Every era has to give new substance to the ritual: an interview with Milos Stedron.

Milos Stedron (*1942) is one of the most important Czech musicologists and composers of today. His main interest as a musicologist is Leos Janacek (he has written numerous musicological studies, and for example contributed to the reconstruction of Janacek's unfinished Danube Symphony), but also the Renaissance and Mannerism (he is the author of the first Czech monograph on C. Monteverdi). As a composer he is associated primarily with the circle of Brno composers influenced by the principles of New Music in the 1960s, and one particular point of interest in this context is Stedron's involvement in "team compositions". He is also a sought after composer of stage music.

I shall start with what is perhaps a rather tired old question: what about the whole supposed musicality of Czechs? Are Czechs really particularly musical in some way? Or is the old saying, "If you're a Czech, you're a musician" just a myth we've constructed about ourselves?

I'd say yes to both questions. Yes it's a myth, but it's based on what has been a great deal of musical activity. Mikulas Bek's book, The Conservatory of Europe? which is essentially a sociological study of Czech musical culture, offers an enlightening answer. Bek describes how in the 1770s Charles Burney travelled across Europe, from Holland through France and England to Vienna, and all round Bohemia before returning through Germany. It was Burney who supposedly said that Bohemia was the conservatory of Europe. In fact, of course, he could never have said that, because in his time the conservatory didn't exist as an institution, except in Italy as an orphanage. Nonetheless, there was something about the idea. If we look at it historically, we see that the first defining moment for Czechs in music came during with the radical religious Hussite movement in the Middle Ages. The Hussite movement spread music more broadly across society, democratised it. In this sense Marxist interpretations were partly correct, since before that time there had never been laicisation and secularisation on the same scale, or such an advance in literacy among ordinary people. Another moment "in the stars", to put it metaphorically, came with the Baroque, with the breakthrough into Late Baroque, when it became clear that what most suited Czechs was the model of a melody or melodic line accompanied by something less complicated, more lucid.

How do you explain it?

It is hard to say. Some nations are more susceptible to melody, while some are more inclined to multiple lines. Of course this is a dangerous generalisation, more just a sort of theory. Among northerners what has always predominated is a feeling for structure. We can see this with the Low Countries, the Burgundians, the Northern French, people from Belgium and Flanders, who wherever they went managed to organise perfect polymelodic music involving many voices--five, seven or even more. The Italians added the poly-choral element but in fact in Italy considerations of melody always prevailed and were always the clearly dominant factor. The Italian approach suited the Czechs better and it is interesting that Italian influences have been more in evidence here than French influences, even back in the reign of Charles IV when you would have thought that the Luxembourg connections would have meant the import of the musical culture of France.

Let us go back to the Baroque. What happened then?

Here what is important is the transition from the Baroque to Classicism. Someone once said that Classicism is Baroque without ornament, that all the decorations were stripped off the facades so that only the strict lines remain ... This may mean on the one hand create something like a barracks, but it may also be very light, airy architecture--and if I compare music to architecture, which is an old idea, architecture is music in stone. In my view the model of the Late Baroque and Classicism particularly suited the Czechs. All over Europe the Baroque was attractive in music because the basic line of the melody, two violins or two trumpets, could be immediately reproduced and communicated by ear and to do so didn't require any great education or skill. This was why initially "Czech musicality" expressed itself in a rather mediocre way and only after 1600 did the phenomenon acquire features that made it comparable with the major musical diasporas. I mean that after the Netherlanders and Italians Czechs become the biggest group of musical migrants. In this sense Havlicek was right when he said that they filled up every corner of the world. But Czechs do not create great concepts, or do so only in exceptional cases. For example J. V. Stamic, who revolutionised High Classicism period by pushing through the sonata form and modern orchestra. J.A. Benda was another Czech who made a contribution of this magnitude. But generally Czechs have been migrating musicians who adapt perfectly to the local style, are in no way provocative but simply develop that style. A model 1.B Class, in fact, marvellous musicians, skilful composers and excellent fulfillers of the norm.

Which are the other periods when Czech music reaches a peak?

