Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  Although I favor a strong presence of thought in the novel, this is not to say that I like the so-called philosophical novel, that subjugation of the novel to a philosophy, that "tale-making" out of moral or political ideas. Authentically novelistic thought (as the novel has known it since Rabelais) is always unsystematic; undisciplined; it is similar to Nietzsche's; it is experimental; it forces rifts in all the idea systems that surround us; it explores (particularly through its characters) all lines of thought by trying to follow each of them to its end. And there is this too about systematic thought: a person who thinks is automatically prompted to systematize; it is his eternal temptation (mine too, even in writing this book): a temptation to describe all the implications of his ideas; to preempt any objections and refute them in advance; thus to barricade his ideas. Now, a person who thinks should not try to persuade others of his belief; that is what

  puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the "man of conviction"; politicians like to call themselves that; but what is a conviction? it is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed, and the "man of conviction" is a man restricted; experimental thought seeks not to persuade but to inspire; to inspire another thought, to set thought moving; that is why a novelist must systematically desys-tematize his thought, kick at the barricade that he himself has erected around his ideas.

  16

  Nietzsche's refusal of systematic thought has another consequence: an immense broadening of theme., the barriers between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world from being seen in its full range, are fallen, and from then on everything human can become the object of a philosopher's thought. That too brings philosophy nearer to the novel: for the first time philosophy is pondering not epistemology, not aesthetics or ethics, the phenomenology of mind or the critique of reason, etc., but everything human.

  In expounding Nietzsche's philosophy, historians or professors do not merely reduce it-that of course- but also distort it by turning it into its opposite, namely into a system. Is there still room in their systematized Nietzsche for his thoughts on women, on the Germans, on Europe, on Bizet, on Goethe, on Victor Hugo-style kitsch, on Aristophanes, on lightness of style, on boredom, on play, on translation, on the spirit

  of obedience, on possession of the other and on all the psychological forms of such possession, on the savants and their mental limitations, on the Schauspieler, actors on history's stage-is there still room for a thousand psychological observations that can be found nowhere else, except perhaps in a few rare novelists?

  As Nietzsche brought philosophy closer to the novel, so Musil brought the novel toward philosophy. This rapprochement doesn't mean that Musil is less a novelist than other novelists. Just as Nietzsche is no less a philosopher than other philosophers.

  Musil's thinking novel too brought about an unprecedented broadening of theme; nothing that can be thought about is henceforth excluded from the art of the novel.

  17

  When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I used to take lessons in musical composition. Not because I was a child prodigy but because of my father's quiet tact. It was during the war, and a friend of his, a Jewish composer, was required to wear the yellow star; people had begun to avoid him. Not knowing how to declare his solidarity, my father thought of asking him just then to give me lessons. They were confiscating Jewish apartments, and the composer kept having to move on to smaller and smaller places, ending up, just before he left for Theresienstadt, in a little flat where many people were camping, crammed, in every room. All along, he had held on to the small piano on which I would play my harmony or counterpoint exercises while strangers went about their business around us.

  Of all this I retain only my admiration for him, and three or four images. Especially this one: seeing me out after a lesson, he stopped by the door and suddenly said to me: "There are many surprisingly weak passages in Beethoven. But it is the weak passages that bring out the strong ones. It's like a lawn-if it weren't there, we couldn't enjoy the beautiful tree growing on it."

  A peculiar idea. That it has stayed in my memory is even more peculiar. Maybe I felt honored at getting to hear a confidential admission from the teacher, a secret, a great trick of the trade that only the initiated are permitted to know.

  Whatever it was, that brief remark from my teacher of the time has haunted me all my life (I've defended it, I've fought it, I've never finished with it); without it, this text could very certainly not have been written.

  But dearer to me than that remark in itself is the image of a man who, a while before his hideous journey, stood thinking aloud, in front of a child, about the problem of composing a work of art.

  PART SEVEN. The Unloved Child of the Family

  I ve referred many times to Leos Janacek's music. It is well known in England and the U.S.A., and in Germany. But in France? In the other Romance-language countries? And which of his works could be known? On February 15, 1992, I go to a large record shop in Paris to see what is available.

  1

  I immediately find Taras Bulba (1918) and the Sinfonietta (1926): the orchestral works of his great period: as the most popular works (the most accessible to the average music lover), they are almost always put together on the same disc.

  The Suite for String Orchestra (1877), the "Idyll" for String Orchestra (1878), and the Lachian Dances (1890). These are pieces from the prehistory of his creative work, whose insignificance astonishes people expecting Janacek's name to mean great music.

  I pause at the terms "prehistory" and "great period": Janacek was born in 1854. That is the whole paradox. This great figure of modern music is older than the last of the great Romantic composers: four years older than Puccini, six years older than Mahler, ten years older than Richard Strauss. For a long time he wrote works that, because of his allergy to the excesses of Romanticism, are notable only for their pronounced traditionalism. Always dissatisfied, he punctuated his life with torn-up scores; only at the turn of the century did he arrive at his own style. In the twenties, his compositions appeared on modern-music concert programs alongside Stravinsky, Bartok, and Hindemith; but he was thirty, forty years older than they. A solitary conservative in his youth, he became an innovator when he was old. But he was still alone. For though he stood with the great modernists, he was different from them. He came to his style without them, his modernism had a different nature, a different genesis, different roots.

