Why Janacek should be the patron saint of oldsters

Leoš Janáček represents a shining beacon of hope for those of us hurtling towards old age without having achieved quite as much as we hoped to when we started out. (Raise your hand if that doesn’t include you.)

If this obscure provincial music teacher, composer and folk music collector had died at the age of 60, he’d be no more than an asterisk in the history of Czechoslovakian classical music, and none of us would ever have heard of him. Thanks to the works he composed after he’d blown out those three score candles, he’s now recognized as one of the towering giants of 20th Century music.

The year 1926, when the old boy was 71, saw the first joint performance in Prague of two freshly composed pieces, the extraordinary, jagged Glagolitic Mass and the classical work I have listened to more than any other since first hearing it properly twenty years’ ago, the glorious Sinfonietta. 

The work, commissioned by the organizers of the Sokol Gymnastic Festival, is based on some fanfares Janáček composed after hearing a brass band perform. Scored for a large orchestra featuring no less that 25 brass instruments, it was dedicated to the Czechoslovak Armed Forces (the composer was a Slavic nationalist). 

When I first heard the sonorous, stately, haunting opening of the main fanfare, (answered by a wonderfully brassy, modern-sounding swagger of the horns) on the definitive recording by Sir Charles Mackerras and the Vienna Philharmonic, I knew I knew it from somewhere. I had the same reaction with the sprightly, cheery, parping theme with which the penultimate fourth movement opens. It was only years later that I discovered that the opening theme was used (I’m almost embarrassed to say) by Emerson, Lake and Palmer for their 1970 recording, “Knife Edge” (I have a guilty suspicion they also introduced me to Pictures from an Exhibition – oh, the shame of it!). I was convinced the second theme had been used for a 1960s current affairs programme, but it turned out to beCrown Court.

The Sinfonietta is tender, majestic, punchy, delicate and stirringly martial in turn. It is brilliant  (very) late romantic music, and it is bursting with eminently hummable and whistleable melodies– but there’s no vulgarity or kitsch involved, no lazy dependence on overly tried and tested formulae. Janacek’s music cannot be confused with that of any other composer: he is startlingly original throughout, and can be relished with a clear aesthetic conscience. Janacek was working very definitely within the same musical tradition that spawned earlier Czech composers such as Dvorak and Smetana, proving that, by 1926, the tradition was far from exhausted. The fact that he didn’t do what silly old people often do and grasp at the latest musical fads to mask their creative exhaustion by donning the mantle of “hipness” is partly down, I presume to his nationalism – as well as his natural genius. Modernism is eager to show its contempt for tradition – and, by extension, humanity – but the work of artists expressing pride in their nation’s underlying folk traditions, and thereby its people, tends to be suffused with love - for example, the music of Bartok, Kodaly, Vaughan-Williams, Grieg, Mussorgsky and Sibelius. 

Apart from the Sinfonietta and the Glagolotic Mass (an unstated companion piece from the same musical palette), Janacek’s late period produced a hoist of other masterpieces: my favourites amongst them are the opera  Katya Kabanova – the music is heart-meltingly beautiful – and the heavily programmatic Taras Bulba (I particularly love the repeated crescendos from  1’15” or so into the first moment, involving organ, bells and brass).

So where did all this energy come from? Well, after he had become estranged from his wife (over an affair that didn’t last), at the age of 63 he became infatuated with a woman many decades his junior. His passion – mania, even – which lasted until his death 13 years later, went unrequited, but he wasn’t rejected, either. I have no idea if this obsession was the cause of his late-flowering genius, or a result.

In any case, I reckon we soon-to-be oldsters should make Janacek our patron saint.