Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Analytic Conventions
- 1 Janáček’s Motives
- 2 Musical Elements
- 3 Nineteenth-Century Foundation
- 4 Folk Studies
- 5 Jenůfa
- 6 Middle-Period Works
- 7 The Cunning Little Vixen
- 8 The Wandering Madman
- 9 First String Quartet—First Movement
- 10 Three Rhythmic Studies
- Postscript
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index of Janáček’s Compositions and Relevant Folk Songs
- Index of Janáček’s Compositions and Relevant Folk Songs
8 - The Wandering Madman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Analytic Conventions
- 1 Janáček’s Motives
- 2 Musical Elements
- 3 Nineteenth-Century Foundation
- 4 Folk Studies
- 5 Jenůfa
- 6 Middle-Period Works
- 7 The Cunning Little Vixen
- 8 The Wandering Madman
- 9 First String Quartet—First Movement
- 10 Three Rhythmic Studies
- Postscript
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index of Janáček’s Compositions and Relevant Folk Songs
- Index of Janáček’s Compositions and Relevant Folk Songs
Summary
After completing the first draft of Vixen, Janáček took a break from the opera and composed the chorus The Wandering Madman (Potulný šílenec, November 1922). He based this work on a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali polymath whose Prague lecture had impressed him greatly the previous year. It is a colorful and imaginative work, often considered one of Janáček's finest choruses. This brief chapter looks at the structure of The Wandering Madman, illustrating his mature musical language in a choral setting. We can trace the growth of his choral technique by recalling the other choruses examined earlier in the book: Ploughing, The Fickleness of Love, The Wild Duck, and The 70,000.
Text
The poem depicts one man's search for a magic stone that turns objects into gold, a search that one day takes a bizarre turn: when asked by a village boy about the origins of a gold chain around his waist (“neck” in Janáček's setting) the man realizes that he has indeed found the stone but was unaware of it. And so he continues searching, though now without much strength.
Like Janáček's other late choruses, The Wandering Madman is in the form of a drama, with added characters joining the male chorus: a narrator (sung by a baritone) and the village boy (sung by a soprano). Tyrrell writes:
One trend that runs through from The 70,000 and the following female-voice choruses is his increasing use of solo voices. In this way, Janáček had transformed a genre of solid massed voices into something approaching a dramatic cantata, with solo voices to characterize individual characters and with the chorus used for narration but also for atmosphere and “orchestration.”
…
Something in this fable spoke to the elderly Janáček, who seemed to have been in search of his gold-making stone all his life and suddenly and unexpectedly has woken up to find that admiration and fame had arrived.
A translation of the poem appears below; the motives are indicated in square brackets. (They are identified in example 8.1.) Text sung by the narrator appears in bold: he opens the piece—intoning his lines on repeated pitches to create a somewhat ritualistic atmosphere—and then returns three more times, finally remaining for the entire last stanza.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Music of Leos JanacekMotive, Rhythm, Structure, pp. 211 - 220Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020