Ravinia 2019, Issue 5, Week 10

and confidante, wrote effusively of the songs on October 28, 1888: “They are so gloriously alive—rushing, throbbing, stamping along, then settling down to a smooth, gentle flow.” For his part, Brahms remained typically self-deprecat- ing in responding to Elisabeth on November 3: “[I did] not expect to hear you say such nice things about the Zigeunerlieder . I prefer to con- sider it an error of judgment rather than a case of hypocrisy, however, so for the present accept my sincere though hasty thanks.” Two days later, Clara Schumann conveyed her praise: “I feel I must follow up my letter of yesterday with an- other, as I must unburden my heart of the joy your Zigeunerlieder have given me. I am quite delighted with them. How original they are and how full of freshness, charm, and passion!” Brahms arranged his short songs into a loose narrative with both male and female characters. The singer calls on the Gypsy fiddler to strike up the “song of the faithless girl” (no. 1). The lapping waves of the Rima Riva (the Hungarian name for the Rimava River, located in what is now south-central Slovakia) cause him to weep for his lost love (no. 2). His lover is most beautiful when she jokes and laughs. Her lover is most pleasing when he holds her in his arms. Each kisses their lover tenderly (no. 3). The girl remembers when a passionate heart demanded that she give her lover a kiss. She will remain true to him (no. 4). The sun-bronzed lad takes his blue-eyed sweet- heart to a dance (no. 5). Courting a girl is not unlawful, else the world would come to an end. Marry a girl from the city of Kecskemét, located on the Great Hungarian Plain (Alföld), where the most beautiful are found (no. 6). One lover reminds the other of their solemn oath, which, if faithfully preserved, will receive divine bless- ing (no. 7). The evening sky glows red as the girl dreams of her sweetheart (no. 8). LEOŠ JANÁČEK (1854–1928) Zápisník zmizelého , JW V/12 As was his daily routine, Janáček opened the Brno newspaper Lidové noviny (The People’s News) on Sunday, May 14, 1916, to catch up on world news and contemporary arts. The literary insert that day included the first installment of poems entitled Z péra samoukava (From the Pen of a Self-Taught Man); the second portion ap- peared one week later. The identity of this “self- taught man,” who signed simply as “J.D.,” eluded researchers for many decades, until 1997 when Jiří Demel, Jan Mikeska, and Jan Vičar inde- pendently published scholarly articles pinpoint- ing Josef (Ozef) Kalda as the author. Kalda was a railroad official in Prague known for writing tales of the rural countryside in his native Mora- vian Wallachian dialect. Coincidentally, the li- brettist Josef Peška had recommended Kalda’s The Little Heifers: A Wallachian Cemetery to Janáček as a possible operatic or symphonic subject back in 1915. The poem about an inexperienced farm boy who abandons his family for a seductive, dark- eyed Gypsy girl fascinated Janáček enough that he clipped the articles from the newspaper and kept them in his studio. He began drafting a song cycle based on Kalda’s poems during the summer of 1917, after returning from his sum- mer spa retreat at Luhačovice. The inspiration behind the 63-year-old composer’s creative out- pouring came in the person of Kamila Stösslová, the svelte 26-year-old wife of a local army offi- cer, whom Janáček met on the lawn of the wine bar Slovácká búda sometime between July 3 (his birthday) and July 8, when his diary included a musical transcription of her speech patterns. The composer was instantly smitten by the young woman, sending her roses on July 16 with a handwritten note: “You are so lovely in charac- ter and appearance that in your company one’s spirits are lifted; you breathe warm-heartedness, you look on the world with such kindness that one wants to do only good and pleasant things for you in return.” Thus began an 11-year affaire de coeur docu- mented in more than 700 letters containing over 200,000 words. Though they were frequently seen in public together, Stösslová remained at an emotional distance from Janáček, while he obsessed over her in written correspondence. She became the “Moravian muse” who inspired several of his late compositional masterpieces, including the opera Káťa Kabanová (1921) and the String Quartet No. 2 (1928), called “Intimate Letters” by the composer. In 1917, Kamila was the very embodiment of the irresistibly attrac- tive Gypsy named Zefka in Kalda’s poem, and Leoš personified the lovesick young man Janik (or Janíček). Like the imaginary characters, they shared—at least in the imagination of the com- poser—a forbidden yet liberating love. Returning to Brno in August 1917, Janáček sketched 11 of 22 songs before setting the cycle aside to work on more pressing projects. Two additional songs emerged in April 1918, and, after a long hiatus, composition resumed in earnest between January 12 and March 11, 1919. Janáček prematurely announced the song cycle’s completion twice to Stösslová, but, after dat- ing the last page of the autograph manuscript “16 June 1919,” he declared definitively 10 days later that “The ‘Black Gypsy Girl’ is finished. I would like to see her printed.” Instead, he placed the manuscript in a decorated storage chest, where it remained buried for more than a year. Janáček’s student Břetislav Bakala rediscovered the score and convinced the composer’s lawyer, Jaroslav Lecian, who was also a tenor, to give a private performance. More revisions followed. The public premiere took place on April 18, 1921, at a Young Moravian Composers’ Club concert at the Reduta Theater in Brno, a perfor- mance featuring tenor Karel Zavřel, alto Lud- mila Kvapilová-Kudláčková, three female voices (Karla Tichá, Hana Hrdličková, and Marta Do- bruská), and pianist Břetislav Bakala. Adolf Ve- selý, a critic for Lidové noviny —the newspaper that published the original poetry—wrote on May 15, 1921: “Janáček surprises with the purely musical beauty of his melodies, which together with some elements in his other works of recent times would seem to hint at a new phase in the development of his ever-young and changing personality.” One final decision remained: the exact title of the song cycle. Janáček had been inconsistent in early program listings, where the title appeared variously as The Diary of One Missing, The Dia- ry of One Who Disappeared and Went Missing , and The Diary of One Unknown and Missing . Ultimately, he settled on Zápisník zmizelého (The Diary of One Who Disappeared). Janáček delivered the score to the small Brno publisher Oldřick Pazdírek, and with a woodcut cover de- sign by Ferdiš Duša, the piano-vocal score was released in mid-September 1921. In 1928, the Municipal Theater in Plzeň commissioned an orchestration for a staged version of the song cycle; Janáček died before completing the task. In a village in the foothills of eastern Moravia, a decent, hard-working young man named J.D.— the sole hope of his parents—disappeared under Johannes Brahms (1889) Leoš Janáček and Kamila Stösslová RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 5 – AUGUST 11, 2019 92