edmund Rubbra in Britain.

At annual intervals, four more symphonies were to follow. If the first symphony had reflected the troubles and struggles of the last two years the second symphony was to be cast in a lighter pastoral mood , as Brahms also had done. There the comparison ends. The second symphony was dedicated to his fellow Czechs of Cleveland and performed in 1943.

Back in 1942 Rheinhard Heydrich, the Reich Protector of Bohemia and author of the plan for the Final Solution was attacked by Czech and Slovak partisans and died of his wounds. The reprisals were horrendous, the killing of all the males of Lidice whilst most of the women and children were deported to concentration camps. Martinu was overcome with the horror. He and other composers were asked to write a work in commemoration. He originally intended a three movement triptych but only completed the middle section and felt it complete as it was. “In Memoriam, Lidice” is an orchestral work of less than eight minutes which contains the foreboding, the tragedy, the hope, the horror and the expression of pain of the event. It is one of the most harrowing and yet moving works to experience. Its mood undoubtedly spilt over into the third movement of the first symphony but also it can be felt in the third symphony which is cast this time in only three movements. It was written between the 2^nd May and 14 June 1944. It is a work which is in some ways Martinu’s Eroica. He said of it that it contained a tragic tone and was written in a period when he felt home sick. A week before its completion, news broke of the D-Day landings and for a brief moment there is a change of mood, when a distinct gleam of joy, of hope shines through and the rhythm of the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, not fate so much as a V for Victory. However the mood slips back and the symphony ends on a rather ambivalent piano chord – where do we go from here?

 The fourth symphony completed in April 1945 comes with the end of the war in Europe and the liberation of Czechoslovakia. It is powerful and joyous. Back in Prague a search was taking place for someone to take over as principal of the conservatoire from Novak. His advice was to send for Martinu. At last, Martinu was preparing to go home. He indicated his readiness but red tape and events were to dictate a different outcome. In 1946 he would write his fifth symphony and the Toccata e Due Canzoni. The former is the most neo-classical of his symphonies which pitter-patters in seemingly unchanging rhythms but which in fact are constantly developing. It is to Martinu in many ways what Sibelius’s sixth symphony was in that composer’s cycle. The Toccata was commissioned by Paul Sacher for chamber orchestra with an important almost solo piano part. It was whilst writing it that the Martinus partied with friends in Berkshire. Gathered on the high unfenced portico of the house, Martinu stepped back and fell two floors and broke his skull. It resulted in loss of memory and deafness in one ear. It did not stop him from continuing the composition but the mood change is pretty well noticeable. His slow recovery caused him to delay his planned return during which time the communist takeover occurred. Martinu was persona non grata with them, his music not being acceptable as socialist realism and the iron curtain came down for him.

 Thus it was that Martinu was to stay on in the United States, not altogether happy but it had given him a home, recognition and a job. He composed a great deal and taught at the Mannes College of Music from 1948 until his return to Europe in 1953. In 1952 he became a naturalised American citizen which actually enabled him to

take up a position at the American Academy in Rome whilst being able to resettle in Europe. However, taking into account it was now the McCarthy era he would be forbidden to enter any country in the Soviet bloc. He remained as prolific in his output as before. Apart from the symphonies, he continued to write extensively including further concertos for piano, cello and violin, this time round with greater orchestral sonority than during his French neo-classical period.

 His sixth symphony was written in America especially for Charles Munch. It took shape as a free fantasy to include three pianos. However, that fantastic idea was dropped and it became the only one of his symphonies not to include a piano. Like Sibelius’s seventh, it was not conceived as a symphony but a symphonic fantasy. It is full of sharp contrasts, of jagged shapes, buzzing sounds and melodies from previous works including Juliette which gives it a feel of other worldliness. He finished it on returning to France in 1953, not to Paris but to Nice. He was to lecture not only in Rome but also at the Curtis Institute back in the States.

