Finding agendas in the Glagolitic Mass through Janáček’s poem in Lidové noviny (27 November 1927)

Image Source: http://www.czechmusic.org/osobnosti.-6.vy_17.en

‘My Mass will be quite different from all the rest…I will show people how to talk to God.’

Leoš Janáček

Setting modest goals was clearly out of the question for Janáček as he wrote the Glagolitic Mass in his final decade. Already enjoying considerable success from his recent operatic works (Kát’a Kabanová (1919-21), The Cunning Little Vixen (1921-3) and The Makropulos Affair (1923-5), Janáček relied upon his international renown when taking the risk of writing a large-scale liturgical composition, a genre that was declining in popularity in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s.

That being said, the Glagolitic Mass was well-received and written about widely. One of the most fascinating pieces of literature, however, is Janáček’s own article in Lidové noviny, a popular daily newspaper published in Prague, which continues to be successful today as one of the Czech Republic’s longest-standing publications. This article, taking the form of a lengthy poem about the Glagolitic Mass, seeks to explain the compositional process, as well as to express the context of its inception. Yet the complex contextual factors contributing to and the agendas shaping the composition of the Mass can be discovered by reading this poem considering alternative evidence to Janacek’s writings alone. Using quotations from the poem, I will explore some of the factors affecting the composition process and its reception.

Below is Wingfield’s (1992) translation of the poem in full and following that my discussion of some of the key points arising from Janáček’s poem.

Why did I compose it?

It pours, the Luhačovice rain pours down. From the window I look up to the glowering Komoň mountain. 

Clouds roll past; the gale-force wind tears them apart, scatters them far and wide.

Exactly like a month ago: there in front of the Hukvaldy school we stood in the rain.

And next to me the high-ranking ecclesiastical dignitary [Archbishop Prečan].

It grows darker and darker. Already I am looking into the black night; flashes of lightning cut through it. 

I switch on the flickering electric light on the high ceiling.

I sketch nothing more than the quiet motive of a desperate frame of the mind to the words ‘Gospodi pomiluj’. [Lord have mercy]

Nothing more than the joyous shout ‘Slava, Slava!’ [Glory].

Nothing more than the heart-rendering anguish in the motive ‘Rozpet že za ny, mŭcen I pogreben jest!’ [and was crucified also for us, he suffered and was buried].

Nothing more than the steadfastness of faith and the swearing of allegiance in the motive Vĕruju!’ [I believe].

And all the fervour and excitement of the expressive ending ‘Amen, Amen!’.

The holy reverence in the motives ‘Svät, svät!’ [Holy], ‘Blagoslovjen’ [Blessed] and ‘Agneče Božij!’ [O Lamb of God].

Without the gloom of medieval monastery cells in its motives, 

without the sound of the usual imitative procedures,

without the sound of Bachian fugal tangles, 

without the sound of Beethovenian pathos, without Haydn’s playfulness;

against the paper barriers of Witt’s reforms - which have estranged us from Křížkovsky.

Tonight the moon in the lofty canopy lights up my small pieces of paper full of notes - 

tomorrow the sun will steal in inquisitively.

At length the warm air streamed in through the open window into my frozen fingers.

Always the scent of the moist Luhačovice woods - that was the incense. 

A cathedral grew before me in the colossal expanse of the hills and the vault of the sky, covered in mist into the distance; its little bells were rung by a flock of sheep.

I hear in the tenor solo some sort of a high priest, 

in the soprano solo a maiden-angel, 

in the chorus our people.

The candles are high fir trees in the wood, lit up by stars; and in the ritual somewhere out there I see a vision of the princely St Wenceslas. 

And the language is that of the missionaries Cyril and Methodius.

1.       Exactly like a month ago: there in front of the Hukvaldy school we stood in the rain.

And next to me the high-ranking ecclesiastical dignitary [Archbishop Prečan].

With the divide between sacred and secular music deepening throughout Europe at the time of this work’s creation, the most important feature of sacred choral music composition had become liturgical functionality. Stemming from Cecilian principles, the Cyrillian movement promoted a return to polyphonic choral music inspired by the sixteenth century. According to Wingfield, these influences took hold in the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia from the early 20^th century, and they are clearly present in the text of the Glagolitic Mass, which, being written in Old Church Slavonic, has clear links to the patriotic research practices of scholars inspired by Cecilian and Cyrillian principles. Janáček had engaged in multiple discussions with Archbishop Prečan about the composer’s dislike of the quasi-renaissance of Czechoslovakian choral church music, in which the Archbishop is rumoured to have challenged the composer to write a grand mass setting (Wingfield 1992).

