PROGRAM NOTES

Leoš Janáček – Taras Bulba, Rhapsody for Orchestra

Leoš Janáček Born July 3, 1854, Hochwald (Hukvaldy), Northern Moravia. Died August 12, 1928, Moravska Ostravá, Czechoslovakia.

Taras Bulba, Rhapsody for Orchestra Leoš Janáček loved all things Russian. He formed a Russian Club in Brno in 1897, visited Russia twice in the early years of the twentieth century, and even sent his children to Saint Petersburg to study. Of the Russian writers he admired, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it was the novelist and playwright Nikolai Gogol he loved most. Janáček considered writing music based on Gogol's tale of Taras Bulba as early as 1905, although a decade passed before he started work on it. He completed the score three years later, the day before his sixty-first birthday. Still, Taras Bulba is one of Janáček's "early" compositions.

Taras Bulba is Janáček's first significant orchestral work. Like Jenůfa, which was premiered in 1904 but didn't come to attention in the larger music world until it was staged in Prague in 1916, Taras Bulba would wait to find its audience. When it was finally performed for the first time in January 1924, Janácek left the hall as soon as the piece was over (the concert was billed as an early observance of his seventieth birthday and he didn't want to celebrate until the actual day arrived) and he failed to hear the enthusiastic crowd calling for him.

The violent, bloody story of Taras Bulba is one of Gogol's most enduring and influential works. Ernest Hemingway called it "one of the ten greatest books of all time" (although Vladimir Nabokov, normally a Gogol admirer, likened it to "rollicking yarns about lumberjacks"). First published as a short story in 1835 and then reworked as a prose epic (of a somewhat less-than-epical 150 pages) seven years later, it tells the tale of Taras Bulba, an aging Cossack, and his two sons, and how all three meet their deaths. (The word Cossack means adventurer.) The story is set in sixteenth-century Ukraine, which was then under the rule of Poland. Taras Bulba, a dyed-in-the-wool Cossack, is a warrior for life, and he pushes his sons onto the battlefield as soon as they are out of school, only to watch them die.

Janáček claimed that he was drawn to Taras Bulba because of his belief that "in the whole world there are not fires or tortures strong enough to destroy the vitality of the Russian nation," paraphrasing Gogol's own lines. "For the sake of these words, which fell into searing sparks and flames off the stake on which Taras Bulba, the famous hetman of the Cossacks, died, did I compose this rhapsody." Janáček picked three episodes from Gogol's tale, each dealing with a death—first that of the sons Andrei and Ostap, and then Taras Bulba himself.

The Death of Andrei depicts the tragedy of Taras's first son, who falls in love with a Polish noblewoman and becomes a traitor. The father confronts his son, renounces him, and shoots him. "What a Cossack he could have been," he says, ". . . and now, now he's finished, dead ignominiously, like a dog." Music of romance and battle merge in the abrupt, discontinuous, epigrammatic style that is quintessential Janáček. (His idiosyncratic language, with its pungent harmonies and speechlike rhythms, is highly indebted to the study of Moravian folk music he undertook more than a decade before the famous field work done by Bartók and Kodály.) In Taras Bulba, Janáček learned how music can explore conflicting emotions and states of mind. Janáček's music perfectly matches Gogol's words, as for example, when he writes of the day Taras and his sons ride off to fight—the sons holding back tears "out of respect for their father, who was perturbed himself, although he struggled not to show it. It was a gray day. The green steppes glittered brightly. Birds chattered discordantly."

In The Death of Ostap, the second son is taken prisoner by the Poles and transported to Warsaw, where he is tortured and finally executed as his father watches from the crowd. A grotesque mazurka suggests the Polish victory, the E-flat clarinet Ostap's screams. Janáček's music is unsparing and disturbing, and nearly as graphic as a photograph.

To avenge Ostap's death, Taras Bulba leads the Cossacks across Poland, where he too is taken prisoner and sentenced to die at the stake. Flames rise up around him, and Gogol writes the words Janáček couldn't forget: "But are there in the world such fires, such tortures, such forces as could overcome Russian strength?" Janáček's answer, with loud bells and roaring organ chords, is unequivocal.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

© by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reproduced; brief excerpts may be quoted if due acknowledgment is given to the author and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs and artists subject to change without notice.