BMKK, whose posts I love, shared Leoš Janáček’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, IV. Adagio, alone with a mysterious epigraph of sorts:
“—The sky is a roof, with windows in it for rain to fall through. People live up there, you see. And if you climb up high enough you can visit them.”—WG
Nearly as much as did Kafka’s, Janáček’s reputation benefited from the intervention of Max Brod, whose relationships with the great Czech figures demonstrates that people who do not understand art can nevertheless love it -consolation for me!- and even help it. Many of Janáček’s difficulties derived from his rejection by Czech musical culture, particularly the Communist devotee of Smetana Zdeněk Nejedlý (never sufficiently punished for his pettiness, viciousness, or conflation of the aesthetic, political, and personal, in my view).
Janáček and his wife Zdenka.
Janáček’s marriage was not a successful one: he fell in love with other women and refused even moderate discretion, provoking his wife to a suicide attempt and an eventual loveless cohabitation as he pursued his affairs and his work.
His music is fascinating and relentlessly inventive; he seems to have been compulsively original, restlessly exploratory, and as such he anticipates many better-known composers of later years. Two of his great popularizers aside from Brod -Sir Charles Mackerras and Milan Kundera, in whose Testaments Betrayed I first read of Janáček- speak of his work as though it approached the prophetic, particularly his interest in psychological realism in operatic melody. Mackerras has said that he was “the first minimalist composer.”
An unrequited object of affection, Kamila Stösslová.
Kundera concludes his brief biographical sketch of Janáček by describing his happier late years, when he was finally afforded international success and no longer required to accept meddlesome and moronic changes to his work. He also finds himself (again) in love with a young woman, Kamila Stösslová. On a trip with her, Kundera says, the 74-year-old plays light-heartedly with her son, catches a cold which develops into pneumonia, and dies in the midst of happiness. I cannot say how much of the anecdote is invented, but it expresses the arc of his life well even if it is apocryphal.
