Jan Dismas Zelenka: (16th October 1679-22nd-23rd December 1745).

Jan Dismas Zelenka and His Style of Composition

The aesthetic qualities and value of the music of Jan Dismas Zelenka (16th October 1679 Lounovice pod Blanikem--night of the 22nd to 23rd of December 1745 Dresden) were all but unknown to modern musical life for much of the 20th century. When an edition of the Bohemian composer's chamber and orchestral works came out and the top Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger made them famous by his masterly interpretations. Zelenka's music suddenly attracted an avalanche of interest on international scale. It was a final vindication for the handful of enthusiasts in Bohemia and Dresden who had been trying for decades but without much success to convince the world of Zelenka's exceptional contributions to music. Today he has been accepted and ranked alongside J. S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi or Telemann as a major Baroque composer. The discovery led to enormous academic interest and grants from German universities and foundations, resulting in numerous editions of his music, biographical documents, a thematic catalogue, two major international conferences and lengthy collected papers, two books and other publications.

Zelenka received the basic elements of his musical education from his father Jiri, the choirmaster and organist in his native village. His views and outlook were probably also influenced by the local Roman Catholic priest Jan Komensky, nephew of the most important figure of the Czech Reformation and Bishop of the Bohemian Unity of the Brethren, Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius). We do not know whether this priest brought up his charges in a purely Catholic spirit, or told them about the stirring reformationary past and its ideas and symbols, and whether these ideas might then have influenced Zelenka's attitudes and faith. After the young musician moved to study at a Jesuit gymnasium in Prague he did or said something that was considered very wrong. Was this transgression something to do with doctrine, or did it reveal the homosexual orientation that has been suggested by the important Dresden scholar Wolfgang Reich, or was it something else? We don't know. All that is certain is that he carried with him a sense of guilt throughout his life and it strongly informed his music. Fortunately the Jesuits recognised his extraordinary talent as well as his guilt and gave him opportunities to compose and perform, but he did not go on to study at university. In 1704 he composed the music for the Jesuit school play Via laureata and then we know nothing of events in his life or other works until 1709. In this year he was accepted into the service of the Count Josef Ludvik Hartig. Evidently on the latter's initiative or at least with his consent, and on the recommendation of the Jesuits, the young musician was selected for a special mission abroad--to write Catholic church music at the court of the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, who had only recently converted to Catholicism. Probably in 1710 he became double bassist and later court composer of Roman Catholic sacred music in Dresden. The young Czech soon proved his talents here and his very first Mass for St. Cecilia in G major was a success. King Augustus II the Strong sent him to study composition in Vienna under J. J. Fux and possibly to Italy as well. Although his task was primarily to compose vocal instrumental church music, he soon showed himself an original and highly ingenious composer of orchestral and chamber music. In Vienna his orchestral Capriccios with thrilling concertante french horns had already been a great success. His six Sonatas with leading oboe part, created soon after his return to Dresden around 1720, are dazzling pieces. At the coronation of the Habsburg Charles VI as King of Bohemia in Prague 1723 Zelenka also excelled with his orchestral suites and concertante works and music for the ceremonial St. Wenceslas play Sub olea pacis et palma virtutis. Nonetheless, it is sacred music that forms the greater part of his output, and it was particularly in sacred music that he showed his mastery of polyphony and his feeling for emotional and philosophical depths, for the expression of humility and awe in the face of divine power. He created almost 30 masses, some of them long and major--festival masses with trumpets and kettle drums such as the Easter in D major or the Christmas Mass for the Birth of Our Lord in D major, and some deep and reflective such as the Mass of the Holy Trinity in A minor or parts of the probably unfinished series Six Missae ultimae--God the Father in C major, God the Son in C major and All Saints in A minor. Among Zelenka's four requiems the most important is the last in D major for the exequies of King Augustus II the Strong. He also wrote dozens of very various Psalms, the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah, the oratorios The Copper Serpent, Jesus on Calvary, and the Penitents at the Tomb of the Redeemer, ten cycles of litanies, two Te Deums and much else.

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Zelenka's creative talent was undoubtedly stimulated and refined by acquaintance with earlier and contemporary European music in Saxony and in Vienna. His studies with J. J. Fux were very important for him, as were his experiences of outstanding performers and large court orchestras. The Vienna court orchestra was conducted by Fux and Antonio Caldara, and for many years Zelenka himself had the chance to work with the court ensemble in Dresden and to watch all the others who conducted it from his position as double-bass player. As double-bass player he rehearsed and played in the premiere of Fux's coronation opera Costanza e fortezza in Prague in September 1723, and it was here that he himself stood at the head of a large ensemble to rehearse and present his ceremonial St. Wenceslas play. These experiences were a great stimulus to his creative gifts and speeded up and channelled the development of the talent he had showed since his Prague years. The masterly skill and distinctive character of his work is the result of a unique coincidence of different kinds of source and inspiration.

