Erotic Biography in Janáček’s Quartet No. 1 and Britten’s Quartet No. 3

Susan McClary and Philip Brett—both cornerstones of ‘new musicology’—have written not only of the fallacy of musical abstraction, but of its tyranny. ‘Of all the sacrosanct preserves of art music today’, writes McClary, ‘the most prestigious, the most carefully protected is a domain known as "Absolute Music": music purported to operate on the basis of pure configurations, untainted by words, stories, or even affect’.[1] Carl Dahlhaus has traced the impulse to make some instrumental music ‘self-contained, innocent of social or other referential meanings’ to a pious, Germanic, metaphysical philosophy epitomised by Eduard Hanslick’s insistence that ‘tonally moving forms are the sole content and object of music’.[2] This essay aims to deny the ‘innocence’ of absolutism to two string quartets whose compositional rhetorics have explicitly concerned themselves with the sexualities of the composers: Leoš Janáček’s quartet No. 1 'The Kreutzer Sonata' (1923) and Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 3 in G Major, Op. 94 (1975).

'The Kreutzer Sonata' does not derive its title from Beethoven, but from Leo Tolstoy's 1899 novella of the same name. In it, TOlstoy advocates sexual abstinence via the intense first-person depiction of a husband, Pozdnyshev’s, jealous rage. Pozdnyshev’s deep-set misogyny stems from sexual panic; in the same breath as asserting that women will never achieve equal rights to men as long as they are treated as objects of desire, he also bemoans the power that sexuality affords them. His own marriage, which ricochets between passionate lovemaking and vitriolic fighting, culminates in his wife’s affair with a violinist named Troukhatchevsky, with whom she has been performing Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ No. 9, Op. 47. Upon finding the lovers together, Pozdnyshev murders his wife with a dagger. Pozdnyshev is arguably just as anxious about music as he is about sexuality. He describes Beethoven’s 'Kreutzer Sonata' as ‘a strange piece of music’, and insists that music ‘does not elevate the spirit', but rather has a 'terrible effect' and 'irritates the soul'. 'Music', he states, 'forces me to forget myself and my true state, it transports me to some other state which is not mine'.[3] While Pozdnyshev’s feelings about music are not necessarily Tolstoy’s, his epilogue to the 1890 edition of the novella made his celibate morality explicit; he deemed sex and love to be worthless, and married life to be ‘swinish’ and ‘vile’.[4]

Janáček’s response to the novella is not a straightforwardly programmatic one—Kirsten Bersch describes it instead as a ‘retort’.[5] Rather than Tolstoy’s moralising, it was ‘the feelings and circumstances of Podznyshev's wife—unhappiness in marriage, abuse by her husband, desire for a passionate relationship’ that motivated Janáček to compose his first quartet. Unhappily married to Zdenka Schulzová from 1881 until his death in 1928, he fell in love with Kamila Stösslová in 1917 while holidaying in a Moravian spa town.[6] Almost 40 years her senior, the 63-year-old composer wrote to her almost every single day for the rest of his life, receiving ambivalent but polite replies. His correspondence with her frequently discusses his compositional activity in relation to his obsession with her: while composing operas he would not only state, baldly, that he based various heroines on her, but would address her by that heroine’s name.[7] Janáček overtly extended this personification to the themes of his instrumental music, writing,

Tell me, might one disclose who the personification of my theme is? Has any writer done it? Painters can make no secret of it [….] She approves since she and I regard ourselves as absolved of the indictment of any liaison except a purely spiritual one.[8]

Bersch reads this statement as Janáček ‘preserving his love for her [….] to live out his desires vicariously’; a ‘fantasy romance’, and even ‘his way of immortalising Kamila, preserving her beauty’ as the magic elixir preserve’s Elena’s in his opera The Makropulos Case.[9] 

The overriding impression from all of this correspondence is that Stösslová does not have much choice in the matter. The fantasy is Janáček’s, and his attempt is to ‘capture’ her image ‘in order to fulfil his narrative goal of constructing an “eternal present” in his music’.[10] Pushing the boundaries of realism, Milan Kundera describes the ‘eternal present’ as a ‘recreation of events and emotions through an artistic medium in order to preserve the essence of a relationship, individual or event in a way that compensates for what the memory is unable to reproduce’.[11] There is ample evidence in Janáček’s correspondence with Stösslová to suggest that this preservation of some spiritual essence was a chief motivation in his composition of both string quartets. The catch is that, as suggested by several scholars in the following analyses, the ‘decidedly erotic’ tone of both 'The Kreutzer Sonata' and his second (and more explicitly addressed to Stösslová) quartet, 'Intimate Letters', does not make a memory ‘eternally present’, but an unconsummated erotic fantasy.[12]