 During these next few years Martinu wrote an almost innumerable number of compositions. His writing now becomes more lustrous, rich textured and has been described as neo-impressionist. This particularly applies to the Frescoes of Piero della Francesa. These mediaeval paintings left a lasting impression on Martinu when he stopped at Arezzo whilst touring Northern Italy in 1954. In similar vein and even more impressionistic are the Parables (1957) and Estampes (1958) written in what can only be described as glorious panoramic sound. These three works could be called his seventh, eighth and ninth symphonies. Despite the onset of cancer nothing could stop Martinu from producing masterpiece after masterpiece in his last year. Amongst these works was a choral work, Gilgamesh, based on an Assyrian historical legend; the opera The Greek Passion, a story of a village passion play, written by Nikos Kazantzakis, better known for Zorba the Greek. He composed right to the end in August 1959 having moved to a house in Switzerland on the estate of Paul Sacher. His last legacy included two of his most felicitous works, the Variations on a Slovak Theme for cello and piano and his delightful nonet.

 Martinu died in Switzerland. Only later did the Czech government lay claim to his genius. His body was to be disinterred and reburied at Policka (where the body of Charlotte Martinu would later join his) in sight of the tower of St Jacob, finally resting where he had started, the circle complete. Behind him he left an unmatched collection of compositions including a cycle of symphonies as great as the best of the twentieth century. He was a loner who never gave up. In his own words

 “The artist is always searching for the meaning of life, his own and that of mankind, searching for truth. A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The pressures of mechanisation and uniformity, to which it is subject, call for protest and the artist has only one means of expressing this, by music.”

This note as all the others in this series was written for the Matthew Taylor Lectures at the Blackheath Music Appreciation Group. Lionel J Lewis ©

HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803 – 1869) – EPISODES IN THE LIFE OF AN ARTIST – 1

To begin at the beginning, Hector Berlioz was born at La Côte-Saint-André in South Eastern France between Lyon and Grenoble in 1803. In his Memoirs, which are a hoot to read, he is modest enough to confess “however painful the admission to my vanity, I came into this world quite normally, unheralded by any of the portents in use in poetic times to announce the arrival of those destined for glory”. His father, Louis-Joseph Berlioz, was a respected local doctor, an atheist and a liberal thinker. His mother was churchgoing. Of himself, Berlioz wrote “Needless to say, I was brought up in the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome. This charming religion (so attractive since it gave up burning people) was for seven whole years the joy of my life and although we have long since fallen out I have kept the most tender memories of it”. These tender memories are there to be found in abundance in his musical output.

 Now, before going further, let us get some chronological bearings on Berlioz. I always find it useful to see where an artist stands generationally. It is in doing this we can begin to see how ahead of his time Berlioz was. For most people who have some little knowledge of the composer he may be perceived alongside other dominant nineteenth century figures like Wagner, Brahms, Dvorak, Liszt and Tchaikovsky. But hold on. 1803 was when Beethoven was writing the Eroica symphony, its original name scratched out when Beethoven learned of Napoleon becoming emperor in 1804. In 1803 Haydn was seventy one with six years still to go. Schubert was just six years old. Berlioz did not discover his innate musical talent till he was twenty. At that time Beethoven was completing his choral symphony. Berlioz’s opus 1, Eight Scenes from Faust, was published the year of Beethoven’s death. His Symphonie Fantastique was completed in 1830, two years after Schubert’s death and the same year as Mendellsohn’s Italian symphony. Wagner and Verdi were ten years younger than Berlioz; Brahms was not born till 1833 and his symphonies did not emerge till the 1870’s. Tchaikovsky and Dvorak were born respectively in 1840 and 1841. When we hear Symphonie Fantastique we are hearing sounds that no-one had dreamed of at the time. More of that anon but, now, one can begin to appreciate that in Berlioz here is a pioneer who ploughed a solitary furrow and, like Beethoven with his last string quartets, it took a half a century to catch up with him. Berlioz was the pioneer. Others followed.

