Leoš Janáček
String Quartet No. 2. Intimate Letters
The Diary of One Who Disappeared
A song cycle for tenor, mezzo-soprano, three female voices and piano
to the Ozef Kalda poem
This evening is devoted to the composer’s belated love for Kamila Stösslová
Janáček was utterly passionate in everything he did. His music stuns you with feverish sincerity. Janáček’s expressionism is “a confrontation of tenderness and rudeness, outrage and peace” (Milan Kundera). Embodying reality in every moment of the vanishing time, he opens up a new world: prose becomes the poetry of life, which puts out new shoots and gives music a fresh, spring water taste.
He first met young Kamila Stösslová in 1915 and loved her dearly until his death in 1928, and this period in his career was incredibly fertile. The passionate finale of his life fathered almost all of his masterpieces: operas (Katya Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen, Makropulos Case, From the House of the Dead), the song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared (1919) and the Intimate Letters quartet (1928). They are the acme of love. The original letters Janáček wrote to his beloved when he was 74 are amazing: “I can’t quench my thirst for kisses. It is like fire burning hotter and hotter inside me.” (It was written in July 1928, just a month before his death). In the quartet these words become the artist’s confession, making pages of his revelations and recitatives of love on the verge of insanity.
Janáček’s unmatched music takes your breath away with its Slavic melancholy and yearning, wonderful Moravian motives and energetic speech. Time is irrepressible and irreversible, which gives birth to a light sadness reminding of life’s autumn and horizontness. The springing play of popevkas is Janáček’s melodic phenomenon: “To me, sounds and intonations of human speech mean the deep truth. They are my windows to one’s soul.” And The Diary of the One Who Disappeared is a poem about the primeval nature of the world and feelings. Janáček’s sound flow renovates the life of one’s soul.
Mikhail Muginstein
The Intimate Diary production is a dialogue with the composer who strongly felt his loneliness and detachment from the world around him: “I perceive myself as one of the unhappiest people, the destiny’s laughing stock” (in his letter to Kamila, while composing the cycle in 1918). It is a fantasia about a person who disappeared, took refuge from the world where people do not communicate and are alienated. They fear love as bondage and affection as dependency. The fear overcomes the natural desire for human tenderness, warmth and caring. My Janiček is completely lonely and locks himself in the world of books and his fantasies about love. In the context of my production he is close to Kundera’s heroine: “For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. <...> They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from life. <...> They differentiated her from others.” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera)
Ekaterina Odegova, stage director