If we are going to talk about national Czech music, then it is something that emerges from the second phase of the Czech national revival, after 1848. All this is perfectly described by Vladimir Macura in his absolutely epochal book Znameni zrodu [The Sign of Birth], which shows how the National Revival had two phases. In the first phase it was a kind of game developed by a few dozen intellectuals, but after 1847 the masses became involved, and this produces crucial episodes such as the "discovery" of the Zelena hora and Kraluv Dvur Manuscripts, the supposed cycles of Old Czech poems from the 9th and 13th centuries that were unmasked as forgeries at the end of the 19th century. The wheels of nationalism start to turn because the tracks have already been laid. At first the Austrian government smiles, because it believes on past form that the phenomenon is trivial. But the smile on its face disappears when it sees the funeral of Rubes. A poet whom everybody knows from his Mlynarova opicka [The Miller's Monkey] or Cech a Nemec [The Czech and the German] or some little verse dies, and Frantisek Palacky gives the order, more or less a political appeal, for his memory to be honoured. Suddenly forty thousand people turn up, the rain is pouring down but Palacky speaks for a whole hour and everyone listens. Suddenly ideology, something completely new, enters the game. And we might perhaps see that as the fateful moment for Czech music as well, which becomes national in spirit. Czech musicians cease to be migrants, and are now people very much bound to a particular cultural instance. Smetana is a tragic but great example of this kind. Here we have a phenomenal world talent, and if he had chosen the path of the Romantic composer freely travelling and spending five years in Paris, and maybe ten years in some German centre, he would certainly be three times more famous than he is today. But he chose the path of Czech opera and gave himself up wholly to the nation. He devoted himself completely to the services of something that he didn't actually understand very well. This is crystal clear if we look at the ideas that inform his music, I mean his view on what he was actually setting to music. Significantly these we noticed by Adolf Hitler with his distorted vision, who praised Ma vlast [My Country] and considered it absolutely the most perfect chauvinistic glorification of landscape, history, nation, race and so forth. He wanted to hear it played authentically; he got his way, and the conductor Vaclav Talich was later nearly charged with collaboration. But what could he have done?

How has Czech music developed since the later 19th century?

Interestingly, in music there was no great break in music at the end of the 19th century. This was unlike the situation in literature, when the 1890s and the "omladina" movement brought a new view, with many young writers no longer believing that we were one nation but seeing the internal differences, parting company for good with the Young Czech political movement and, for example, in many cases finding the iconic national poet Vrchlicky no longer acceptable. In music the situation was not so polarised. There was a relatively smooth transition between Dvorak and his pupils. The latter were modernists, of course, but Czech modernists, a more traditional sort of modernist. On the other hand, Suk had such a mimetic talent that he could be regarded by the Viennese avant-garde as a composer sometimes close to atonality and significantly only Josef Suk, Leos Janacek and Ladislav Vycpalek were taken up by the Society for the Private Performance of Music--the most avant-garde outpost in Vienna. Suk was thought to have affinities with the Viennese because some of his compositions were written in several polyphonic layers, and in that sense were similar to Mahler, Mahler at his most modern. But then along came Janacek and changed everything. An outsider arrived, a solitaire, and became a great hit. After Jenufa each of his operas was eagerly awaited and he overshadows all the other Czechs.

We shall come back to Janacek later. Now let's turn to more personal matters. You come from a well-known family of musicians. Do you remember from your childhood any melody that had a great effect on you and perhaps even influenced your later direction?

I don't remember any specific melody, but I lived in a very musical environment. My father's friends would come to our house and play, mainly trio sonatas or at least two violins and piano. Apart from that my mother taught at music school and at the conservatory, and so her pupils would meet at our house and play too. It was my uncles who started my musical training. Vladimir, born in 1900, was a lawyer but he had concurrently studied at Josef Suk's master school. In fact he was had even been Suk's favourite pupil. He had great talent but somehow he dissipated it. He constantly sat about in various coffee-houses debating what he would do, until in the end he didn't do anything much. He wrote the most in the Fifties, when he was "put out of action" as a judge because he wasn't a party member, and so he fell back on music: he ended up at the Prague conservatory where he played for ballerinas, and he was satisfied. He was a great influence on me. He was a bon vivant and confirmed bachelor and I used to go and visit him in Prague, where he educated me in artistic taste. My other uncle, Bohumir, was a professor at the Philosophical Faculty, a pupil of Vladimir Helfert, an outstanding pianist, an excellent lexicographer, a scholar, a pedant in the best sense of the term, very strict with himself but very friendly to other people. Bohumir taught me from when I was six and it was a real drilling. When I was nine or ten my mother couldn't bear to watch it any longer and took me to her old professor, the seventy-year-old Mrs Holubova, who had originally been appointed by Leos Janacek to the organ school. She venerated Janacek, but in that very Czech sort of way. She used to say, "Janacek is a complete genius, but he spoils everything with that abruptness of his, the way he cuts everything off. It's terrible, it always annoys me when I hear it in the Glagolitic Mass, the way he cuts a thing short, when maestro Novak would have developed it, would have made it a great passage. (Well, yes, but then again that is precisely what is distinctive about Janacek). She was a graduate of the Prague Conservatory, and she boasted that she had ridden in a tram with Dvorak. She always told me the story of how she had been sitting there and Dvorak had got on and she had stood up and said. "Maestro, please be seated". He had said, "Sit down". She had replied, "I cannot sit". And he had thumped with his cane and said," Sit down this minute!" She was a fantastic woman, very nice, but at the same time very exacting. First she saw me as a pianist but then she recognised that I might have gifts as a composer, and guided me in that direction. And then there was my other uncle Jan, an outstanding violinist who had a great career ahead of him but didn't have the push to make it and so ended up in Vyskov, where he directed the Hana orchestral association.

