Interview with Prof. Miloš Štědroň

After the CD was completed and produced in Studio 1 of Czech Radio Brno, I handed the recording over to Professor Štědroň so he could listen to it. He had known about the project from the very beginning, when Jiří Procházka and I first approached him. He spent several hours with us throughout the entire preparation, and now I was curious to hear what he would say about the final result. And not only that. Parts of his responses were used in the CD booklet. But here you have the full interview from the Besední dům.

Michal Javůrek, Co-author of the project Čierna zem and publisher

Besední dům, Brno, 2009

What comes to your mind when you hear the name Leoš Janáček?

Probably one of the greatest composers of the modern era, and in the Czech context, one of the three greatest composers overall.

Why do you like him? When did he first speak to you, and how?

I have loved Janáček since childhood. Partly because I was raised that way, which is the rational side of it, and emotionally because, as a theatre child, I regularly attended performances. So I have liked him ever since Jenůfa. My first and most powerful experience was Jenůfa, and then came the others.

Is there something fateful in your relationship with him?

There is something fateful… laughs… namely Fate (Osud). Literally. Because I saw the world premiere of Osud with Ulrych and Pokorná when I was, what, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old.

(Note: World premiere on October 25, 1958, Brno, as part of the Janáček Festival marking the 30th anniversary of his death. Conductor: František Jílek. Míla Valková: Jindra Pokorná, soprano. Živný, the composer: Jaroslav Ulrych, tenor.)

Why did Janáček arrange and collect folklore? We know he recorded sounds, folk melodies… Why did he do it? Was he internally compelled, or was it a response to a societal demand?

There was, of course, a societal demand. Throughout the 19th century, an entirely new theory emerged that folklore is the very beginning, the Alpha and Omega of all art. It was claimed that everything originates from the people. This was, naturally, a reaction to the French Revolution, where what was once the lowest and most marginalized suddenly flipped and was elevated to the highest position. That’s how it often goes, isn’t it? It’s like a kind of reverse racism. And, of course, from Herder’s time onward (Note: Johann Gottfried von Herder, August 25, 1744, Mohrungen – December 18, 1803, Weimar, was a German writer, philosopher, pioneer of pre-Romantic aesthetics in Germany, and Protestant preacher. His ideas about nations and national languages had a decisive influence on both German and Czech National Revival.), roughly after 1800, folklore became highly valued. It was sought after, initially collected in a romantic manner and later in a more scientific way. Janáček came into this second era, the more scientific approach.

So, there was a societal demand. This meant that in the Czech environment, and in Moravia as well, no one could say, “I don’t like folk songs.” Everyone had to at least pretend to have some connection to folklore. For Janáček, this connection was genuine, as he truly had a relationship with it.

These people are usually divided into two types: those from the locality and those from the city. I, for example, am from the city, so I had to acquire everything rationally—study it, learn it. I didn’t have it in my blood. Janáček, on the other hand, likely had it in his blood. But then he forgot about it for a long time. At some point, the idea emerged that he truly lived for folklore, and so Bartoš (Note: František Bartoš, March 16, 1837, Zlín – June 11, 1906, Zlín, was a teacher, linguist, ethnographer, and a significant figure in Moravian education and culture in the second half of the 19th century, as well as an organizer of scientific and national life in Moravia.) chose him as a folklorist when Janáček was approaching his thirties. But he threw himself into it with a fervor unmatched by any of his contemporaries.

He approached his work holistically. This meant, of course, scientifically, which was appropriate because he wanted to be a scientist, and Brno lacked a university or other scientific institutions. He constantly sought a scientific perspective and even presented himself in a highly formalistic manner. In his youth, he always acted older than he was. Janáček didn’t go through the kind of romanticism typical of young people; instead, he came across as a “young-old” man, as they say.

But with science, it’s hard to say what came first—whether it was a deliberate decision or something that developed gradually over three or four years. He studied folklore holistically, meaning constantly. Not for half an hour, an hour, or three hours a day, but all the time, directly in the localities. As a result, he realized that it encompassed all aspects—not just the idealized ones but also the negative ones.

