The Enchanting Music of Blades and Bullets: Visions of Violence In
The Enchanting Music of Blades and Bullets: Visions of Violence in Janáček’s World-War Symphonic Poems [published version in Music & Letters, Volume 99, Issue 1, 1 February 2018, Pages 16–44, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcy011 Published 15 May 2018] Andriy was […] wholly absorbed in the enchanting music of blades and bullets, because will, oblivion, death, and pleasure are nowhere united in such a seductive, terrible charm as they are in battle.1 Leoš Janáček is undoubtedly best known today as a composer of operas. Yet at the beginning of the First World War, no one could have imagined that this would ever be the case, least of all the composer himself. In the first half of 1913, it had become obvious that his Osud (Fate) would not be performed in Prague, and he had 1 ‘Andriy takzhe pogruzilsya ves’ v ocharovatel’nuyu muzyku mechey i pul’, potomu chto nigde volya, zabvenie, smert’, naslazhdenie ne soedinyayutsya v takoy obol’stitel’noy, strashnoy prelesti, kak v bitve’ (Nikolay Vasil‘evich Gogol, Mirgorod, povesti, sluzhashchiya prodolzheniem Vecherov na khutore bliz Dikan’ki [Mirgorod: Tales Serving as a Sequel to “Evenings on a Farm near Dikan‘ka“], St Petersburg, 1835, ‘Taras Bulba’, chap. 4; the second half of this sentence was suppressed in the corresponding passage in chap. 5 of the 1842 version known to Janáček). 1 abandoned work on Mr Brouček’s Excursion to the Moon; he did not work on Brouček or any other opera until after the success of his Jenůfa (Její pastorkyňa) in Prague in 1916.2 Indeed prospects for performances of any large-scale works must have seemed bleak after the outbreak of war in 1914.
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