Janáček’s Unique Vision for Káťa Kabanová

Janáček was involved early on with the collection, study, and preservation of the folk music of his native Moravia.  While this was a passion he shared with many other musicians and composers of the time, his individual take on what constituted “folk music” had a somewhat wider vantagepoint.  Throughout his life, Janáček would note down what he referred to as “speech melodies.”  We all modulate our voices when talking.  We speak differently when we are happy or sad, content or angry, energetic or calm.  What fascinated Janáček was the way in which rising and falling speech patterns seemed to contain an expressive subtext.

This explains one of the first things audiences were surprised at in his operas: the characters virtually never sing together. A love duet will not have two people singing simultaneously as we might expect in traditional operas. His vocal melodies remain individual, frequently resembling recitative type phrases.  This allows him to build up a natural conversation between those on stage and gives a realistic feel to dialogues, as when Boris and Kudrjaš are together in Act 1.  Even with monologues he does not change his compositional method, as with the beautiful “aria” Káťa sings in Act 3.  Such vocal writing gives the chance to set off songs as special moments within the overall story and musical texture, as we hear in Act 2 where Kudrjaš sings his song while waiting for Varvara.

Such operatic writing was not without precedent; Mussorgsky and Debussy often worked in a similar vein.  What is striking about Janáček is his way of creating the story musically, underneath the characters.  He grew up in the era in which through-composed operas were replacing those built from a succession of musical numbers.  Wagner had famously managed to solve the idea of long-range form with the notion of the Leitmotiv, a musical signpost of sorts, which allowed him to suggest ideas that color the text being sung.   But Wagner was the last composer Janáček wished to emulate, and this is where the Moravian collector of folk music was richly rewarded.

Janáček heard how the basis of thousands of folk melodies relates to a series of five notes, known as the pentatonic scale. Out of this simplicity of melodic shapes, he fashions phrases that use a wide vocabulary of traditional tonal harmony, modal harmony, and whole tone harmonies, all combined with his understanding of speech melody.  The result is that he can create virtually any kind of musical atmosphere that will suit his purpose.  The melodic and harmonic are responsible for the X and Y axis of musical space, but Janáček’s inventiveness in the area of time is equally brilliant.

His use of a small motif, say the interval of a fourth, can be given a particular rhythm or rhythmic sequence.  An excellent example is right at the start of the opera: the timpani, accompanied by a soft, dark halo of trombones and tuba, quietly plays four repeated F’s followed by four repeated Bb’s.  It is immediately recognizable and specific in its ominous sound.  After its third appearance, this time in a loud, threatening statement, we hear a quick melody in the high woodwinds, and it is only dimly that we perceive, if at all, the direct relationship of the first eight notes of the oboe melody, with its fluttering halo of flute and sleigh bells, as being identical with the timpani melody but more than double the speed.  As if to underline the two senses of time, Janáček brings in the timpani and trombones to play the melody in its slowed down version.  It is perhaps no coincidence that this concept developed not long after Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

I referred earlier to Janáček fashioning the story musically underneath the characters’ singing and this brings us to his remarkable use of the orchestra.  Káťa Kabanová is the last opera where he used traditional staff paper to write out his orchestral score.  He felt a danger in using a page of twenty lines of music staves when what he had in his imagination would only need a few of those. He did not want to be tempted to fill out the empty staves on the page with something, especially if it was not the sound he heard in his mind.  From 1921 onwards, Janáček wrote out the staves he needed onto blank sheets of normal paper. This way of thinking accounts for what might seem to be strange decisions in loud passages where certain instruments that would traditionally take part remain unused.  A great example is the lack of trumpets to conclude the powerful forte statement at the end of Act 2. They can be added, but what he imagined was a sound that was darker; the bright sonority of high brass was not in his inner ear.

His treatment of the orchestra was so advanced that the scores were often “filled out” or “corrected” by others. Jenůfa, performed at Brno in 1904, was refused a performance at the Prague National Theater until it was heavily retouched by Karel Kovařovic in 1916!  The conductor Sir Charles Mackerras was instrumental in helping the original sounds of Janáček’s works be heard.  Here in Rome, we are using the edition that Mackerras published of Káťa Kabanová in which changes from the original, previously made in the interests of practicality, are noted as such.  This allows us to play Janáček’s original version and come as close to what the composer had in mind as possible.  What you will hear is a strikingly modern use of the orchestra, as though it were a large chamber music collective.  Janacek never looks at his notes as something to be orchestrated, rather he feels the dramatic characters on stage are mirrored by individual musical personalities in the pit.  The result is a beautifully large color palette with an almost narrative use for each instrument.

Copyright 2022 David Robertson