Song cycle for tenor, alto,
three female voices, and piano
Duration: 40 minutes
Music: Leoš Janáček
(Composed 1917-19, revised 1920)
Poems:
'From the pen of a self-taught man'
(Ozef Kalda in Lidové noviny)
Premiered: Brno 18/4/1924
(first staged in Ljubljana 27/10/1926)

Catalogue Number: JW V/12
 

Janáček’s song cycle for tenor, alto, three female voices and piano, first performed in his hometown of Brno in 1921, has had an odd life. In May 1916 a collection of anonymous poems appeared in the popular Brno newspaper Lidové noviny telling the story of a young farm boy who became infatuated with a Gypsy girl and left his family for them. They were published as ‘Z pera samoukova’ [from the pen of a self-taught man], but since have been proved to be by Ozef Kalda (1871-1921). Kalda was a Czech railway official with a sideline in writing fiction. His first short story mocking his colleagues on the railways got him into considerable trouble with his employers, so he was posted to a small rural station as penance where his love of writing increased. There he wrote his most enduring novel The Lads and then penned this bizarre collection of poems, even providing the above column-inch to throw readers off the scent. Janáček was an avid reader of Lidové noviny – the newspaper was also the source of the original cartoons for The Cunning Little Vixen – and in 1917, the year after their publication, Janáček began to write his song-cycle (though he never himself named it as such).

Every year it was customary for Janáček to spend a few weeks in the Moravian spa-town of Luhačovice, where he took the waters and strolled through the countryside. In the summer of 1917 Janáček was enjoying great success; Jenůfa had just been performed in Prague, and a Viennese premiere was in the offing. That year he met Kamila Stösslová, the young wife of an antique dealer from Písek. Janáček was twice her age yet became utterly infatuated with her. Very shortly after the composer’s visit to Luhačovice in July 1917 he started composing the setting of Kalda’s poems, telling the story of a farm boy’s sexual infatuation with a gypsy girl. Their friendship (though Janáček wished for more) is detailed in a correspondence of more than seven hundred letters; many of Stösslová’s letters were burnt by Janáček, but the large majority of his to her survive. Throughout the correspondence Janáček mentions his compositions, often cloyingly telling Stösslová that she was the influence for the work at hand. And apart from the shopping lists to the Stössels (Kamila’s husband was a notorious black-marketer) and the endless unanswered invitations to premieres and performances of his work, Janáček gives us as readers many clues to his working environment.

The ‘few motifs’ were the building blocks for this extraordinarily intense piece. As with many of Janáček’s later works, the vocal line takes its lead from the natural rhythms of Czech speech – exaggerated for dramatic emphasis – whilst the piano is the focus of the musical material. Janáček indicated when the Gypsy was to appear and disappear in the song-cycle, with voices come from ‘off-stage’. Likewise the performance was also to be given in ‘semi-darkness’. It wasn’t long before full-staged performances of the work were taking place; the earliest was given in Ljubljana in 1924. More recently Ian Bostridge performed the work at the National Theatre in a production by Deborah Warner.

Whilst the young farmer initially seems to be a distant relation of sorts to the young miller of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, his eventual seduction by the Gypsy and his decision to leave his home-land marks Janáček’s own departure from the usual bounds of the traditional song-cycle. The young miller and the wanderer in Winterreise or even Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) are permanently trapped in their world, yet the ‘one who disappeared’ dramatically breaks out of that milieu. As such – and with the trappings of the character of the Gypsy and the spectral off-stage voices of the women in the central section of the piece – The Diary of One Who Disappeared is much closer to opera than its lieder forebears. Recent popular biography has obliterated some of the innate genius of Janáček’s work with simplistic tales of his infatuation for Stösslová, yet The Diary continually asks us to re-evaluate the composer as a true innovator in genre and style. Readers of the composer’s doting letters may seek solace in the fact that this young farmer’s search for romantic fulfilment in the Gypsy was based in part on the composer’s devotion for Kamila Stösslová, yet Janáček’s sycophantic placing of her on a pedestal should not unquestionably continue to invade our perception of one of his most perverse but redolent works.



A list of the songs included in the cycle
 

* both the first and revised editions of these movements exist. Both were recorded on the recent EMI recording, details of which are given below.


Bibliography:
Ed. & Tr. Tyrrell, John, Intimate Letters: Leoš Janáček to Kamila Stösslová (London: Faber, 1994)

Full details of how the piece was performed (in stagings and concert performances) as well as further details about revisions are given in the catalogue of Janáček's works.

The poetry was translated for the ENO/National Theatre production and is published by Faber Books:
Kalda, Ozef tr. Seamus Heaney, Diary of One Who Vanished (London: Faber 1999)

Cheek, Timothy
Singing in Czech: A Guide to Czech Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire
(Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2001)

Edition: Score from Ol. Pazdírek, Brno - Editio Moravia
A new edition of the score was released in Winter 2005, printed in the new Editio Janáček edition. For more information click here.

Recordings:
Bostridge, Philogène, Adès (EMI, 7243 5 57219 2 1) 2001 release