Yet Janáček’s apparent reverence of ‘the high-ranking ecclesiastical dignitary’ must be considered in the light of the composer’s atheism; the concept of ‘teaching people how to talk to God’, or indeed even writing for liturgical purposes, demonstrates a somewhat artificial relationship between the composer’s choice of genre when composing the Glagolitic Mass and his true opinions of the Church and the higher purpose of sacred music.

2.       I switch on the flickering electric light on the high ceiling.

I sketch nothing more than the quiet motive of a desperate frame of the mind

Throughout his poem, the composer paints a rather romanticised version of his composition process; sitting alone, in the countryside in stormy weather, with little electricity and a pen and paper, one could not possibly infer that he had already written the central melodic content for at least one of the movements twenty years earlier for a group of composition students. Originally titled ‘Latin Mass’, Janáček’s first attempt at writing a Mass setting was for a class in the early 1900s, and much of the music he wrote to instruct his students on how to compose sacred music has been repurposed for the Glagolitic Mass. The composer, upon writing the Glagolitic Mass, destroyed all evidence of the original, the only extant evidence of which can be found in the transcriptions of Vilém Petrželka, who was one of his students at the Brno Organ School in 1908. (Wingfield, 1992). Indeed, so indebted was his compositional process to these original musical ideas that the process of writing the first draft took a mere ten days. The ‘quiet motive’ inspired by the stormy surroundings in 1927 had already been fully formed nearly twenty years earlier, however the composer’s desire to present his inspiration as being linked to nature and the divine is undeniable and consistent throughout the poem; perhaps Janáček sought through this publication to confirm his status as an internationally celebrated composer by removing any discussion of reused material.

3.       Nothing more than the joyous shout ‘Slava, Slava!’

Janáček’s devotion to the religious text is asserted several times during the poem, and this raises some important issues surrounding his treatment of the text. Taking ‘Slava’ (Gloria) as an example, one sees evidence in the musical structure of the careful consideration taken when setting the text. The standard Gloria text is given a bipartite structure, being subdivided into eight, in turn divided into 5 and 3 musical sections in accordance with the lines of the Gloria text, in order to create a musical partition between the glorifying of the Father and the Son in the text. Ethereal harmonics in the violin parts are combined with joyful ‘shouts’ in the soprano line, alternating tonal centres, and regularly changing tempo markings, to create a constantly evolving movement in which variants of the opening motives recur, just as the text repeats with minor changes throughout.

Yet the composer’s many revisions of the text (including changing the Old Church Slavonic’s vowel constructions in some cases for ease of singing) demonstrates that this apparent faithfulness to the liturgical content of the work was accompanied by his aesthetic approach to composition (Culver,2005). This directly opposed the text-first approach to composition found in much sacred music of the time, instead favouring the wide range of sentiments found within the Mass and their potential for musical expressivity, including the ‘fervour and excitement of the expressive ending’, over the importance of the liturgical text and the correct transcription of the language and the performance thereof (Holloway, in Wingfield, 1999). Despite the implied reverence to the liturgical text, Janáček’s preference for using the Glagolitic alphabet (an early Slavic alphabet) was clearly linked to his compositional focus on the expressive, non-religious element of the text (Langston, 2014). This premise is supported by the notes of Petrželka, who quotes the composer as saying ‘Write Latin, think Czech’ when teaching sacred composition, an idea which clearly endured throughout the composer’s life (Wingfield, 1992).

4.     Without the gloom of medieval monastery cells in its motives, 

without the sound of the usual imitative procedures,

without the sound of Bachian fugal tangles, 

without the sound of Beethovenian pathos, without Haydn’s playfulness;

against the paper barriers of Witt’s reforms - which have estranged us from Křížkovsky.