He also studied the people themselves and was interested in the social and sociological dimensions of folklore, which few others cared about. For example, Dvořák and Smetana were not interested in this at all. They idealized the people. Dvořák had had enough of it because he played in a folk or semi-folk band and knew that making a living from it was no easy task. So, he certainly had no desire to revisit that.

Smetana never came into contact with folk life; he observed it from a distance as a patrician, as someone who was well-off and relatively privileged.

What’s surprising about Janáček is that, after his thirties, he suddenly developed a thoroughly scientific approach. This held him for nearly a decade. During that time, Janáček completely forgot that he was a composer himself and composed only from folklore. That’s probably the decisive factor. He reached nearly fifty in this way and suddenly realized he had been sheltered, emerging as a young, modern composer. Meanwhile, all his contemporaries, twenty years younger—like Novák or Suk—were reaching fifty, feeling old, frustrated, and angry about being underappreciated. Suk less so, but Novák certainly. They faced crises, burnout, a late midlife crisis. And Janáček was radiant. There are two Janáčeks. That’s my old, well-known theory. But it’s not really mine—anyone who observes Janáček a bit comes to this conclusion.

Back to the recording of folklore.

Janáček recorded in the localities, and of course, he did so in various ways. He notated instrumental music, vocal music, musicians, and even sounds. But that’s another matter. From 1897, he worked on speech melodies. That’s a very interesting field, about which we now know quite a lot. We have a database of speech melodies, with several thousand collected. Milan Kundera said they are rituals of everyday life, which is a beautiful idea but slightly diminishes the scientific significance of Janáček’s research. Science, after all, operates daily, aiming to discover something, while everyday life consists of rituals—brushing our teeth, praying, or bowing to something. If that’s the case, the cognitive value of this process might have been different than we thought. But let’s not dwell on that; it’s a separate issue.

I would say that Janáček tried to find a middle ground between what he recorded scientifically and his artistic activities. That’s very characteristic. He constantly strove to bring folklore to the concert stage, but he was aware of how difficult it was, and the results were often compromises. For example, one such compromise is Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs (Note: Moravská lidová poezie v písních, an arrangement of folk songs for voice and piano, 1892–1901). It’s a large cycle that should be sung by a singer who, when they open their mouth, startles everyone because we hear opera. We know folk songs sung like this… “That bench of OURS!!!” with that affectation. It’s very hard to find a solution. That’s why I greatly appreciated Bittová’s approach (Note: L. Janáček, Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs, Iva Bittová, Škampa Quartet, SUPRAPHON 2004, SU 3794–2 231). She changed it so much that some might say it’s not Janáček anymore, that it’s Godár (Note: Vlado Godár rearranged the piano part for string quartet.), and that only the idea is Janáček’s. An arranger stepped in, but today we live in a time when arrangers have a significant voice.

On the other hand, there were things Janáček did exceptionally well. I’m not saying Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs wasn’t successful, but it’s hard to grasp as a cycle. I can’t imagine it being performed in concert from A to Z. It could be—Bittová did it—but it’s quite challenging to make it contrastive and give it a developmental arc. Because it’s essentially a collection. He worked on it for years and probably didn’t compose it as a cycle. He likely just gathered it all and published it. He published it as a cycle but didn’t expect it to be performed from start to finish.

We faced the same problem with our recording. In the end, we decided to mix the songs from the individual cycles featured on the album and arrange them in a sequence that we felt formed a logical structure. For example, performing the entire cycle Folk Nocturnes as a whole is also quite challenging – the melodies are very similar…

I agree.

We came to the conclusion that the cycle was assembled for publication purposes, not for performance.

You're absolutely right — it's very difficult to interpret. Take the Nocturnes, for example. There's always a lead singer and a chorus: “Ej bude zima, bude mráz…” — and then come those parallel thirds. It's also a stylized form. This is, of course, not pure folklore, because these songs are essentially a cappella, sung by girls, and there’s no piano or cimbalom involved. It’s basically shouted into open space. Note: Folk Nocturnes – Evening Songs of the Slovak People from Rovné, 1906.