Based upon his own conversations with Janáček, Milan Skampa considers the first movement of 'The Kreuzer Sonata' to be a ‘portrait’ of Podznyshev's wife, suggesting that Janáček wanted this movement to evoke ‘compassion for the miserable, prostrate female being’.[13] Janáček is often portrayed as a proto-feminist in his reading of Tolstoy’s novella, usually due to pity narratives such as this. ‘I had in mind a poor woman, tormented, beaten, battered to death’, he wrote, probably prompting violinist Josef Suk to write that ‘Janáček meant the work to be a kind of moral protest against men's despotic attitude to women’; Skampa cites Janáček stating that ‘we must defend the unyoking of womanhood’.[14] Burrell states her own motivic analysis of 'Intimate Letters' alongside those by Skampa and Jaroslav Vogel, and always, in light of these comments, with the view that Podznyshev's wife is the ‘protagonist’: ‘his music portrays the feelings of all three characters in the story’, writes Mirka Zemanová, ‘one can almost sense the individual characters entering and leaving the stage’.[15]

Skampa’s dramatis personae on Janáček’s ‘stage’ are as follows: the opening motif of the first movement (figure 1), which recurs through all four movements, is the nameless wife (so, by extension, Stösslová), and the second movement’s opening viola motif (figure 2) is the antagonist-lover.[16] Burrell identifies a third character-motif for the jealous husband in bar 169 of the final movement.[17] This motives do indeed permeate the quartet, and perhaps while so literal a programmatic reading as Zemanová’s has the potential to assume definite direct intertextual relationships between specific points in the novella and the quartet, the manner in which these two themes interact with one another has illuminative analytical potential for insight into Janáček’s reading of Tolstoy’s work. Janáček was, after all, obsessed with the ‘interpenetration’ and ‘percolation’ of harmonies.[18] It is arguably not such a stretch to extend the metaphor to motivic analysis. Vogel also assigns characters, events, and sentiments to several of the work’s main motives’, hearing the ascending fourth as a ‘love motif’. Bersch agrees with his move away from direct personification and towards the thematization of affect, describing the wife’s theme as the ‘theme of the heroine's pain and suffering’.[19] ‘She describes this suffering as ‘omnipresent, even though at times it is obscured or hidden’.[20] Attributing the major melody in the second section of the first movement to a possible love scene, which problematically precedes the ‘foppish’ entry of the seductive viola in the second movement, she identifies a variation of the woman’s theme in the ‘underlying triplet accompaniment, creating a close connection to the theme of suffering’ (figure 3).[21]

Figure 1: The 'Wife' Motif

Figure 2: The 'Antagonist-Lover' Motif

Figure 3: The 'Love' Motif

Nors J. Josephson’s reading of Janáček’s second quartet, 'Intimate Letters' may have justifiably more straightforwardly biographical personifications, this time of Janáček himself and Stösslová as a masculine-feminine matrix with a dance-like child’s theme in the third movement. Nevertheless, Janáček’s decision not only to compose out such a violently misogynistic novella as 'The Kreutzer Sonata' but to relatively explicitly cast a real woman—the object of his, a musician’s, obsession—in the role of victim, has sinister undertones as yet only alluded to in scholarly literature.[22] Bersch writes that such comments as a request for ‘a picture of Kamila's head with her hair let down on the cover of the printed score to the Diary of One Who Disappeared ‘prompted Kamila to keep a safe distance from the composer’, while John Tyrrel not only notes that ‘when he suggested that she might like to attend the Prague premiere of the Diary of One Who Disappeared […,] he received a forthright refusal in which she made her position abundantly clear: she did not wish to be alone with Janáček’, but corroborates his first ever greeting to her (‘you must be a Jewess!’) with her ‘chance remark’ in 1925 that she ‘didn’t want to speak to him’.[23] Janáček’s frequently demanding, intrusive, and exoticising behaviour towards Stösslová could inflect analyses of 'The Kreutzer Sonata' more than it presently does. An amount of scepticism could therefore be extended to Rachael Wilson’s suggestion that ‘while Tolstoy's text deprives the woman of a voice, Janáček's Quartet gives Pozdnygev's wife the only significant voice in his piece’.[24] It is not Stösslová’s voice, but Janáček’s fantasised ideal of her voice being heard here.

