Word: ek
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...stunning revival of the Excursions of Mr. Brouček was a hit last summer at West Berlin's Deutsche Oper, as was the Stockholm Royal Opera's The Makropulos Case in Munich last month. The San Francisco Opera gave Jenufa its first professional performance last week on the West Coast. "Pile-driving drama," critics raved. "Music that stabs, jabs, spins, lunges, pecks, soars." This week 185 stations will carry National Educational Television's color production of From the House of the Dead, which is likely to provide an hour-and-a-half of emotional shock...
...ek's music sounds like nobody else's: short, choppy phrases, thorny melodies that blossom abruptly and are suddenly plucked away, trumpets and trombones that whoop with glee, orchestration that seems all top and bottom with a yawning gap in between...
...ek's nine operas seem appropriate to an age of revolt, space travel and biochemical revolution. From the House of the Dead, based on Dostoevsky's novel, broods over the futility of life in a prison camp. Mr. Brouček involves a flight to the moon (although the propulsive liquid is beer rather than rocket fuel) and a 15th century invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Makropulos Case tells of a 300-year-old woman who discovers the secret of eternal life and finds eternity not worth enduring...
Second Youth. Janáček was born in 1854 in Moravia, now part of Czechoslovakia. He studied music in the town of Brno, married there (unhappily), suffered through the early death of his two children, and enjoyed no major success as a composer until he was 60. About that time, he fell in love with Kamila Stössl, 38 years his junior and the wife of an antique dealer. The affair was apparently platonic; nonetheless, it brought the composer an astonishingly productive second youth. From the time of his meeting with Kamila, his music surged with an energy...
...ek was fascinated by the melodic curves of speech. He would eavesdrop on conversations in the street, jotting down musical notations of individual speech patterns. He claimed to have recorded 60 distinct ways in which the word yes could be pronounced. He was also fascinated by bird calls, animal cries, and the whispering of leaves. Conversations between his dogs were carefully transcribed onto music paper. Czech Conductor Karel Ančerl, now music director of the Toronto Symphony, recalls the first time he saw Janáček: "I was returning home from a party with a few friends...