  2

  I continue my stroll among the bins at the record shop: with no trouble I find the two String Quartets (1924, 1928): this is Janacek's peak; all his expressionism is concentrated here in total perfection. Five recordings, all excellent. Even so, I regret not finding (I've long been looking for it on compact disc) the most authentic (and still the best) performance of these quartets, that of the Janacek Quartet (the old Supraphon recording [50556], awarded the Prix de l'Academie Charles-Cros and the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik).

  I pause at the term "expressionism":

  Although he never made the connection himself, Janacek is actually the only great composer to whom the term can be applied fully and in its literal sense: for him, everything is expression, and a note has no right to exist except as expression. Thus the total absence in his work of mere "technique": transitions, developments, the mechanics of contrapuntal filler, routine orchestration (on the contrary, a penchant for previously novel ensembles made up of a few solo instruments), etc. The result for the performer is that, every note being expression, every note (not only every motif, but every note of a motif) must have maximal expressive clarity. Another point: German expressionism is characterized by a predilection for excessive states-delirium, madness. What I'm calling expressionism in Janacek has nothing to do with such one-dimensionality: it is an enormously. rich emotional range, a dizzyingly tight, transitionless juxtaposition of tenderness and brutality, fury and peace.

  3

  I find the beautiful Sonata for Violin and Piano
(1921) and the "Fairy Tale" for Violoncello and Piano (1910). The Diary of a Man Who Disappeared, for piano, tenor, alto, and three female voices (1919). And then, the works of his very last years; his creativity explodes; never before had he been so free as he was in his seventies, overflowing with humor and invention; the Glagolitic Mass (1926): like no other: it is more an orgy than a mass; and it is fascinating. From the same time, the Sextet for Winds (1924), the Nursery Rhymes (1927),

  and two works for piano and various instruments that I especially love despite rarely satisfactory performances: the Capriccio (1926) and the Concertino (1925).

  I count five recordings of works for piano solo: the Sonata (1905) and two cycles: "On an Overgrown Path" (1902) and "In the Mists" (1912); these beautiful works are always grouped on one disc that is nearly always (unfortunately) filled out by other, minor pieces from his "prehistory." Incidentally, pianists in particular get Janacek wrong, as to both spirit and structure: they nearly all of them succumb to a pret-tied-up romanticizing: by softening the brutal aspect of this music, by ignoring its forte markings and by throwing themselves into the delirium of a nearly systematic rubato. (Piano music is particularly undefended against rubato. It is actually difficult to arrange for rhythmic inaccuracy with an orchestra. But the pianist is all by himself. His fearsome soul can rampage with no control and no constraint.)

  I pause at the term "romanticize":

  Janacek's expressionism is not an exaggerated extension of Romantic sentimentality. On the contrary, it is one historical option for moving out of Romanticism. An option very different from the one Stravinsky chose: unlike him, Janacek did not reproach the Romantics for having talked about feelings; he reproached them for having falsified them; for having substituted sentimental gesticulation ("a Romantic lie," Rene Girard [1] calls it) for the unmediated truth of the emotions. He has a passion for the passions, but still more for the precision he musters to express them. Stendhal, not Hugo. Which involves breaking away from Romantic music, from its spirit, from its hypertrophied sonorities (Janacek's economy of sound shocked everyone in his time), from its structure.

  4

  I pause at the term "structure":

  – whereas Romantic music sought to impose emotional unity on a given movement, Janacek's musical structure is based on unusually frequent alternations of different, even contradictory, emotional fragments within a single piece, a single movement;

  – corresponding to this emotional diversity is a diversity of tempi and meters, which also alternate unusually often;

  – the coexistence of many contradictory emotions in a very limited space makes for a semantics that is brand new (what astonishes and fascinates is the unexpected juxtaposition of emotions). The coexistence of emotions is horizontal (they follow one another) but also (even more unusual) vertical (they sound simultaneously as a polyphony of emotions). For example: at the same time, we hear a nostalgic melody, beneath it a furious ostinato motif, and above it another melody, which sounds like cries. If the performer doesn't understand that all these lines have equal semantic importance and that therefore none of them should be made into mere accompaniment, into an impressionistic murmur, he is missing the structure characteristic of Janacek's music.

