Czech Philharmonic • Josef Špaček

Leoš Janáček’s operas made him world famous, and the genre was always one of the cornerstones of his oeuvre. He finished writing The Makropulos Affair (Věc Makropulos), the penultimate of his nine stage works, in 1925 at 71 years of age, but the music does not at all resemble the work of a tired, old man. To the contrary, Janáček was bursting with energy during the last period of his life. In 1917 while staying at the spa in Luhačovice, he met Kamila Stösslová, a woman nearly 40 years younger than him, and she became his source of inspiration and muse. Their relationship, which lasted until the end of the composer’s life, was full of tender emotion, but those feelings were much more intense on Janáček’s part. Kamila was flattered by the attentions of the famous composer, but she had no special admiration for his music and seemed to be unaware of the profound influence she was having on Janáček. Nonetheless, their friendship was in the background of one of the most fruitful periods of Janáček’s career, and Kamila became the model for several operatic heroines including Elina Makropulos. 

Čapek’s play about an immortal singer utterly captivated Janáček, who had already dealt with the theme of life’s eternal cycle in his previous opera The Cunning Little Vixen (Příhody lišky Bystroušky). After initial hesitation, Karel Čapek finally gave Janáček permission to adapt the play into an opera, and he even gave the composer a free hand to make cuts and other changes to the action. Janáček turned what had originally been a comic play based on dialogues into a drama about immortality, the desire for love, and the search for the meaning of life, at the end of which the chief heroine dies.

Orchestral suites from operas and ballets were an especially popular genre during the 19th century. The suites could serve as promotion for the works from which they were drawn while bringing popular music to the concert stage in a more condensed form. In his operas, Janáček strove to create compact music dramas with inseparable textual and musical elements. Věc Makropulos is his supreme achievement in this respect. The six-minute prelude to Act I is the only purely instrumental passage, and unlike The Cunning Little Vixen or Káťa Kabanová, the opera lacks orchestral interludes entirely. For this reason, putting together a suite from Věc Makropulos requires significant compositional input. Rather than compiling self-contained instrumental numbers, one must artfully combine shorter passages and motifs, merging them into a whole that is musically meaningful despite the loss of the vocal component. The Czech composer Tomáš Ille created the most recent arrangement at the suggestion of the conductor Tomáš Netopil and finished it not long before its premiere in November 2022. 

Many of Bohuslav Martinů’s works came into being because of external stimuli: requests from performers or commissions from conductors, orchestras, or institutions. The Rhapsody-Concerto for viola and orchestra was commissioned by the violinist and violist Jascha Veissi (1898–1983), a native of Odessa. Since 1920, Veissi had been living in the United States, where he got his start with the Cleveland Orchestra before setting out on a solo career; later on, he worked in other American orchestras. Martinů composed the work in a single month in early 1952. It is regarded as the beginning of the composer’s final creative period, in which he left Neoclassicism behind and arrived at his own original synthesis characterised by a simplification of harmonic resources and by heightened expressivity. The combination of free rhapsodic form with a three-movement layout made it possible to write a solo viola part in a manner that matches its characteristic sound and its technical possibilities. The work develops a central four-note motif that serves the composer as a kind of “motto”. In the first movement, individual episodes follow upon each other loosely, the solo part predominates in the second section, then reminiscences of previous material appear in the finale. The premiere took place on 19 February 1953 with the Cleveland Orchestra led by George Szell and with Jascha Veissi, who had commissioned the work, as the soloist. Veissi also gave the work’s European premiere with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. The first violist to perform the work in this country was Hubert Šimáček, who made the first Czech recording in 1973 with the Prague Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Ladislav Slovák. 

Inspiration from folk music is also characteristic of the works of Vítězslav Novák, who spent part of his youth in Jindřichův Hradec, to which he and his family moved from his birthplace Kamenice nad Lipou, and where he also completed his grammar school studies. This was also the time of Novák’s first attempts at composing, consisting mostly of songs and little piano pieces. As a beginner, he became thoroughly familiar with the music of all of the great Romantic-era composers including Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Berlioz, but the greatest influence on him was the music of Johannes Brahms and especially of Antonín Dvořák, under whose tutelage Novák graduated from the Prague Conservatoire in 1893. 

Vítězslav Novák composed in a wide range of genres including many songs and piano pieces, but he also wrote nearly 30 choruses that often react to current social themes. In the field of orchestral music, he devoted himself mainly to smaller forms, symphonic poems, suites, and overtures, but he also wrote two large-scale symphonies combining vocal and instrumental forces. Novák’s compositional style underwent development comparable to that of his contemporary Richard Strauss. He was influenced by Impression, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau, and he also experimented with extended tonality, but he never left tonality entirely behind. Overall, Novák’s music retained the character of Late Romanticism.

Like Strauss, Vítězslav Novák found inspiration in nature. Slovakia’s Tatra Mountains enchanted him, and at the age of 26 he made his first visit to Velké Karlovice in Moravian Wallachia. He quickly fell in love with the distinctive region, which awakened his interest in folklore motifs. This is also reflected in his Moravian-Slovak Suite (1903). Novák conceived the work as a series of scenes illustrating a day of festive celebration in the Moravian countryside. The five-movement cycle is inspired by folk singing. The first movement, In the Church, quotes a Protestant hymn, and in the movement The Country Musicians, the composer takes inspiration from the verbuňk, a “recruiting dance” from Horňácko (a region of Upper Moravian Slovakia). In his Moravian-Slovak Suite, Novák employs a small orchestra including harp and organ. Those two instruments combine with the lyrical sound of the strings and the tenderness of the woodwinds to create the extraordinarily poetic, picturesque atmosphere of what is one of Novák’s most popular compositions.