3 - Narrative in Janáček's symphonic poems

Summary

To claim that Janáček is unorthodox in his artistic procedures never provokes surprise, since almost all the techniques and attitudes of his mature music went against the grain of convention to some extent. His word-setting, his orchestration, his treatment of large-scale and small-scale structure, his views on harmony, theory and language, his style of notation and his methods of work, even his unforeseen late flowering – all these betray a mind which was never inclined to follow a worn groove. He was not an iconoclast simply in order to be rebellious; he preferred always to devise his own methods and pursue his instincts wherever they might lead.

In the case of the three symphonic poems – Šumařovo dítě (The Fiddler's Child; 1912–13; rev. 1914), Taras Bulba (1915–18) and Ballada blanická (The Ballad of Blaník; 1919) – his instincts led to an additional unorthodoxy that is scarcely to be found in his other music. This arises from the fact that all three are based on narrative literary sources and purport to convey the content of those works, as all symphonic poems do, without recourse to words. So Janáček's celebrated concern for the ‘melodic curves of speech’ (nápěvky mluvy) has no actual words to build on.