So that was the background I came from. All my uncles would come and visit us, at Christmas and at Easter, and their influences mingled and interacted in me.

You haven't yet mentioned your father ...

My father wasn't a professional musician. He played the violin and viola very well but he worked as the secretary of the Cyril and Methodius Savings Bank. Janacek had been a regular visitor to the bank. He always used to come to my father and say, "Good morning, do you know Mr. Chlubna?" And my father would always answer, "Of course, Maestro, I shall call him for you immediately". He always asked whether father knew him. Osvald Chlubna was Janacek's right hand, and I myself got to know him well when I was studying, when he used to come to the Janacek Academy and curse us for being moderns. In seminars we almost came to blows with him. Then came 1968 and the Soviet tanks arrived. Chlubna ran into me at the time and said, "Let bygones be bygones. Now we must all unite and defend our national culture." It was a very First-Republic sort of attitude, but it gave me the shivers because it made me realise that things were really going to get rough.

What were your student years at JAMU [The Janacek Academy of Performing Arts in Brno] like?

First I completed studies at the Philosophical Faculty, then I went to Pardubice for a year and did my national service as a signals man, but even before I went for a talent test at JAMU. By that time in 1961 and 1962 I was already in touch with the composers Miloslav Istvan, Josef Berg and Alois Pinos, who kept encouraging me in the idea that I just had to go to JAMU. When I came back from military service I already had a place in the Moravian Museum as an assistant in the music department and I directed the Theatre of Music [Divadlo hudby]. On the basis of the talent test I was admitted to the Janacek Academy and became a regular student of composition there up to 1969. But I have very happy memories of the Theatre of Music too. It was an institution that I made in my own image. I got my friends involved with it, the Brno Surrealists, Pavel Reznicek, and Jiri Veselsky appeared in it as well, and Arnost Goldflam, Karel Fuksa, and of course that cult figure of Bohemian Brno life Jan Novak. I invited Mirek Kovarik, too, who produced a sort of mini-festival of poetry.

At JAMU you experienced a very potent set of teachers. The composition teachers were Miloslav Istvan, Josef Berg, and Alois Pinos. Ludvik Kundera was rector at the time ...

It was a truly starry period. But Berg wasn't at JAMU. He taught for just a short time, because teaching caused him such serious physical problems--a kind of stigmata--that he had to stop. He always overdid the preparations for his classes and it took up too much of his time. Istvan and Pinos were complete revelations and it was very good that Ludvik Kundera, Milan Kundera's father, was rector. He was an unusually educated and cultivated man. He had studied in Germany and admired Beethoven, but Janacek was a huge influence on him. Then he had been in the Czechoslovak Legions in the First War and had gone through the whole legion experience in Russia. For me he was always a classic example of the syndrome of the Czech nation, combining German culture and Russophilia. He had a perfect mastery of both languages. He also wrote a book in Russian, The History of the Music of the Czechoslovak People, which came out in Yekaterinburg in 1919.

Istvan and Pinos were polar opposites, friendly and mutually respectful at the time but later their paths diverged sharply. Both were absolutely ideal teachers. It is very difficult to teach art; it means imposing some kind of artistic doctrine and often turning it into a compulsory text and testing students to check they agree. But both Istvan and Pinnos were hugely liberal at a time that wasn't liberal at all. They taught for much longer than was required, sometimes six or seven hours at one go. We would sit in the pub but not drink at all, maybe a glass or so of wine at most, or would go to their flats. We were in close contact with them, we all used the familiar form of address ("ty" not "vy", as in French "tu" not "vous") and created things together. The atmosphere was completely different from in Prague, where there was a big distance between teachers and students and a rigidity that became even worse under Normalisation [the freeze after the 1968 invasion]. This meant that the leading Prague and Bratislava composers sent their offspring to Brno for their training, and Brno managed to keep up a decent standard even in the Seventies. Music is something that it is hard for ideology to infiltrate. They could ban concerts, or order up concerts to celebrate the revolution or whatever, but essentially it was the composers who created the content. And Istvan and Pinos were completely uncompromising.

So you mean that from the point of view of music the Sixties were more dynamic in Brno than in Prague?