 Berlioz was no child prodigy, unlike some other composers we have encountered; at ten he was sent to the local secondary school where he did not stay for long. His father, busy as he was, withdrew him and undertook his tuition from age 12, including languages, literature, history and geography and basic music. He found daily translation of Latin tedious until the penny dropped for him whilst he was translating Virgil’s Aeneid and, as recounted in his Memoirs, he burst into tears as the story revealed itself to him. It played no further part in his life until resurrected by him in his last years for his great opera, The Trojans. As to music, he never learned to play the piano. As a composer this would be viewed like a blind man playing cricket, not that the present English team are any better. He did however become reasonably proficient at guitar, flageolet, an early form of flute, and drums. His learning of harmony was by textbooks alone which may be why Matthew would like to teach him a lesson or two on the subject if he could. The majority of his early compositions were romances and chamber pieces but get this. Berlioz would not know the sound of an orchestra till he arrived in Paris when he was eighteen. It was only then that he got to hear the orchestra, usually the one in the opera pit. And yet within just a few years he was producing orchestral sounds as no-one had ever heard before, with instruments never before used, and creating an aural experience that would change the direction of symphonic writing.

 His first passion – his word – for someone of the opposite sex took place when he was 12. He describes in his Memoirs how when he visited his grandfather, he met a neighbour called Estelle Dubœuf who was 18. He describes the electric feeling which seized him and what he remembered most was not the colour of her hair or eyes but her pink dancing shoes. It might have been calf love but he wrote a song for Estelle which he stored away in his memory to reappear again as the opening largo at the very beginning of his Symphonie Fantastique, a movement he called “Rêveries-Passions”. Berlioz from the start was an incurable romantic, not only weeping at passages by Virgil, but driven from an early age by testosterone.

 In 1821, he finished his school studies at Grenoble, and went on to Paris to study medicine, clearly intended to follow his father, but a field for which he had developed no interest himself. In the Memoirs he describes his revulsion at a human corpse being dissected and his having to rush out of the building. Many accounts will say that that was the be all and end all of his medical studies and he then switched to composing. Not so. He was yet to discover the world of music. He was an eighteen year old on his own. He stayed with medical and scientific education which lasted on for another year or more and hardened himself as a seasoned medical student. Berlioz himself records that “I was on my way to becoming just another student, destined to add just one more obscure name to the lamentable catalogue of bad doctors, when one evening I went to the Opéra”.

He was to hear “Les Danaides” by Salieri, then Méhul, names barely known to-day. Salieri had in his time given lessons to Beethoven and to Schubert. I am lucky at having heard Beecham conducting a concert of lollipops which included the Overture to La Chasse du Jeune Henri by Méhul. For Berlioz this was a new world. His studies ran in parallel with his evenings at the opera. There he would sit close to the orchestra, absorbing the sounds and range of each instrument; he got to know the players by sight. He had great admiration for La Vestale by Spontini but his greatest love was for Gluck. As the great institutions of the arts were opened up for the free use of students he took advantage by going to the Conservatoire library to study and copy out the parts from Gluck’s Iphigenaia in Tauris. This led to his first encounter with Luigi Cherubini. That very year Cherubini, Italian born but who had spent most of his life in France, became the director of the conservatoire. In his Memoirs Berlioz recounts that Cherubini had introduced a rule to keep male and female students apart by creating separate entrances of which Berlioz was not aware . This led to a scene between the two in the library with Berlioz refusing to give his name and Cherubini chasing him round the table in an attempt to have him thrown out. There are some who say that Berlioz’s depiction has distorted Cherubini’s image with posterity. He certainly portrayed him in his memoirs as a crotchety pedant. Adam, the composer of Giselle, wrote of Cherubini “some maintain his temper was very even – because he was always angry.”

Now Berlioz began writing his first works and in 1824 he decided to abandon his medical studies and devote himself to composition. His parents were devastated and angry and correspondence between them led to his father severely cutting his allowance which in turn led to Berlioz on the bread line. Unable to obtain admission to the conservatoire as he had no certificates to show he managed to obtain private lessons from one of its professors, Jean-François Lesueur, who was composer to the Chapelle Royale and who remained firmly rooted in the eighteenth century writing fugues and counterpoint. He encouraged Berlioz who wrote warmly of him as a true friend “but what hours I wasted learning his antediluvian theories and only having to unlearn them and begin my education again from the beginning”.