We said that Janáček was documenting folk music and trying to bring it onto the concert stage. At that time, however, it was considered proper in bourgeois households to own a piano and to play it as well. Did Janáček have the ambition to bring folk music into these bourgeois homes too?

They were definitely compromises — various kinds. For example, Janáček tried to bring a folk band into the Besední dům (Note: a Neo-Renaissance building from 1871–73, designed by Theophil Hansen. Politically significant in the life of Brno's Czech community as a counterbalance to German influence in the past. Today, it houses the Brno Philharmonic) — to make it feel authentic.

From the time he began working with folk musicians in the mid-1890s, the conditions were there to actually hear that authentic sound. People were recreating all kinds of East Moravian cottages, Prague audiences were suddenly seeing what traditional costumes looked like, and sometimes even tasting regional foods — and Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs is itself a kind of compromise.

Well, wouldn’t it have been simpler to just take the folk band and let them play it the way they were used to? Why did Janáček feel the need to rearrange it?

Yes, of course he tried — but it was difficult to get such a folk band onto a concert stage. He attempted it several times. Once, the band even ran away from him. He chased them all the way to the train station. They escaped from the Besední dům — right here, where we’re sitting now — I don’t know how exactly, but probably through a bathroom window, and they fled.

And still, he kept trying again and again, because he believed he could make it work.

So he saw it as his mission to bring the folk song from the countryside to everyone – to the grand concert stages.

It really raises the question of what was actually happening. His artistry kept growing after 1900 — and yet, surprisingly, he never abandoned folklore. He held on to the tools and insights he had gained from it. Still, one wonders: did it perhaps start to fade into the background a bit? We don’t know. It seems not — because until the end of his life, he still considered himself a folklorist.

Even later, he collaborated with Váša on the Love Songs, and so on. He remained deeply involved with folklore — even from a kind of managerial or organizational perspective. He was continuously active in the Committee for Folk Song, which was a very important institution, though few people know that this is where he had already come to know Hostinský and Nejedlý — long before they became prominent public figures.

Today, there’s a tendency to demonize Nejedlý — as if he were some absolute villain who destroyed Czech culture, which is, of course, far from the truth. He simply had a different perspective — on Dvořák, for instance — and he kept a close eye on Janáček. He criticized him a lot, but he was also one of the few people who wrote the most about him. He wrote a larger section on Janáček than anyone else had written before 1914.

On the other hand, Janáček’s role in the Committee is interesting in another way: Czechs and Moravians sent their top experts. There were university professors like Hostinský, Nejedlý, and Janáček himself. Meanwhile, the Austrians didn’t take it seriously — they sent completely average or below-average teachers from Lower Austria. Our side had the upper hand — they knew exactly what they wanted.

The Austrian government underestimated it — they didn’t realize it would gain such cultural and political significance. And that significance lasts to this day.

Abroad, everyone knows Janáček’s operas. But are his folk song arrangements performed as well? Can they appeal to foreign audiences?

There are so many Janáček enthusiasts and scholars around the world — it’s like a fan club. These are the kinds of people — you know how it goes — when someone starts collecting something, they want everything. First, they get to know the basics, then they go to the original sources, and then even deeper. It’s like studying the Bible: eventually you end up with Latin, then Greek, and finally Hebrew and Aramaic — because you realize you need to understand how the original words were spoken, and what they might have truly meant.

Janáček is an immense asset. Abroad, he has a large following — far larger than here in the Czech Republic. Here, he’s not a prophet in his own land. And there’s probably nothing that can be done about that.

Not long ago, I was at some meeting, and someone was lamenting loudly about how Brno should become “Janáček’s city” and how he should be properly honored. But that’s a matter of mentality — it won’t shift overnight. You can’t command people to care. Czechs are just like that. People say they’re tolerant. I think it’s a mix of tolerance and a kind of general indifference. No one rushes into anything, and no one gets too involved.