Yes, but it was marked by what you might call the "curse of Brno", which is hard to explain. Usually I say it is a matter of the relationship between Czech and German identity in the area. In Prague the polarisation of Czechs and Germans was unambiguous. After the October Diploma there were Czechs and there were Germans, and anyone who wanted to be both at the same time was denounced by both sides. In Brno it was more complicated. Up to 1890-1900 there were Czechs living here but the German town hall tried to stop more Czechs moving in from the suburbs. Brno had ninety thousand inhabitants at the time and wanted to protect the German majority of around fifty thousand. In Prague the turning point had come in 1880--the Germans and Jews suddenly realised that they were surrounded by Czechs. The Josefine doctrine effectively paid off and nobody then had any doubts that Prague was a Czech city. And another factor was that in Brno the working class was forced into bilingualism by the German owners. There was only one Czech school in the place. So clear national polarisation came late, only after 1900. There is always that last straw that breaks the camel's back; that's the law of quantity changing into quality. The last straw in Brno was the carpentry worker Pavlik, who was killed in 1905 when he was demonstrating for a Czech university. A worker demonstrating for a university!!!

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Janacek wrote a wonderful sonata on the theme. Blood was spilt and there was no going back. Up to that time the Czechs and Germans in Brno had always quarrelled, brawled and then always come together again in support of some idea. After 1905 it was no longer possible for Czechs to go to the German theatre. The divorce was final.

What effects did this have for the atmosphere in Brno, what you call the curse?

Generally a kind of embarrassment about the fact that actually there is a double or triple culture here. It is most obvious in the architecture, because in order for Brno to be given a Czech face something absolutely new had to be found. That was the reason for Functionalism. It was clear that this was something new, Czech, beautiful. This is the principle on which I would explain the specific character of Brno. The modern started here practically from scratch, much more so than anywhere else.

At the end of the Sixties you were part of the birth of another Brno legend--the Goose on a String Theatre [Divadlo Husa na provazku], where you created the stage music for many productions. How can music influence a stage production? Or what generally is the relationship between the dramatic and musical element?

Music can of course have great psychological power, but in theatre the main problem is that it is stigmatised by being used for the transitions. When there's a scene change, then there's music. There's a constant danger of someone talking while it's playing, the audience chatting, in short, a danger of the music being just a backdrop. Or else it's the accompanying element to movement, to dance, which then turns into ballet or mime. But today musicians, and also directors and ultimately even actors want there to be a song or something more. So music is being liberated from the stage of spoken drama and becoming something that is moving in the direction of opera or musical. At the Goose on a String Theatre [later Theatre on a String] each director had his own approach to music. Zdenek Pospisil cared a great deal about music and wanted to do musical. Of course he didn't know quite how to do it, but he created Balada pro banditu [Ballad for a Bandit], which was a work of genius in its time. Peter Scherhaufer on the other hand needed music as rhythmic emphasis, as atmosphere. But it was Scherhaufer who had the idea that the Theatre on a String might do opera. Of course--a peculiar sort of opera, but Chameleon at the Theatre on a String meant more to me than an opera I would, do in a classic opera house. The atmosphere there was marvellous, and it was a joy to write for people like Mirek Donutil, Mojmir Maderic, Jirka Pecha who couldn't read music, Iva Bittova ... there was a real electricity between them all the time. On the one hand they worked together, but on the other there was a certain competitive tension between them, which led to great performances. It was all a great joke for them, because they had no knowledge of opera and so they performed the way they imagined opera might look. What emerged was actually a parody of opera. I also did Balet Makabr [Ballet Macabre]. I must say I would like to go back to Chameleon, though, because I think it is perfectly written, probably one of Ludvik Kundera's best plays. The story of Mr. Fouche, who was not wicked or cynical, but just didn't have a character at all.

You mentioned Ballad for a Bandit, which is now a popular classic, and its songs are regularly sung around camp fires. What does it mean for a composer of modern classical music when his songs become part of popular culture? Isn't there a kind of contradiction about it?

Yes there is, undoubtedly, and I am aware of it. In the 1970s we all retreated from the avant-garde, as it were. The rapid movement of the 1960s came to an end. John Lennon or someone else said that the seventies were worth shit and in some ways that was true. Naturally we turned away from the avant-garde. We didn't for example have the same kind of conscious view as the German composers who deliberately turned against the avant-garde, against the remorseless expressiveness of the new music and looked for a larger synthesis, a road to a new simplicity. We only learned about that later. But many of us instinctively sensed it and inclined towards historicism. Not that we completely gave up avant-garde things, but we worked on two or three levels in parallel. We cultivated the New Music almost ritually, because for us it retained the attraction of the 1960s and we didn't want to betray that; whenever we did a chamber piece we would go back to its principles, but even then new things were getting into it. In my case this was theatre and of course in the theatre there was a yelling director who didn't want to hear a word about some New Music or other. He yelled that he wanted songs, songs for people. The second line, but that was one that I founded myself voluntarily, was historical music. I realised how superficial my approach to music had been when I hadn't had the historical dimension, and so I submerged myself in the period around 1600 and studied it in great detail. The result was that after fifteen years I wrote a book about Monteverdi. Then I went back another hundred years. This way I got addicted to music of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth century. It was what you might call my other face. Of course I felt the contradiction with doing songs for the theatre, but I took the prospect of theatre songs as a new sort of reaction to the avant-garde, and thought I would try it, since I had never done it before. I had never written Country, and suddenly here it was with Ballad for a Bandit, and Pospisil shouting, "Do you know how to do a Western?" So first I listened to all the westerns and then I produced my own idea of a western. Naturally I know that as soon as something is too popular or too easy on the ear, it's dangerous. And so in the case of Ballad I haven't succumbed to some great enthusiasm. In fact I tend to be suspicious and tell myself that it is very odd that it is so catchy and still remembered. But you must remember that Ballad for a Bandit aspired to be a musical. If--but neither Pospisil nor I myself realised it--if there had been more dancing. A musical needs to be very much dance drama, and that element is rather lacking in Ballad.