In 1824 the choirmaster of St. Roch asked him to compose a mass. His Messe Solennelle was what he called milk and water copy of Lesueur’s methods. He approved the most Lesueur-like passages Berlioz wrote. To save copying charges the score was copied out by choir boys who missed out notes, flats, sharps and bars so that Berlioz had to rewrite all the parts himself. Only a handful of the players attended the rehearsal and it ended as a fiasco. Still Berlioz had heard enough to rewrite it and, with the help of a loan from a friend and the Odéon singers and players giving their services without charge, it received a second performance at St Eustache some months later. Berlioz recorded in his Memoirs that he later burnt the score. There has turned out to be a sensational sequel. The score of the Mass was discovered in an organ loft in Antwerp in 1991and passed to Berlioz experts and then taken up by John Eliot Gardiner and recorded. It is not the raising of the Titanic but a fledgling work, but what is simply amazing is that this was written only a year after his arrival. Moreover it is teeming with ideas of tunes known from later works that been filed away in the My Themes Folder of Berlioz’s mental computer. Thus we find a wisp of the Dance of the Sylphs in the Kyrie; then in the Gratias, almost as if filched before its later birth, the whole of the main theme from the Scène aux Champs of the Symphonie Fantastique. One becomes disorientated when hearing a familiar strain from the overture to Le Carnaval Romain which leaves one writhing to try and identify it out of context. This occurs in the Resurrexit following what are clearly the fanfares from the tuba mirum from the Grande Messe Des Morts but here the embryo of what would be the later giant. The score discovered is the first of the two versions Berlioz wrote, whilst all we have left of the second version is the Resurrexit which itself is an enormous advance on that of the first version. (Berlioz addicts, which you all should finish up being, are recommended to the CD of John Eliot Gardiner).

Meantime, he returned to La Côte St André to try and sort matters out with his estranged father. The reception was icy and Berlioz père threatened to withdraw all subsidy. Even if he were to go along with Berlioz fils giving up medicine, he should choose a proper alternative profession, not music. There followed a stand off without dialogue, a hunger strike and lack of sleep until his father summonsed him and to the surprise of Berlioz conceded that he could return to Paris to study music, for a period only on condition that, should he fail, he would take up another career. His comment to Berlioz was “You know my opinion of second rate poets. Second rate artists are just as bad”. Berlioz’s riposte in his Memoirs was, “My father was unaware that he was more indulgent towards second rate doctors, who are as numerous as bad artists as well as being useless and positively dangerous”. What was even more upsetting for Berlioz was that his mother refused any part in the reconciliation. Her perception was that music meant theatre and theatre and all that went with it was immoral. She cursed him for the shame he had brought on the family.

On returning to Paris, to supplement his allowance he started taking on pupils of his own as well as finding a position in the chorus of a second rate vaudeville theatre, winning the audition as he was able to sing by sight reading. He then started work on an opera, Les Francs Juges. It never saw the lighting of any theatre as the production company had its facilities withdrawn. Still, there is a legacy. First of all, there is the overture, his first orchestral work, which is remarkable for the advance on the St Roch Mass and emerges as full blown Berlioz. It is well known, its memorable second subject taken from one of his juvenile flute quintets. But most daring and amazing is a development section where the bass drum and timpani join in playing with a different number of beats to the bar to the rest of the orchestra. Amongst the instruments is the ophicleide, a military instrument invented in 1818 and first used in a Spontini opera. It replaced the serpent and after a short life was replaced by the tuba which is used today in the modern orchestra. The other legacy of Les Francs Juges was a march lifted out bodily, so to speak to become the Marche au Supplice in the Symphonie Fantastique. Listen to that and compare it with Brahms third symphony, for example, written in 1883 and you will realize the sheer bravura of Berlioz nearly sixty years before. In comparison Brahms is conservative and stuffily comfortable. Wagner would have agreed with me.