The foundation of Zelenka's musical idiom was the style of the Central European High Baroque. Around 1700 the older style of Renaissance vocal polyphony still survived in Prague, and in Vienna, where Fux was one of those who favoured it. We may assume that he taught Zelenka the elements of style as thoroughly as he expounded them in his textbook Gradus ad parnassum (1725). And this was not just a matter of Palestrina's style but of the expressive language, colourful combinations of distant chords and chromatic treatment of voices typical of mannerism and often, for example, of Girolamo Frescobaldi. It is no accident that among the many pieces that Zelenka transcribed and brought to Dresden was Frescobaldi's collection Fiori musicali, and no accident that in the 1730s he parodied ricercares in unusually melodically and harmonically intense ways, giving them a text and instrumentalising them for choir and orchestra. Especially in the musical expression of pain, regret and humility before the majesty of God, for example in the musical arrangement of the mass Credo, various points in the requiem, in numerous Christmas pieces including oratorios, psalms etc. Zelenka manages to exploit the impulses of Mannerist music in the service of an extreme expressiveness. Fux also provided him with a thorough training in Baroque polyphony, and Zelenka became a master of canons, fugal counterpoint variations and so forth. In addition he learned the Venetian style with its concertante idiom a la Vivaldi, while from the 1730s he was confronted with the Neapolitan opera style also applied to sacred music, which was already distinctive in its gallant mode and simplified in a Classicist spirit. He seems to have used it in Eight Arias on Italian texts in the cantata Serenata, and we can also find its traces in some places in oratorios from the mid-1730s. Zelenka evidently adopted it to improve his standing at the court, since this kind of music appealed to the young Elector and King Frederick Augustus II. To no avail, since the king still appointed a direct representative of this style, Johann Adolf Hasse to the head of the court kapell, and Zelenka was only allowed to stand in for him when he was away for long periods. Indeed, Zelenka was never to be appointed kapellmeister. Particularly for the style of his late masses and other sacred music works, Prof. Thomas Kohlhase has coined the term mixed sacred style", by which he means the internally contrasting alternation and intermingling of all the style elements mentioned within single individual works.

Research into the sources and form of Zelenka's style has one unexplored aspect, which some authors avoid altogether while other authors simply make assertions of general kind about it without trying to get to grips with it in any more concrete way. This is the Czech element and wellspring of Zelenka's music the issue of what it was in his native tradition that influenced his unique and individual musical idiom. Foreign musicologists who have written on Zelenka's Capriccios and Sonatas or characterised his music in general, have speculated that the composer's musical imagination owed much to his native environment, a definably Slavonic and specifically Czech folk musicality. We Czechs are of course highly sensitive to this element, but it is very hard to identify and formulate it precisely. This is because the popular musical cultures of the lands of Central Europe in the Baroque era were so closely inter-related and mutually entwined that when we take any one musical idea or even idiom it is impossible to say exactly whether it is Czech, Austrian or South German, and sometimes well-known popular melodies identified with one area or another turn out to have equivalents beyond the immediate borders of that area. Of course, specifically Czech, Austrian, German and Polish music does exist, but there is a great deal of overlap and mutual influence, and sometimes, for example, you hear something of French origin sounding irresistibly Czech.

Zelenka's orchestral Capriccios are a typical case in point, and there are also strikingly Czech aspects in his six Sonatas. Intonations reminiscent of Czech music are scattered through his orchestral works and in various places in his sacred music as well. Czech and common Central European attributes appearing in the music are primarily matters of melodies and movement identified in Czech music with a number of distinct genres. Zelenka sometimes seems to draw on the melodic archetype of a broad ascending-descending melodic arch identifiable in Czech music from the Hussite Paternoster of the earlier 15th century and appearing frequently in Czech folk music of a later date. It was intensively developed in Czech choral and hymnal tradition both Protestant and Catholic and is strikingly evident for example in the music of Bohuslav Matej Cernohorsky, J. D. Zelenka's most important Czech contemporary. It is not accidental that, for example, the strong melody of the first choral fugue of the St. Wenceslas play, Sub olea pacis et palma virtutis to the words Dextera tua Domine, has affinities with the first fugue theme of Cernohorsky's Laudetur Jesus Christus and the subjects of his organ fugues. Zelenka sometimes draws on the lyricism of the Czech folk song, and also has something in common with Christmas carols; three parts of his Christmas Missa Nativitatis Domini in D major are pastoral in character. Zelenka uses simple, almost folksong melodics in his canons, and his fast instrumental

movements, especially those that have a dance element, sound strikingly Czech. None of the movements of his Sonatas are actually named after specific dances, but they have definite resonances of dance music, especially Czech folk dances, particularly in the rapid last movements. Some of their themes are at heart close to Czech folk instrumental idiom, but not of a kind that we can document until roughly fifty years later. All kinds of traces of Czech folk musical feeling and tradition can be found in Zelenka's work, although they do not play a major constitutive role in his compositional style.