Now that we talk of musical--what is your view of the boom in musicals in the 1990s in Czech Republic? What is the basis of the appeal?

It's a matter of visual appeal. It's the visualisation of music. If you look back on the last 20 years, what you see is that music has become terribly visualised. Every group must have clips, and if they don't they might as well not exist. They have to present themselves in some way, and so they put on different costumes and create an image, which then determines fashion. But musical is above all a huge commercial commodity--as I've often written--it is instant opera for the poor. Nobody can get into the grand operas these days. Just take a look at what happened in Britain when the Labour Party, after winning the elections, wanted to get their new MPs their traditional seats at the opera. It was impossible because the seats had already been taken by the lords. Sometimes you can get into a matinee there, but no one has a chance of getting into the premieres. The rise of the musical was an attempt to somehow exploit the financial capacity of the middle- and lower classes, to get money out of them. Rock-n-Roll achieved the same thing starting in the sixties. The young had plenty of money, because after the war they were in apprenticeships and had regular incomes, and so they could buy a record every week or at least every month. Everything is perfectly calculated. A lot of smart people in this country grasped the opportunity and started to do musicals. Amazingly this merry-go-round is still turning and making money, which is something I can't understand. Yes, I can see a number of attempts at innovation, one cannot write it all off as mindless, and there are some major artistic and what you might call intellectual or text investments. But the mortal sin of Czech musical is that it lacks irony about itself. I am an admirer of Webber's Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, for example, where at one point the action stops and the protagonists entirely challenge the principles that they embody. Joseph is supposedly dead and his father weeps for him, he is comforted by a girl and together they dance in front of the curtain, and suddenly Joseph takes off his dark glasses and says, "Let's get on with the plot. I'm dead, but nothing is happening." It is a tremendous lightening up of the atmosphere, and if someone did it in Dracula (successful Czech musical--editor's note), half the audience would definitely understand and the piece would acquire another dimension. But in this country musical is treated like an opera around 1800, except that opera around 1800 was done a little better. Perhaps it is the revenge of history. In history it what usually happens is that once grand styles come back in lightened up and boiled down forms. This can be the case with musical as well, following the rule that what comes first as tragedy comes back a second time as farce.

Let us take the situation from the opposite side now--what is the situation of classical music today?

Naturally it is a minority genre, but what isn't a minority genre? Only mainstream pop. Rock music and folk rock are already minority affairs today. Jazz is very definitely in the position of a minority genre. Unless it goes for something of the kind that Jaromir Hnilicka tried, for example, when he did a jazz mass at Petrov. Ordinary believers came too, and people who were interested in paraliturgical music, but they were not jazzmen of course. In other words, I think we are seeing a huge process of syncretism, which reminds me of Late Antiquity and the Early Christian period. Those were times when religion didn't exist in pure form, many people believed in various different cults and combined them in all kinds of ways. Today the media throw so much information at us that we couldn't actually be non-syncretic if we tried. This is why classical music no longer exists in pure form. When I look at the young generation of composers I can't see even one who is a purely classical composer. Earlier, composers used to come out of the conservatory or studies with some master and if then Mr. XY wrote an operetta, they would want to banish him from the avant-garde. Today everyone says, yes, he has to make a living. Of course he studied at the Janacek Academy of Performing Arts, but now he plays in a band or makes clips or ten different things at the same time. And occasionally he writes a symphony. His intentions are serious, but he thinks on five different tracks. And so we get synthesis.

Can one say what the classical music public of today is like?

Probably not, because the public changes. It is a complete minority, but if some appealing external element is added, classical music can attract a lot of people. One example might be the Ostrava Days, a festival of avant-garde music that the well-known avantgardist Petr Kotik, born in 1942, decided to hold. He deliberately held it in industrial Ostrava, in an environment we might consider completely acultural. But it worked perfectly. He combined avant-garde music with industrial conditions, which was a terrific idea and the response was very good. This shows that it is possible to get a broader public to listen to classical music, but the music must have some new, non-traditional packaging.