In 1826, with help from Lesueur, he gained admission to the Conservatoire to study composition under Le Sueur and Anton Reicha. Reicha was a Bohemian who was born the same year as Beethoven and played alongside him at Bonn in their early years. He moved to Paris and was celebrated for his wind writing including some eighty wind quintets. His pupils also included Gounod and Franck. Berlioz also entered the Prix de Rome Competition but was eliminated in the primary round. Winning this prize would become a target, if not an obsession, every year until he succeeded at his fourth attempt in 1830. His motive was not just academic recognition but winning included a five year pension, very useful income for any struggling composer

So here we are in 1826/7, three years on from his arrival in Paris and a full time student at the Conservatoire, except that he was teaching, singing and had taken up musical journalism which would on and off earn him his keep for many years and make him many enemies. It was during this period that four thunderbolts would occur, two literary and two musical, each of which would leave an indelible impression on him and his music.

First, there was Weber, who was passing through Paris in 1826 on his way to London where he would die of tuberculosis. His opera, Der Freischutz, was to be performed at the Odéon and Berlioz went to each performance which he acclaimed despite the work being ravaged and bad performances. Berlioz desperately tried to meet Weber but always just missed him wherever he went. Weber was the originator of German romanticism and replaced classical gods and monsters with aerial spirits, sylphs, fairies and water nymphs. He was also the originator of German nationalism and thus his music was both influential on both Mendelssohn (Midsummer Nights Dream) and the music of Wagner. What appealed to Berlioz was the element of the fantastic and we were soon to learn of the influence that would have in the symphony Berlioz had in mind.

 Thunderclap No 2, what Berlioz described as “the supreme drama of my life”, was Shakespeare and Miss Hariet Smithson. That year, an English theatre company were playing both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet at the Odéon. Berlioz went to the first and was bowled over by the Irish born lead actress, Harriet Smithson, who played Ophelia.. Although he did not understand English, he was immediately infatuated with her. He could not sleep. He roamed the streets of Paris. In this state he went to see the production of Romeo with her playing Juliet. The contrast between the cold backdrop of Elsinore Castle and the Italianate heat of Verona was too much for him to bear. He was in a state of fever and, prone to violent impulses began flooding her lodgings with love letters and proposals of marriage which both confused and terrified her as well as getting him nowhere. She had to have protection from this madman. This was the beginning but by no means the end of his encounter with Miss Smithson as we shall later see. One London critic welcomed her success in Paris as it kept her away from the London stage. Shakespeare would be a predominant influence on Berlioz’s output which would include, “The Death of Ophelia”, the symphony “Romeo and Juliet”, the opera Beatrice and Benedict and the overture, King Lear.

In December 1827 Berlioz discovered Goethe’s Faust in translation. Its impact on him was again immediate. Its dwelling upon a world of promises and the temptations by the devil linked in many ways with the world of the fantastic of Weber. Berlioz wrote Eight Scenes from Faust (his original Opus 1), no longer played but which became instead later re-developed and integrated into La Damnation de Faust. It is very much the Faustian atmosphere which takes over and pervades the last movement of the Symphonie Fantastique, A Dream of the Witches Sabbath.

Lastly there arrived in Paris the symphonies of Beethoven to be played for the first time in that city at the conservatoire. The shock produced by hearing for the first time the Eroica and then the fifth symphony, twenty years after their composition, cannot be imagined. Until then Haydn was the supreme master of symphony, itself a form considered in France nowhere near as important as the opera. The musical establishment had little time for music from the other side of the Rhine and many kept away. The music itself was not quite authentic Beethoven even but re-orchestrations by a French composer, Fétis, who corrected a number of the mistakes Beethoven had clearly made. Even, despite this adulteration, Berlioz found himself overwhelmed by the Eroica and relates in the Memoirs trying to persuade Lesueur to go with him for the first performance of the fifth symphony. Lesueur was uncertain but Berlioz persuaded him it should be his duty to listen and judge when music of a completely new style and an unprecedented scale was to be performed. The old teacher yielded and was dragged off to hear the fifth. However, he insisted on sitting in a box on a lower floor where he would know no-one, so as to remain unbiased. After the performance Berlioz rushed down to find out the effect the music had had on his master. “Ouf, I am going outside for air. It’s unbelievable, wonderful. It so moved me and disturbed me that when I went to put my hat on I didn’t know where my head was”. By the next day he seemed again to be doubtful but, pressed by Berlioz, he acknowledged he had been moved but he went on to say “All the same, that sort of music should not be written”. Berlioz retorted, “Don’t worry master. There is not much danger that it will”.