Distancing himself from the traditions of canonic composers such as Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, and demonstrating a clear preference for Czech composer and conductor Pavel Křížkovsky, the composer here seeks to prepare his audience just before the premiere through his publication for the overt musical influences of previous Czech composers rather than those more typically found in the Austro-Germanic classical tradition. Interestingly, Křížkovsky’s compositional output centred upon bringing choral settings of folk songs and sacred vocal music to the concert hall in Czechoslovakia. By referencing Křížkovsky in his poem, Janáček draws clear parallels between his predecessor’s work and his own attempts to bring a sacred Mass inspired by Old Church Slavonic and Cyrillic philosophies to the concert hall in 1927. This reference, whilst demonstrating the aims of the composer’s writing process, also seems to be an attempt to justify the artistic choices of using a less popular genre of music at the time, by bringing publicity and authority to the large-scale form through comparing it to the successful output of a Czechoslovakian composer of the nineteenth century. (Encyclopedia of Brno Online.)

5.       I hear in the tenor solo some sort of a high priest, 

in the soprano solo a maiden-angel, 

in the chorus our people.

The reception of the work was largely appreciative and uncontroversial; hailed by William Ritter as ‘a revelation’ shortly after its premier, and then later in his 1928 article in the Gazette de Lausanne as being unmatched in contemporary composition. Much of this had to do with the composer’s own expression of the work’s nationalistic tendencies, presenting the work in an interview for Literárni svĕt as a celebration of Czechoslovakia’s independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By suggesting that the chorus of the work is intended to embody ‘our people’, Janáček sets up the work to connect with the local audience in Czechoslovakia.

This, whilst also demonstrating one of the reasons for the work’s creation, also creates a conflicting perspective to that set up in the beginning of the poem when the composer discusses admiringly the conversation with the Archbishop; this poem is intended to appeal to all, regardless of religious position, and enables the composer to present himself as not only more tolerant of religion and its music than his strong atheist views might truly have permitted. It is also designed to present Janáček as a socially relevant and politically-driven nationalist composer who was reviving through this work the heritage of past Czechoslovakian composers and refuting the legacy of Austro-Germanic romanticism. The composer’s agendas demonstrate the many ways in which a composer during this post-War period might have to justify unconventional compositional choices, and they also demonstrate the ways in which having the renown enjoyed by Janáček in the final decade of his life meant that making compromises in certain artistic decisions (including modifying the text and therefore rendering it completely impractical for liturgical performance) in order to generate a piece which would appeal to audiences from a range of religious, social and political backgrounds.

Bibliography

Birnbaum, H. (1981). 'Eastern and Western Components in the Earliest Slavic Liturgy.' in Essays in Early Slavic Civilisation. Munich. 

Culver, C. (2005) Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass is useless". https://www.christopherculver.com/languages/janačeks-glagolitic-mass-is-useless.html. Accessed 31/01/18.

Encyclopedia of Brno. Pavel Křížkovsky. Accessed 31/01/18.  http://encyklopedie.brna.cz/home-mmb/?acc=profil_osobnosti&load=207

Langston, K. (2014). Janáček’s Glagolitic mess: Notes on the text of the Glagolitic Mass and pronunciation guide. UGA Dept. of Germanic and Slavic Studies. Accessed 31/01/18.

Steinberg, M. (2008). Choral masterworks: a listener's guide. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press

Wingfield, P. (1992). Janácek, Glagolitic mass (Cambridge music handbooks). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wingfield, P. (eds.) (1999). Janáček Studies.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zemanová, M. (1989). Janáček's Uncollected Essays on Music. London.

Image Source: http://www.czechmusic.org/osobnosti.-6.vy_17.en

Schoenberg’s "Erwartung" and the Structure of Desire

In the summer of 1908, Mathilde Schoenberg left her husband. For the first time, the 34-year-old composer was forced to confront the fact that he had virtually no understanding of what it meant to be a woman: “the soul of my wife was so foreign to me that I could not arrive either at a truthful or a dishonest relation with her”, he wrote; “we never knew each other” (Crawford and Crawford 1993: 78). Mathilde’s affair with the young artist Richard Gerstl was short-lived, and ended in his violent suicide following her return to Schoenberg in October 1908.