You mean by providing the audience with some key to interpretation, some potential explanation that will make the music more accessible?

Yes, or else a special performance. For example when a cellist like Jiri Barta plays, or violinist like Pavel Sporcl. Sporcl attracts a certain public that admires him because he is an excellent violinist, looks unconventional, doesn't play in black tie and so on, and so basically he can play anything, and his public will swallow it, to a certain extent. I say to a certain extent, because if he decided to play the Schonberg's violin concerto he would have problems in the long term, because people would start complaining everywhere that he was playing something peculiar. Or he would have to play in some exclusive setting, package it in some special way.

I think the same thing can be observed with "high-brow" literature, which today seems to need a "para-story" if it is to appeal to a broader readership. But does classical music still retain an odour of exclusivity, snobbery?

Of course, old people who behave as people used to behave in the concert hall come to our concerts too. It is more a kind of ritual than anything else. Ultimately we all came to this ritual by what you might call a snobbish route. We were taken to the theatre, sometimes at six, or at ten, or at fifteen, and there we saw the audience and learned when to applaud and when not to, and it was the same at concerts. Many people have ritualised it to the extent that concerts have become a social imperative for them--we just have to be there. Naturally at JAMU it is different. When there is a concert there, the students form another kind of audience. Probably what is important is to mix environments. To do concerts among pictures and so on. Every era has to give new substance to the ritual; there is no permanent recipe.

Could one generalise and say that the perception of art is an essentially ritualised matter?

To a certain extent yes, because when a perception is collective, everyone is going to watch how his neighbour reacts. With individual perception the situation is slightly different. There I don't have to make any pretence, and I am not bound to any external response. One example: I went to a musical that I averagely enjoyed and I was averagely satisfied. The performances were quite good. And the people who were there, probably businessmen because the tickets were very expensive, expressed crazy enthusiasm corresponding to the price of the tickets. The enthusiasm was enormous. And so you see that even para-stories like this influence the perception of a work.

You spoke about syncretism, but don't you have the feeling that the opposite trend exists as well, that artistic genres are getting further and further away from each other, and that for example contemporary music communicates far less with art or contemporary literature?

Syncretism is to some extent a case of the "wish being father to the though", of course; we want it to be like that. But I would say that the position may actually have improved in music, in relation to the visual arts for example, when you think of "graphic music", "visual scores" and so on. Earlier music was a purely acoustic matter but since 1950, with the existence of graphic music, it has not been possible to ignore the visual side. Nonetheless it's true that a very high level of specialisation is occurring inside the individual branches of the arts. This is perhaps comparable with specialisation in the sciences after the positivist era. But here too there is a different level, because interdisciplines are developing that are far more important. Physical chemistry is emerging between physics and chemistry, and is more important than the classical disciplines ... Interdisciplines are also emerging inside music, bringing it closer to the visual.

What is the situation in relation to literature? Does contemporary opera for example use contemporary prose as libretto?

I'll answer on the general level. Opera is actually something that began from literature and then moved further away from literature. The first opera librettos were written by great poets, but then people took over who turned them out as if on a production line. From the point of view of craftsmanship they were very good, but they devaluated the great words. The great word "love" was constantly on the lips of singers, and so nobody any longer much believed in it anymore. That was the situation from 1690/1700 to 1750. After a period like that, however, innovation always comes along in one form or another. Around 1800 we find types appearing who don't trust the established art of libretto and rightly find it stale, and they look for a literary opera. Which means that they read. Obviously it depends on what they read. They may read banalities, or great literature. That was the case with Beethoven. He always became enraptured with something and wanted to do it as an opera and then looked around for someone who would do it for him. This is the process of the literarisation of opera. And the process continued in a very steep curve that culminates in Wagner. Wagner is the ideal example of poet and musician combined. And I deliberately put "poet" first, because his Collected Writings are very impressive. Today, however, there is no unequivocal answer. It is very likely that opera is using literature for inspiration. There are plenty of cases. Recently for example an opera based on Beckett was staged in Prague. Think how many times Svejk has been done as an opera. But of course the quality of the results is a different matter. Today the composer needs to have a good literary knowledge, to be widely read and able to find his or her own way. Abroad you find an ideal combination in Steve Reich and Beryl Korot. They are married, Reich composes and Korot writes terrific texts.

A few years ago the philosopher Vaclav Belohradsky claimed that opera was a genre as dead as poetry ...