Let me give you an example.

I was recently in Palestrina — the birthplace of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. We saw an elderly woman who looked like she might be living on the edge, and we weren’t even sure we should ask her for directions. But she knew absolutely everything. Everyone did. Anyone you asked, their eyes would light up and they’d say: “Sì, sì! Nostro maestro Pierluigi — casa è là!” and point immediately: “Casa natale.” Each of them was proud of Palestrina. There’s a magnificent Baroque monument in the town square… That’s something that lives in a nation’s spirit. The Germans can be proud like that too.

Sometimes it leads to truly bizarre situations. I had a doctoral student — a Japanese woman — very bright, she’s working somewhere in Japan now. Her name was Hisako Naito. Once we got to know each other better, I asked her, “What’s your favorite Janáček piece?” And she said, “Kralovnicky! Kralovnicky! Very beautiful!”

And honestly, I couldn’t understand why. I wouldn’t travel all the way from Tokyo or Hiroshima to the Czech Republic for Královničky. To me, that seems like a kind of ritual captured somewhere near the village of Troubsko outside Brno — it is what it is. They’re children’s games. Musically, let’s be honest, there’s not that much to it. We’re not going to hire the Czech Philharmonic or top-tier artists to perform it. It’s more for a folk ensemble or a local performance piece. Even if we stood on our heads, we wouldn’t conjure up any magic from it. There are two nice little songs in there — and that’s about it.

If we leave aside the prominent international circle of Janáček enthusiasts – can a folk arrangement still find its way to the average listener?

Moravian song is incredibly interesting — and Slovak as well. That’s not to say that Czech folk music is worse. But it’s in a different phase. You can feel the difference of historical time in it.

Czech music — and this has been rightly stated, and probably won’t change — is menuet-like. It’s essentially 18th-century. It’s classical. You can clearly see it in Dvořák. When he writes “folk” in Rusalka, he eventually slips into pastorella style. The Gamekeeper and the Kitchen Boy are two simpletons — they behave like fools. After four bars, it’s all very straightforward. Meanwhile, the Prince is Wagnerian — that magnificent “Vidino divná, přesladká…” — so that’s a completely different world.

Moravian folk music, as Hostinský and many others after him noted, is a vocal type. It relies less on instruments — or rather, the instruments play a different role than in Czech music.

Czech folk music is different. It’s much more instrumentally based. The melodies are instrumental in nature, built on thirds — which is harder to sing. Singing classical music isn’t easy at all. Singing in triadic harmony is difficult because any wrong note is immediately exposed. Just try singing an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni — “pa pa pa pí ra pa…” — and delivering it at a tempo of 160. That’s no joke.

Moravian song, on the other hand, is directed into open space.

The most important question for me when it comes to Janáček is this: To what extent can folklore be stripped away — at least visually?

Musically, it cannot. The song always remains, it has to be present in a wide arc. In Jenůfa, no one can deny it. The verbunk is there.

For instance, David Pountney directed Jenůfa in Brno and Vienna recently — and he did it with only two folk musicians. Some people were outraged, saying it was a total rejection of folklore. I didn’t see it that way. The real question is: how far can one go?

Jenůfa is a verismo opera. So let’s ask: What is verismo?

Verismo is about zooming in on the detail over the whole. Instead of universalism — it’s regionalism. This specific, unrepeatable place. This dialect, this costume, this mill. There are studies — Němcová wrote a good one — that identify, almost precisely, which mill it is. There are two possible ones, three kilometers apart. So Jenůfa is Horňácko in the most literal sense.

It’s not just a Moravian opera — it’s also a Slovak opera. That’s why Gabriela Beňačková was such an outstanding Jenůfa — because she felt it. And in Act III, Laca says that the bouquet he brings is from Belovec, from a gardener — that’s just three kilometers over the hill. He went into Hungary to have it professionally tied, because it was for a wedding.

