The Reception of Janáček’s Programmatic Orchestral Music
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Leoš Janáček is largely viewed as one of the most significant innovators of opera. The fact that his achievements in the field of orchestral, chamber and piano music were (in a context of the ‘long’ nineteenth century) no less innovative remains obscure. Furthermore, all of his instrumental music, except for a few marginal cases, can be regarded as programme music: Janáček was a composer of a fundamentally programmatic and dramatic musical disposition. In my paper I will focus on the critical reception of Janáček’s programmatic compositions, namely symphonic poems by his Czech contemporaries; critiques and other texts from both the press and musicological publications from the period 1877-1928 will be taken into account. Principally, my paper monitors the evaluation of Janáček with respect to the tradition of Czech programmatic music of the «Smetanian line» (B. Smetana, Z. Fibich, J. B. Foerster, and O. Ostrčil) on the one hand, and in the context of Dvořák’s programme overtures and symphonic poems on the other. Attention is paid to the issue of receptive constants or «conceptual fields» (Eggebrecht), produced by individual newspapers, journals and artistic, social, and political groups; this issue includes various conceptualizations of Czech-ness and Slavic-ness in terms of either folkloristic and nationalist inspirations of Janáček or literary prototypes of his compositions ( J. Vrchlický and S. Čech were the two most famous Czech poets of the late nineteenth century; N. V. Gogol was perceived as a Classical figure of ‘Great Russian’ literature). |
| Related projects: |