  The permanent coexistence of contradictory emotions gives Janacek's music its dramatic quality; dramatic in the most literal sense of the term: this music does not evoke a narrator telling a tale; rather, it evokes a stage set on which many different characters are simultaneously present, speaking, confronting each other; the seed of this dramatic space is often to be found within a single melodic motif. As in the first measures of the Piano Sonata:

  The forte motif of sixteenth notes in the fourth measure, still part of the melodic theme developed in the preceding measures (it consists of the same intervals), at the same time forms its harsh emotional opposite. Some measures later, we see how much the brutality of this "secessionist" motif contradicts the elegiac melody it comes from:

  In the following measure, the two melodies, the original and the "secessionist," come together; not in an emotional harmony, but in a contradictory polyphony of the emotions, the way yearning tears and rebellion can come together:

  In their desire to lay an emotional uniformity on these measures, all the pianists whose recordings I could find at the record shop neglect the sudden forte Janacek marked in the fourth measure; thus they strip the "secessionist" motif of its brutal character and Janacek's music of all of the inimitable tension that makes it recognizable (if it is properly understood) instantly, from its very first notes.

  5

  The operas: I don't find The Excursions of Mr. Broucek in the record bins and I don't miss it, as I consider this work rather a failure; all the others are here, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras: Destiny (written in 1904, whose versified, catastrophically naive libretto and even its music, coming after Jenufa, represent a distinct regression); then five masterpieces that I admire unreservedly: Katia Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Affair; and Jenufa: Sir Charles Mackerras has the immeasurable merit of hav-

  ing finally (in 1982, after sixty-six years!) rid that opera of the arrangement that was imposed on it in Prague in 1916. Still more brilliant a success, I think, is his revision of the score of From the House of the Dead. Thanks to Mackerras, we became aware (in 1980, after fifty-two years!) how much the adapters' arrangements had weakened this opera. Restored to its original form, wherein it regained all its spare and strange sonority (poles apart from Romantic symphon-ism), From the House of the Dead emerges alongside Berg's Wozzeck as the truest, the greatest opera of our dark century.

  6

  An insoluble practical difficulty: in Janacek's operas, the charm of the vocal parts does not lie only in the beauty of the melodies but lies also in the psychological meaning (always an unexpected meaning) that the melody confers not on a scene as a whole but on each phrase, each word sung. But how to sing it in Berlin or in Paris? In Czech (Mackerras's solution), the listener will hear only meaningless syllables, gain no understanding of the psychological subtleties present at every melodic turn. In translation, then, as was done when these operas started their international career? That too is problematic: the French language, for example, would not tolerate the stress put on the first syllable of Czech words, and in French the intonation would take on an entirely different psychological meaning.

  (There is something poignant if not tragic in the fact that Janacek should have concentrated most of his innovative powers on opera of all things, thus putting himself at the mercy of the most conservative bourgeois audience imaginable. Moreover: his originality lies in an unprecedented revaluation of the sung word, meaning specifically the Czech word, which is incomprehensible in ninety-nine percent of the theaters in the world. It's difficult to imagine a greater self-imposed accumulation of obstacles. His operas are the most beautiful homage ever paid the Czech language. Homage? Yes. Homage in the shape of a sacrifice. He immolated his universal music on the altar of a nearly unknown language.)

  7

  A question: If music is a supranational language, is the semantics of speech intonations also supranational in nature? Or not at all? Or at least to some degree? Problems that fascinated Janacek. So much so that in his last will and testament he bequeathed nearly all his money to the University of Brno to underwrite research in spoken language (its rhythms, its intonations, its semantics). But as we know, people don't give a damn about wills and testaments.

  8

  Sir Charles Mackerras's admirable fidelity to Janacek's work means: grasping and defending what is essential. Aiming for the essential is, indeed, Janacek's artistic ethic; its rule being: only absolutely necessary (seman-

  ticallv necessary) notes have a right to exist; from which follows an extreme spareness in orchestration. By ridding the scores of their imposed additions, Mackerras restored that spareness and thus made clearer the Janacek aesthetic.

  But there is also another, an opposite, kind o
f fidelity that takes the form of a passion to collect everything an author leaves behind him. Since in his lifetime every author has already tried to make public everything essential, the garbage-can scavengers are devotees of the unessential.

  A perfect example of the scavenger spirit shows in the recording of the pieces for piano and violin or cello (ADDA 581136/37). On this two-disc set, minor or worthless pieces (folk music transcriptions, abandoned variants, juvenilia, sketches) take up some fifty minutes-a third of the time-and are scattered among the full-scale compositions. For example, there is six and a half minutes of music written to accompany gymnastic exercises. 0 composers, control yourselves when pretty ladies from a gym come to ask a little favor! Your good turn will outlive you-as a laughingstock!

  9

  I go on looking through the bins. I search in vain for certain beautiful orchestral works of Janacek's mature years ("The Fiddler's Child,"1912; "The Ballad of Blanik," 1920), his cantatas (especially: Amarus, 1898), and some compositions from the time when his style was taking shape, works notable for their moving

  and unparalleled simplicity: Pater Noster (1901), Ave Maria (1904). The most important and serious lack here is his choral works; for in our century there is nothing in this genre to equal the four masterpieces of Janacek's great period: "Marycka Magdonova"(1906), "Schoolmaster Halfar" (1906), "The Seventy Thousand" (1909), "The Wandering Madman" (1922): works of diabolic technical difficulty, they were excellently performed in Czechoslovakia; those recordings must surely exist on old pressings from the Czech firm Supraphon, but for years now these have been impossible to find.