That's nothing new. People have been saying that since 1600. And I think opera has basically come to live with the situation and reckon with it. Opera always has to be hitting a crisis to show once again that it is not in crisis. Since 1900 there has been enquiry after enquiry designed to discover whether opera is in crisis. Of course it is. Opera is a museum. People go to the Metropolitan Opera as they go to a museum. There they consider Puccini to be modern opera and Janacek is considered some peculiar anomaly. Some operas are deliberately museums, museums that have fantastic subsidies and attract vast numbers of visitors. Opera in general probably lives for the past, because it shows how many great achievements were accomplished then. When you compare what was written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with what was written in the twentieth century, then it is clear that the impulse of the past predominates. On the other hand, directors today in general try to innovate--to dress operas in new costumes, to put them in different settings. Recently I saw a Twelfth Night that was updated to the period 1900-1915. It was extremely interesting. Of course, it shifted the work to a different level entirely. It doesn't bother people who already know the text and it can potentially attract a larger public by appeal to the popularity of a certain period, style of costumes and so on.

You have mentioned Janacek, and of course his operas are a model example of the combination of literature and music. Milan Kundera has written that Janacek discovered the world of prose for opera, and even the world of realistic prose, and that he rejected stylisation and discovered the acoustic world outside music. What do you see as unique about Janacek?

It is one of the great ambitions of musicologists--to explain how Janacek wrote his operas. Actually we don't know much about it and one might ask whether it will help us a great deal when we do know. But his achievements, his contribution, are something else. Milan Kundera has expressed it very well, but Janacek was not the first to discover prose, and he was following the French naturalists. Specifically he made a detailed study of Gustav Charpentier, who wrote the opera Louise. This is a story from Bohemian life, from the street, where we hear the jingles of milk-sellers and bakers and so on. Evidently this attracted Janacek, because he did something similar. He knew that opera could no longer speak in a stylised idiom that had originated some time at the beginning of the seventeenth century and drawn on the tradition of Petrach and Dante. That idiom had slid into the hands of mass producers who strikingly resemble today's Musical librettists and the original power of the words had been lost. Prose libretto therefore definitely helped opera to come closer to reality, to naturalism. Janacek, originally a great proponent of formalism, suddenly started to talk about the need for truth to take precedence over beauty. This means that ugliness too is justified. It also looks as if he started to look for ugliness. Furthermore prose creates irregular shapes that made it possible to go beyond the stereotypes of aria and recitative. Janacek called this "formative splinters", which is his term, and he put the opera together from these splinters. The melodies of speech, which he recorded on a systematic, daily basis in the street, are another thing. Today we no longer believe that this was a scientific enterprise. I would say it was a more literary project. Arne Novak, when he wrote about his feuilletons--Milenec a nevolnik okamziku [The Lover and the Serf of the Moment] was sharply insightful on this point. Few Czech writers--and here Janacek may be considered a writer--chose this form of splinters. Perhaps the smallest form that Janacek used in his feuilletons is precisely a kind of speech melody splinter. He then composes a sketch or feuilleton out of melody splinters and this isolated melody is actually a kind of entity. It was through these phenomena that Janacek got to know the world. And this is evident in his operas too. One other aspect is also interesting from the literary point of view. In his third opera--Jenufa--Janacek for the first time altered the libretto, improving on Preiss's original in terms of dramatic effect and in some instinctive way arrived at the Aeschylean principle. It is something first noticed by the English. The Aeschylean principle involves one figure playing many other figures and entering into them. We find this in all of Janacek's operas--one character replaying, quoting another: a monologue that works like a dialogue. The Kostelnicka in Jenufa says, "It will be soon. But in the mean time I have to go through a whole eternity a whole salvation. What if I took the child away somewhere ... Then they would pounce on me, on Jenufa. You see her. You see her. You see her, Kostelnicka.." And now she plays the future situation over to herself. This principle is used randomly, appears once or twice, but it can entirely dominate as in the case of the last opera Z mrtveho domu [From the House of the Dead], where it is the principle that generates the action. The characters are already waiting only for death in a concentration camp and they narrate their memories. The memories are far stronger than their current state. They tell how they killed someone or what happened to them, what wrong has been done them or how they have arrived here through injustice, and as they do they play different characters. And it becomes clear that this monologue / dialogue is far more powerful than if there had been ten of these characters present with each playing only himself. And one more thing: in Destiny and Jenufa veristic opera plays a major part. Jenufa is essentially ancient tragedy, and its novelty and great modernity lies in the fact that Janacek has set it in a highly specific time and place. In the spirit of verism he has replaced the universalism at which Late Romanticism had arrived--the world as myth, the world as the universe, as we see for example in Wagner. This can be played anywhere, on a boat or in a military base and suchlike. In the case of verism, however, the setting matters a great deal; it matters that it is a mill that is so and so many kilometres from Hruba Vrbka. Verism work with the concrete, unique setting and ritual is important here. An ancient tragedy repeats itself: jealousy, murder, love, hate and so on, but these are differently packaged, in this case in the garb of folk costume, the garb of ritual, the garb of the dance of recruits.

Another musical phenomenon that you have been concerned with and that is linked with literature is that of singing poets. What form does this phenomenon take today?