Several of the scholars cited above identify similarities between Janáček’s quartet themes and those found in his late operas. This is particularly relevant with themes from such works as The Cunning Little Vixen, the protagonist of which Janáček persistently related to Stösslová. Benjamin Britten’s use of five motifs from Death in Venice in his third quartet, however, inflects the biographical reception of his last major work in an altogether different way. Charged, as Anthony Payne writes, with ‘extra-musical significance’, he describes it as ‘fragmented’, ‘difficult to follow’, yet a ‘moving document’; Kimberly Fairbrother Canton, Amelia Defalco, Linda Hutcheon, Michael Hutcheon, Katherine R. Larson, and Helmut Reichenbacher hear the piece, in their various ways, as a ‘meditation on his life by way of his compositions’.[25] Ruth Sara Langobardi traces Aschenbach’s utterance ‘I love you’ through Death in Venice and out the other side, into the last movement of this quartet. ‘At first a fused unit of music and words’, she writes, it ‘continues beyond the libretto into the textless interlude—and finally beyond the confines of the opera entirely into another, purely musical genre, the string quartet [….] without the shelter of its partnering text’.[26] The sense of vulnerability here is poignant; not only was Britten ill and dying, but working with a ‘gesture which readily provokes questions about the parameters of musico-dramatic unity and homosexual meaning’.[27]

The intimacy of the first movement, “duets”, derives from the namesake pairing of each possible combination of instruments in the quartet. Significantly, this movement is not in a traditional sonata form, but a large binary. In the absence of the familiar large-scale form, it conversely derives its vulnerability from ‘tonally diffuse music recalling Aschenbach’s intellectual exhaustion at the opera’s opening’ create a ‘twelve-note unfolding’ of ‘isolated high and low pitches’.[28] Philip Brett has written of a ‘collusion of musicality and the closet’ via a ‘social contract’ which composers such as Britten ‘self-police under the terms of the closet's double-bind, its simultaneous stimulation and suppression of desire’.[29] Consequently, ‘public [queer] demonstration of feeling serves the function of keeping the rest of society in a state of decorum and restraint’.^[30] Britten never publicly discussed his sexuality, and yet within the ‘safety’ of the closet-container of the composition, he could not only deal with the themes of homosexuality, but pederasty.

As David Halperin writes, sexuality ‘represents the appropriation of the human body and its erogenous zones by an ideological discourse’.[31] In the injection of sexuality into music via the vocal utterance of “I love you” becoming the ‘paradox of an instrumental voice’, Britten injects his body into the quartet too: a ‘speaking presence without words’.[32] Each ‘voice’ enters solo in fantasy recitative before the Passacaglia proper. First the cello with the gondola-song, then the second violin with the pursuit of Tadzio, then the first violin with Tadzio’s gamelan-esque dance, and finally the viola with Aschenbach’s exhausted opening scirrocco.[33] Finally, the ‘I love you’ vow is played in a ‘ridiculous but sacred’ climactic tutti. While David Matthews hears in this Aschenbach’s ‘final quest for redemption’, perhaps it could be held up against Janáček’s erotic-fantasy twist of the ‘eternal present’: vivid flashes of song and exotic dance before a declaration of love, that leads into a morbid frenzy. The difference is that it is Britten’s life, and not his love-object’s, which is at stake here.