I think it’s true that people will treat folklore differently. In the Czech Republic, it’s mostly done with reverence — no one really dares to “break it open.” I once saw a klezmer-style production of Jenůfa at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera — which originally began as a theater for refugees, based at a countryside manor, and later became a world-renowned institution.

It was something totally different from what we’re used to. The props were wooden, and in Act III, when the child is discovered, the people smashed everything — shards of pottery everywhere, broken furniture, it looked truly convincing. The actors wore only black and white, no beautiful costumes or traditional folk dress.

And yet — the music was so powerful that it held everything together. Still, I have to admit — I personally can’t imagine Act I without the traditional costumes.

We're still talking about Jenůfa, which is very well known and contains many folk-inspired elements. Could it serve as a key and an introduction for listeners to explore Janáček’s other works – such as his cycles of arranged folk songs?

Definitely. A listener probably won’t start with Five Moravian Folk Songs. The journey will most likely begin with Jenůfa.

Let me return to our recording. Do you remember your first impression when you heard it?

Well, I really liked it. I said that right away.

First of all, the inventiveness of the arrangements is obvious, because sound always matters.

And in this case, the sound is refined, yet I didn’t sense that kind of deliberate intention — that effortful “trying.” There are arrangers who are masters and can create absolutely anything. But here, I had the feeling that it was truly closely connected to Janáček. And I think that’s very important.

You even said that you believed Janáček would have liked it — that this is how he would have wanted it. That the recording is human, pleasant, down-to-earth, not pompous…

Well, these things will probably keep evolving. And you are absolutely right.

Right now, I’m speaking as if I were two people in one.

One is the person who publishes Janáček’s work critically. That means, the moment I look at his manuscript, I have to decipher it with absolute precision. And if I can’t fully decipher something, I need to annotate it, explain what I think it might be, and offer a solution.

The other person evaluates what these things actually mean — whether they were conditioned by their time, and whether they can be moved forward. And I think they can. Experiments prove that. Bittová proved it, and so have you… You’ve simply joined that line. But of course, the whole circle is still Janáček’s. It was Janáček who brought these songs to light, who drew attention to them, who collected them — he was the one who essentially predestined the locality.

In the recording, we used a harmonium. And the piano part — which Janáček originally used to notate what he had heard from the cimbalom — we gave back to the cimbalom in performance. Could that be seen by listeners as inappropriate? As an attempt to “improve” Janáček?

No, I don’t think so. After all, it’s all very closely connected. Janáček liked the cimbalom — he appreciated its repeated tones, which are hard to play on the piano but come out beautifully on the cimbalom, since they’re played with both hands. On a Viennese piano mechanism, that kind of repetition is very difficult. Janáček knew this very well, and in connection with Chodníček, he used about five cimbalom techniques that he essentially translated quite effectively to the piano.

I wouldn't overemphasize the question of substituting one instrument for another. We shouldn’t become overly rigid, like the kind of dogmatic purists you sometimes find in the historical performance movement.

Janáček and the piano, Janáček and the harmonium… After all, he didn’t hesitate to rewrite some parts of Chodníček for harmonium, which is quite a different instrument in terms of technique — you can't really play fast passages on it.

One more note about the cimbalom: there’s a big difference between the large, factory-made Hungarian cimbalom and the smaller, more traditional one that Janáček also studied. He visited the cimbalom players, described them, drew the instruments…

…those were the small ones that were worn around the neck, right?…

Yes, exactly — the břocháč. The cimbalom is a mysterious instrument. It wasn’t present here for a long time; it became popular with the rise of the Neo-Hungarian style. It came from what is now Hungary — it had never really been part of Horňácko traditions. It only arrived in the 1870s and 1880s.

We’ve already touched on the topic of the next question once before. Most of the songs in the cycles featured on our recording are ballads. Their texts resemble Kytice by K. J. Erben — full of sorrow, sometimes even horror. Why did Janáček choose precisely these sad, sometimes terrifying, even grotesque stories from folk tradition? Was he particularly drawn to this kind of material? Did his own life somehow lead him in this direction? Or was it simply the spirit of the times — the way people today say that sex and death must appear in advertising, otherwise it won’t be effective?