            Gerstl’s final self-portraits in particular illustrate an expressionist immediacy of emotion: now aloof and dandyish, now buzz-cut and staring, now laughing maniacally, he presents image after image of himself as a parade of radically different people. The mutability of his style sees conventional figuration “buckle under the pressure of an all-out Expressionist technique” (Ross 2017), and these portraits are concretisations of bodily actions; expression itself, once wet, now dry. As Alex Ross writes,

Gobs of paint stream across the canvas, squeezed from the tube and spread with a fast brush, a palette knife, or the fingers. Faces melt into blurry masks, with splotches for eyes and mouths. Backgrounds are reduced to chaotic abstraction. 

Nude Self-portrait with Palatte, 1908.
www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/2QFAb3wfd-in0Q

Self-portrait in front of Blue Background, 1905.
www.wikiart.org/en/richard-gerstl/self-portrait-in-front-of-blue-background-1905

Self-portrait Laughing, 1907.
www.wikiart.org/en/richard-gerstl/self-portrait-laughing-1908

         

            To state the obvious, music is not painting. As Peter Franklin points out, “while Kandinsky could indeed stand, paint-pots to hand, and attack a canvas in a momentary outburst of expressionistic anguish, no such momentary spasm in the presence of manuscript paper could produce scores such as […] Erwartung” (Franklin 1985: 94). Erwartung is the object of my study here. A one-act monodrama written in 1909 over just a handful of days, it is pre-serial but certainly atonal. For Franklin, Schoenberg’s early expressionist works are necessarily structural; object, aesthetic lessons in Freudian dream interpretation, rather than dreams themselves. To Adorno, they are the "self-conscious model of a case study": art as psychoanalysis, made manifest through collaborative work.

            Wishing to “portray how, in moments of fearful tension, the whole of one’s life seems to flash again before one’s eyes”, Schoenberg does nevertheless lean towards what John and Dorothy Crawford describe as the “expressionist urge towards simultaneity” (1993: 78). His contemporaries concurred: in 1912, Webern would write that “all traditional form is broken with; something new always follows according to the rapid change of expression”, and Adorno characterised Schoenberg's "actual revolutionary moment" (ie. more revolutionary than the emancipation of dissonance) as "the change in function of musical expressions", wherein "passions are no longer simulated, but rather genuine emotions of the unconscious--of shock, of trauma--are registered without disguise through the medium of music". 

            Erwartung is rife with these aural "traumas". Violently sudden in its timbral and textural changes, the closest it comes to motivicism arises from some sparing ostinati (heard, for example, from the harp in bars 9-11 at 0:40 in the video below) and a few flashes of literalistic word-painting (the chirping of crickets on the celesta and tremolo strings in bars 17-19 at 1:20). Itself a psychoanalysis, Erwartung has been described as paradoxically "notoriously unanalysable" in its resistance of the Romantic musical structures of tension and release within forms of repetition (Franklin 1985: 95). Taking the gauntlet, commentators such as Crawford and Crawford have found characteristically Freudian "subconscious" structures such as three-note leitmotifs that relate to recurring symbols in the libretto: "night", "moon", and "blood". In a letter to Busoni, Schoenberg wrote,

I strive for complete liberation from all forms, from all symbols of cohesion and of logic […] no stylised and sterile protracted emotion. People are not like that. It is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time. One has thousands simultaneously [….] And this variegation, this multifariousness, this illogicality which our senses demonstrate, the illogicality presented by their interactions, set forth by some rising rush of blood, by some reaction of the senses or the nerves, this I should like to have in my music (Crawford & Crawford 1993: 80).

The material spontaneity of an object such as a painting, or the lived spontaneity of a feeling in a moment itself, is paradoxically stretched across time. The aim, Schoenberg wrote in Style and Idea, was "to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour" (1984: 105). This is, in many ways, the polar opposite of his approach to his 2011 Die glückliche Hand, in which "a major drama is compressed into about twenty minutes, as if photographed" (Schoenberg 1984: 105). In Erwartung, the blink of an eye is extended into something like a drama.

            This drive not to communicate emotion but the embodied perception (in the “rush of blood”: think, again, of Kandinsky “attacking” a canvas) and, above all, experience is not—according to Crawford and Crawford—incidental to the “foreignness” of  Mathilde’s psyche to Schoenberg. In a last will and testament that "may have been intended as a suicide note", Schoenberg wrote that he had "plunged from one madness into another," that he was “totally broken" (Ross 2017). In fact, Crawford and Crawford suggest that the Gerstl affair was what “aroused [Schoenberg’s] interest in feminine psychology”, and that the libretto  to Erwartung directly relates to her (1993: 78).