To visualize Berlioz at this time, we have in two years a mélange of Weber, Shakespeare, Goethe and Beethoven driving him on in new directions whilst he is developing his skills as a composer, soon to be at work on the Symphonie Fanastique, a symphony that would be themed around the beloved Harriet Smithson. He describes himself in his Memoirs as “ravaged day and night by my Shakespearian love which the discovery of Beethoven’s music only made worse” and “perpetually in a dream, unsociable, unkempt in appearance, unbearable alike to myself or my friends” when in June 1828 he decided to enter for the Prix de Rome for the second time and came second. Berlioz gives an amusing description of the competition which can but be briefly described here. There is no sense of wounded vanity or sour grapes as he went on to win it in 1830. What he describes is pure Laurel and Hardy. The competition starts with entrants having to write a fugue. Then the top six are locked up daily in the Institute between 11 and 6, given a piano and set a scena for a singer and orchestra. This goes on for days until the work is handed in. It is then judged with other members of the institute, artists, sculptors, engravers, but it is played not with an orchestra but in a piano reduction. Berlioz comments that you cannot judge an orchestral work by listening to a piano or understand what instruments it was written for without reading a score. In Berlioz’s case, those who composed at the piano had the advantage of their work reverting to it; not so Berlioz whose orchestration did not readily adapt to the piano. Still he got to know what the judges wanted. Ultimately an enlarged jury of 36, consisting of all the faculties, gave their judgement and only then was the work heard with the orchestral accompaniment. “Thus the prize is awarded by men who are not musicians and who have not had the chance of hearing an adequate performance”

Berlioz then gives us a hilarious diversion devoting a chapter to the revelations of the porter of the Institute, one Pingard, in what is probably a completely fictitious account with Pingard having overheard the shenanigans going on between the judges.

Berlioz: “What have I got? Tell me. First, second or honourable mention or nothing ?”

Pingard: “You’ve got second prize. Look it has really upset me but then, you know, I am not a painter or an architect or an engraver of medals, so of course I know nothing about music…..” In Berlioz’s case, sarcasm can be the best form of wit.

The following year, Berlioz was the hot favourite for the prize. Having come second the year before, it was Buggins turn. But the judges, no doubt on the advice of Cherubini, withheld the award of first prize!. The next year when he did win, the 1830 revolution was breaking out and, in true Berlioz manner , “I dashed off the final pages of my orchestral score to the sound of stray bullets coming over the roofs and pattering on the wall outside my window. On the 29th I had finished, and was free to go out and roam about Paris ’till morning, pistol in hand”.

It was this same year he started and finished the Symphonie Fantastique but, that said, much of it had been written for earlier incarnations. The wonder and novelty and excitement of this work never ceases to amaze. As you know I do not like to tread on Matthew’s toes because he is the one illustrating the music but it is the realisation of what and when which helps one to appreciate even more this work.

First of all we have a five movement symphony instead of the usual four. OK, Beethoven had written five for his pastoral symphony but that was not quite the same thing as structurally the fourth movement there is more an interlude to link the third to the fifth. With Berlioz there are five distinct movements with a valse and a march surrounding a long slow movement. It was a form not used again (as far as I know) until Mahler’s second, the Resurrection, in 1894 or Sibelius’s string quartet, Voces Intimae, in 1906.