That’s entirely possible — because the ballad, in terms of form, is perhaps the most developed genre. It’s the outline of a tragedy. It’s a complete story — meaning it has an exposition, a crisis or conflict, a catastrophe, and then, of course, a catharsis. Some form of punishment or reconciliation. I think that’s why Janáček was drawn to it — because it’s a closed, self-contained narrative. And beyond that, Janáček explored these structures in great depth.

I believe he was genuinely fascinated by it. I’ve always asked myself: When did ballads actually originate? And I came to a clear answer — after the Thirty Years’ War and the wars with the Turks. Before that, life wasn’t exactly idyllic either, but no one had seen so many corpses, so many mutilated bodies, as after the Thirty Years’ War. That’s where all the “cut-off legs, cut-off arms” imagery comes from. Sure, executions were known — but not on such a mass scale.

But why did Janáček choose only the sad songs?

You said it yourself. Love and death are incredibly close to each other, and: “…he wants her madly, and when he can’t have her, he’d rather kill her…”

And wasn’t Janáček a bit like that inside, too?

(laughs) That’s quite possible.

There’s a part of that in all of us — of course. And those “Strawberries”, that’s real horror. I was drawn to it too, though from a different angle — I was interested in the Thirty Years’ War, and there’s a wealth of that kind of material there as well…

Well, take “Strawberries”, for instance. The folk song itself is already highly emotional and intense — and Janáček turned it into something that makes your hair stand on end… the wailing and the cries of the male choir, and so on…

Yes, it’s absolutely fantastic!

But why did he push it to such an extreme?

One of the stones was Impressionism — probably the weakest in his case. It was present mainly in the coloristic aspect, which does exist in folklore — that rawness, for example. But that rawness already borders on Expressionism. And Expressionism was the second major style that had a strong influence on him. You could explain Expressionism as pushing everything to its extreme — the loudest, the softest, the fastest, the slowest… it’s all about extremes.

So — Expressionism, Impressionism, and also Verismo — that was his rustic foundation. Janáček was a rustic man at heart, and he had the opportunity to see the great verismo operas like Cavalleria rusticana, Pagliacci, and later he became familiar with Puccini — who continues that tradition. That began to interest him more when he was working on The Excursions of Mr. Brouček and other operas.

And you can find all of this in folklore — all these styles. A ballad is naturally full of Expressionism…

And how did audiences at the time respond to these compositions?

They were performed, but they didn’t receive nearly the same attention as his operatic works. They were included in occasional concerts, but back then, they weren’t the focus of any major interest. That appreciation really comes from us — from today’s perspective.

For exact details, have a look at Tyrrell.

At the Besední dům, these pieces were rarely performed — if at all.

Could you place one of the song cycles from our CD in the context of Janáček’s time and life?

Probably the best fit for this kind of contextual placement would be the Detvanské písně (Songs from Detva). They date from just before Jenůfa (Její pastorkyňa) was premiered in Prague — a turning point in Janáček’s life. By that time, he was already at the height of his creative powers and had begun to believe that he might finally achieve recognition. He was over sixty and growing in confidence.

It was Kovařovic who made the decisive move by accepting Jenůfa. That brought the opera to the stage of the National Theatre in Prague. We may be curious to know what Jenůfa sounded like in its original 1904 version, but when it was later performed by a full ensemble of thirty professional musicians at the National Theatre, no one will convince me it was worse. These were professionals on a stage that, at the time, was in many ways comparable to Vienna or Berlin.

Then came the Vienna premiere — even more successful — and then Berlin. That was when Janáček first saw a hundred musicians in the pit. He was stunned and said he never wanted to hear those small orchestras again. Bakala cried. That’s a well-known story.

That’s the atmosphere surrounding the Detvanské písně. And what’s more, the cycle contains one key song that is thematically central to Jenůfa as well: Na horách, na dolách (). It functions almost like a semiotic mirror of Jenůfa.

Jealousy.

If not me, then no one.

Then I’d rather kill her.