A musicus poeticus is someone who essentially works with both levels, with music and with poetry or the word. This tradition developed very strongly in humanism, i.e. from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century. In this period the poet was able to write some musical form and combine it with poetry. It was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that were crucial, however, because this was when people who had a need to combine music with text emerged as a clear group especially in the universities and the intellectual sphere. But even well before this, in the fourteenth century, when the new mensural notation was developed, suddenly it was possible to write music down in a far more complex way, to structure it. Some people composed in a way that shows they were not even very interested in the question of whether a piece could be sung at all, and were just excited by the range of possibilities of what could be invented on the page. With the sixteenth and seventeenth came the development of a vast field of figurics, rhetorical figures in the sense of pre-composed situations that it was useful to know for particular kinds of verbs of motion, for particular kinds of numerical and spatial relations and so on. There are several dozen such figures and they can either be used conventionally as they were intended or else individualists can try to bend or break them using anti-figures. This means they begin to use them in other ways, which everyone notices. Around the year 1600 this led to the rise of what was known as the modern and a rift--musica antica e moderna. And in Italy a seconda prattica--other practice, developed. The popularisation of art, which is most evident at the beginning of the Baroque and in the Middle Baroque, acted as a major factor for conserving style. In the decorative arts or in literature and music, we are not sure in the Renaissance what is schlock and rubbish and what is high art. But in the Baroque we can be completely certain. We can see the artisan making cherubs and shrine figures on a production line. The equivalent in music is the broadside ballad. This is the projection of high art onto the ordinary market where it is sold for money. The trend on the other hand means the fall of musica poetica. Bach is still a musicus poeticus, which means that he knows exactly how to treat verses. After Bach, from the 18th century, the roles divide. There are composers and there are poets. You can see it today in Czech pop and folk. There are poets who are quite clearly a long way from being great musicians and fit some quite decent or adequate poetic figure to some empty music.

Last year we celebrated a major Janacek Anniversary. Do you think this will attract more attention to his work? I almost have the sense that Janacek is more popular abroad than in this country.

Janacek really is performed abroad more than he is here. The Janacek "boom" abroad is quite marked. But when he is performed in a better than average way here he draws great attention--for example Wilson's Prague production of Destiny. The jubilee year 2004--a hundred years from the Brno, local premiere of Jenufa--was a reminder that today Janacek is attracting the greatest directors, choreographers and stage designers, and is being sung by the best singers and staged in the most famous opera houses in the world. We are witnessing new interpretations of his operas. Jenufa as the problem of unwanted children, social and other inequalities. In the same way Wilson's breakthrough production of the opera Destiny--as a probe into the composer's biography--broke through an earlier indifference to the piece. And Vylety pana Broucka [The Excursions of Mr. Broucek], that excellent burlesque on a Czech or indeed any other petit bourgeois, just like Liska Bystrouska [The Cunning Little Vixen], one of the most "ecological operas" of the 20th century. Its brilliant dynamism and colourfulness predetermine it to become the opera-ballet of our era, and a Paris production had just this concept of it. From the House of the Dead is the opera of the black 20th century--the century of gulags and concentration camps and escapes from them. This opera cries out for film or television adaptation. The main thing, however, is that we shall not be able to follow just some "one obligatory" tradition. New and different traditions are already emerging. And it is possible and likely that they will attract a larger number of admirers than the previous one.

(Reprinted in abridged form with the kind permission of the magazine Host)

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Prof. PhDr. et MgA Milos Stedron, CSc (*9. 2. 1942)

Musicologist and composer. He studied musicology at the Philosophical Faculty of Brno University and composition at the Janacek Academy of Performing Arts. In the 1960s he led the Theatre of Music in Brno and was one of the founders of the Theatre on a String [Divadlo na provazku], where he composed music for many productions (including Balada pro banditu [Ballad for a Bandit] (M. Uhde, 1975), Pohadka maje [Fairytale of May] (M. Uhde, 1976), Cameleon aneb Josef Fouche [The Chameleon or Josef Fouche] (L. Kundera, 1984) and so on). With Parsch, Ruzicka and Medek he has worked on "collective compositions" based on the Czech experimental music of the 1960s.

Since 1972 he has taught at the Institute of Musical Science at the Philosophical Faculty of Masaryk University. There he specialises in Renaissance and Baroque Music, and 20th-Century Music with a focus on the works of Leos Janacek. He is the author of many academic studies published in learned journals in this country and abroad. His books include Claudio Monteverdi (1985), Josef Berg--skladatel mezi hudbou, divadlem a literaturou [Josef Berg-A Composer Between Music, Theatre and Literature] (1992), Leos Janacek a hudba 20, stoleti [Leos Janacek and the Music of the 20th Century], Paraley, sondy, dokumenty [Parallels, Probes, Documents] (1998). As a composer he works with Iva Bittova.