Next it is a programme symphony, that is a symphony with a story to tell. There were other early 19^th century composers, mostly disappeared from the scene, who wrote battle symphonies and the like, Beethoven included although not one from his top drawer. With Berlioz it is different. Just as Mendelssohn would write songs without words, Berlioz was almost writing an opera without singers. Subtitled Episode in the Life of An Artist (Berlioz of course) the story is of a composer who has taken opium and in his psychedelic haze recalls his passions, including that of Estelle, before the main theme itself gets underway with what is called the idée fixe, a syncopated theme which appears throughout each movement, representing the Beloved (Hariet Smithson of course). Exhausted the hero turns to religion at the end of a first movement which is written in sonata form notwithstanding its dramatic content. The use of the idée fixe was to be developed later by Wagner as the leitmotif. The programme symphony of Berlioz would become in the hands of Liszt and later of Richard Strauss, the symphonic poem.

The second movement is Un Bal (A Ball) introduced by strings and two expectant sounding harps making that instrument’s first entry into symphonic music. The idée fixe turns into a waltz as he dances, sighting the Beloved, until she is whisked away. In the original orchestration there is a prominent part for cornet, not often heard in modern performances. Interestingly, Tchaikovsky introduced a ballet-like waltz into his fifth symphony which was written in 1888 and thought at the time to be daring. Yet here we have Berlioz doing the same thing almost sixty years earlier.

The third movement is the “Scène Aux Champs” (Scene in the Fields), a long slow movement. The hero has escaped to the country to regain his equilibrium when he perceives the Beloved at a distance. It starts with a cor anglais, a shepherd’s pipe, answered from off stage by a distant oboe. Here Berlioz shows how to fill space with sound. The cor anglais was unusual but had been used long before by Haydn, two of them in fact, in his symphony no. 23, the Philosopher. The main tune which follows is retrieved from the wreckage of the Le Roch Mass. The orchestra then becomes agitated at the sight of the Beloved and we hear the idée fixe. The shepherd’s pipe on cor anglais returns but no answering call from the oboe. Instead there are thunder rolls with four (!) tympanists, quiet rumblings which fade away.

The fourth movement is the March to the Scaffold. Our hero now dreams he has murdered his Beloved and is being marched to the scaffold. Berlioz said he wrote it in one night which may not be surprising because he had copied it straight out of Les Francs Juges with the exception of a reference to the idée fixe, which has been cut and pasted, just before the drop of the guillotine. In the original serpents, ophicleides and trombones between them blow rude raspberries. The sound in the original is more ominous and the tempo slower. There are two sets of tympani outdoing each other, building to the horns and ophicleides, heaving like a French rugby scrum, then the trumpets blast a tune not too distant from La Marseillaise. One last lingering glance up at the Beloved before the blade falls and the tumbrels roll.

Finally, a Dream of the Witches Sabbath. Our hero dreams he is in hell where his Beloved, now grotesque, in the company of witches, dances about him. Strange slithery sounds come from the woods before the Beloved appears, the idée fixe on clarinet sounding distorted and horrible without its syncopations with the witches joining in a diabolical dance. Two themes now interchange. The Gregorian Dies Irae is intoned on the ophicleides (tubas) and other brass and tubular bells ring out at intervals. The Ronde Du Sabbat (Sabbath Round) appears, turns into a fugue which goes straight up non-stop to a climax almost like a rocket out of control until it bursts like a star shell and explodes and spatter in all directions. Both the Ronde du Sabbat and the Dies Irae are played then together but we are not quite finished yet. The violins are directed to turn their bows round on to their wood and play col legno, representing the rattle of bones before one last devilish idée fixe, the distorted clarinet theme now on full orchestra ending in a triumphant tumultuous blaze.

 By now but he had won the Prix de Rome. He did not wish to leave as he had formed a new attachment for Marie Moke to whom he became engaged but the French Academy would not release him.

 In 1821 he had arrived in Paris, an absolute greenhorn. Now he had come out as the top pupil of the Conservatoire, despite the hostility towards him. He had emerged as the most original and individual of composers who was leading France from the shackles of an outdated classicism and opening the floodgates of romantic music. Few might understand. In short, long before Frank Sinatra, he did it his way..