There is an essential drama and theatricality about Zelenka's music, and it appears that this was a feature of his work even before he deepened his education as a composer by studying with J. J. Fux in Vienna. We can ground this judgment in more than just the fact that the first of Zelenka's known works was music for the Jesuit school play Via Laureata, magnis virtutum. As early as 1709 he wrote Music for the Holy Sepulchre Immisit Dominus pestilentiam, which includes the dramatically very effective alto aria Recordare, Domine, testamenti tui with chamber instrumental ensemble. In its central recitative part the instruments are vividly used to express the clamour of destruction. It is an example of Zelenka's tendency to dramatic and directly programmatic musical expression of emotion even before his departure for Dresden.

There are many instances of musico-dramatic ideas in Zelenka's output. They include the use of violin tremolo to express the shaking of the earth in Psalm 113 In exitu Israel D minor, the depiction of the timbres and stylistic qualities of the instruments named in the text of Psalm 150 Praise ye God the Mighty; the evocative descriptions of situations and settings in a dark, mystrical sinfonia for the oratorio I Penitenti al Sepolchro del Redentore, and the depiction of human character, for example in the mimicking of the painful breaths of a hypochondriac in the sinfonia Hypocondria. We find an instrumental characterisation of states of the human mind in two movements of the Capriccio no. 5 G major of 1729: II contento (Content), serene and with Czech elements, and II furibundo (Furious) with a wild turbulent unison of all the violins. One particularly remarkable example of the depictive element in Zelenka's music is Psalm 129 In convertendo ZWV 91; here the text on conversion (of godless people and enemies of the Lord), inspires the composer to write canons in inversion, i.e. with "converted" testimonies. We find such touches, representing non-musical content, situations and so forth, in other pieces as well, but the theatrical quality of Zelenka's music is best documented in his major works on dramatically conceived libretti, the St. Wenceslas play Sub olea pacis et pama virtutis, the oratorios, and the cantata Serenata.

The most impressive and unique value of the music of Jan Dismas Zelenka lies in his expressive profundity and authenticity, the interior depth of his musical testimony, but of course the Baroque was the epoch of grand gestures and emotions, and in this sense Zelenka was entirely a son of his time. Like Baroque statues and paintings, cathedrals and palaces, his music, and especially his great sacred works, i.e. the festival and mourning (requiem) masses, oratorios, litanies. Psalms, the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah, the Magnificat and Te Deum, are highly charged testimony to the meaning of the texts and original emotional interpretations of their mysteries. Far from formal or conventional in spirit, they are always deeply experienced and unique in terms of the intensity with which their message is conveyed. Of course, liturgical and biblical texts offer a range of different moods and nuances of expression in the celebration of God, Christ and the saints. Zelenka often polarises their musical expression. At one pole he emphasises joyful celebration and trust, sometimes to the point of the childishly naive; this is the source of the exalted style of his Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Osanna and Benedictus, Magnificat, the Te Deum, and Psalms with the their glorifications of the Lord and protestations of trust, the celebratory exclamations in the Litanies often with trumpets and choral and instrumental coloratura, the shifting texture of polyphonic parts that may be complex, but always exultant. At the other pole is the musical expression of the pleas for forgiveness and sins, the remorse, the images of pain and suffering, visions of punishments, despair and death derived from texts focused on the word Miserere (even when surrounded by the joyful visions of the mass Gloria or psalms and other texts), the depiction of the crucifixion and entombment of Christ in the mass Credo and the pleading verses of the Agnus Dei, the visions of the Last Judgment and eternal damnation, the Dies irae and despairing weeping in the Lacrimosa and other sections of the Requiem and so on. It is particularly in such images that the expressive power and energy of Zelenka's musical imagination resides. Here the composer opens up and addresses the Lord from the depths of his soul. You may also believe in God, but you need not, since a sensitive person not just of Zelenka's time but of our own can still hear in his music the trembling of the deepest layers of the human psyche, the authentic voice of human guilt, pain, despair and hope. I am convinced that this is the essence of the art of Jan Dismas Zelenka.

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