            Schoenberg commissioned the libretto from Marie Pappenheim, a recent medical graduate and poet, and part of an entire family of eminent Freudians. She would later go on to co-found the Socialist Society for Sexual Education and Research along with several counselling centres for sex workers--activity that, along with her and Annie Reich's feminist tract on the ethics of abortion, made her the target of police raids in the mounting conservatism of pre-war Vienna. Using stream-of-consciousness and free association techniques, Pappenheim's libretto consists of the shifting monologue of a lone, unnamed woman wandering a forest in search of her dead lover's body. The sexual politics are overt (to which the prominence of the feminine-coded "night", "moon", and "blood" attests); she kisses the corpse's lips in the same breath as implying that she killed him as revenge for infidelity.

            Crawford & Crawford and Franklin all point out the parallels between Erwartung and Richard Strauss's Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909): the "demented shade" of both (or either) heroines "wanders off alone into the dark forest of the unconscious, 'searching'--perhaps for her Tristan, her John the Baptist, whose corpse she had stumbled upon but which she leaves behind at the last without remorse". In reality, though, Erwartung is far more ambiguous. In the dreamscape of the psyche, a body is never just a body, or even necessarily there at all. The corpse may or may not actually be there and the forest may or may not be literal: this music is the massive prolongation and unravelling of the "thousands" of simultaneous feelings, in all of their "multifarious [...] illogicality".

Marie Pappenheim by Arnold Schoenberg, 1909.
https://www.discogs.com/artist/1926734-Marie-Pappenheim#images/7514793

            "Erwartung" translates as "expectation". If Schoenberg is attempting to unravel a multifarious moment of pure feeling for half an hour, presumably this the closest word we have to describing that feeling. What exactly are we supposed to be expecting? There is no revelation. A body is discovered, but we already knew it was there. From her first words, "hier, hinein?" ("shall I go this way?") to her last, "ich suchte..." ("I was searching..."), the Woman is utterly unmoored. As Franklin puts it, "what we searched for was never there at all. There were only the blind forces that prompted the search" (1985: 96). Salome knows what she wants ("bring me the head of John the Baptist!"), and gets it to the throbbing pound of orgasmic (and indeed tonal) release, but Erwartung has no such consummate climax. It "represents no spontaneous eruption from unconscious depths"; it can only be "the frozen illustration of a terrifying idea", and so the "registration of traumatic shock becomes the structural law" of a music "that has nothing to do with the illusory shapes of conflict and resolution, tension and climax" (Franklin 1985: 95; 66-67). The Woman never sings what precisely it is that she is searching for.

            Unfulfilment is inherent to desire; one cannot exist without the other. To put it another way, you can't want what you already have. The crux of Freud's theory of dreams as the simultaneous revelation and cloaking of manifest and latent content relies on this structure. But fulfilment can only take place in time, in the teleology of climax. If Schoenberg and Pappenheim treat Erwartung as an analysis of a moment, then the condition of desire is suspended to the extent that its very object is totally unknown: "ich suchte..." trails off into ellipses, and the music evaporates into a contrary motion chromatic centrifuge. "The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time", writes Adorno, "the technical structural law of music [....] Musical language is polarised according to its extremes: towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill". The "bodily convulsions" of desire, and the absolute stasis of not knowing its object, generate the tension that structures Erwartung: not harmonic or dramatic suspension, but the at once vague and visceral condition of want itself.

George Haggett

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W., and Robert. Hullot-Kentor. Philosophy of New Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Crawford, John C., and Crawford, Dorothy L. Expressionism in Twentieth-century Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Franklin, Peter. The Idea of Music : Schoenberg and Others. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985.

McLary, Laura A. "The Dead Lover's Body and the Woman's Rage: Marie Pappenheim's Erwartung." Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift Für Germanistik 34, no. 3-4 (2001): 257-69.

Ross, Alex. 2017. "The Final, Shocking Self-Portrait Of Richard Gerstl". The New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-final-shocking-self-portrait-of-richard-gerstl

Schoenberg, Arnold, Leonard Stein, Leo Black, and Joseph Auner. Style and Idea : Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. 60th Anniversary ed. London: University of California Press, 2010.