The ‘chromatically distorting’ bass of the passacaglia changes the love motif into something strange an uncanny, with the relentless repetition capturing ‘the reckless obsession of Aschenbach’s pursuit of Tadzio’ in ways reminiscent of Lawrence Kramer’s reading of Schubert’s “Doppelganger” and its obsessive, futile pacing.[34] In spite of the ‘dawning of tonal clarity’ in the ‘restoration’ of Aschenbach’s E major, the movement’s ‘non-end’ of a single note simply ‘dying away’ bring’s to mind Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s warning that ‘a musical idea that originates alongside a text can broaden the referential field, insinuating subtexts and deviations from the written word’; the passacaglia may have originated in the vocal utterance of a performative love-vow, but it has transformed, twisted, and deviated into an intertextual and decentred permutation of ambivalent meanings.[35] The ending of Britten’ final quartet is, as Longobardi points out, a ‘multivalent representational space that extends outward into an infinite network of possible associations […] the opera’s referential labyrinth in which [….] singular statements about homosexuality cannot and do not exist’.[36] This condition bears significant resemblance to the closet of composition described by Brett, and its double-bind of safety and suppression exist in these liminal ambiguities. The absence of these ‘singular statements’ is not an absence of sexual meaning, but a rich and unspoken tangle of multiple sexual meanings, which can only ever be alluded to, can never be linguistically pinned down, and are only as ‘eternally present’ as their biographical context.

Bibliogrpahy

Bersch, Kirsten, and Beck, Jeremy (supervisor). First String Quartet (“Kreutzer Sonata”) by Leoš Janáček, 2002, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

Burrell, Lisa, and Lange, Barbara Rose (supervisor). Music, Narrative, and Sexual Morality in the “Kreutzer Sonatas” of Beethoven, Tolstoy, and Janáček, 2002, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

Brett, Philip., Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas. Queering the Pitch [electronic Resource]: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Canton, Kimberly Fairbrother, Defalco, Amelia, Hutcheon, Linda, Hutcheon, Michael, Larson, Katherine R., and Reichenbächer, Helmut. "Death in Venice and Beyond: Benjamin Britten’s Late Works." University of Toronto Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2012): 893-908.

Holloway, Robin in Wingfield, Paul, ed.. Janáček Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Josephson, Nors S. "Janáček's Intimate Letters (Listy Důvěrné): Erotic Biography and Creative Genesis." Archiv Für Musikwissenschaft 66, no. 2 (2009): 155-84.

Longobardi, Ruth Sara. "Reading between the Lines: An Approach to the Musical and Sexual Ambiguities of Death in Venice." The Journal of Musicology 22, no. 3 (2005): 327-64.

McClary, Susan. “Narrative Agendas in "Absolute" Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms's Third Symphony” in Solie, Ruth A., ed.. Musicology and difference: gender and sexuality in music scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Payne, Anthony. "Britten and the String Quartet." Tempo, no. 163 (1987): 2-6.

Rupprecht, Philip in Cooke, Mervyn, ed.. The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten. 

Cambridge Companions to Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Tyrrell, John. Intimate Letters: Leoš Janáček to Kamila Stösslová. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Wilson, P. Rachael. "Under the Sign of Leo: Janáček's Kreutzer Quartet." Russian Literature 40, no. 4 (1996): 535-44.

Zemanová, Mirka. Janáček: A Composer's Life. London: John Murray, 2002.

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[1] McClary 1995, 326.

[2] Car Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music cited in ibid, 327.

[3] Bersch 2002, 26.

[4] Tolstoy 1890,

[5] Bersch 2002, 126

[6] Tyrrell 1994, 3-4.

[7] Bersch 2002, 135.

[8] Ibid, 138.

[9] Ibid, 129-140.

[10] Burrell 2002, 126.

[11] Ibid, 132.

[12] Bersch 2002, 128.

[13] Burrell 2002, 165.

[14] Ibid, 161; ibid, 171.

[15] Zemanová 2002, 179.

[16] Burrell 2002, 168.

[17] Ibid, 175.

[18] Holloway 1991, 5.

[19] Burrell 2002, 70.

[20] Ibid, 70.

[21] Bersch 2002, 69.

[22] Josephson 2009, 155.

[23] Ibid, 75; ibid, 4; Ibid, 33.

[24] Wilson 1996, 536.

[25] Payne 1987, 6; Canton et al 2012, 900.

[26] Longobardi 2005, 356.

[27] Ibid, 357.

[28] Rupprecht 1999, 253.

[29] Brett 2003, 6.

[30] Ibid, 6.

[31] Halperin 1990,25.

[32] Rupprecht 1999, 252.

[33] Ibid, 252.

[34] Ibid, 253; see Kramer, Lawrence. Franz Schubert : Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song. Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis ; 13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[35] Rupprecht 1999, 258.

[36] Longobardi 2005, 363.