EMERGING VOICES: New Nations - Songs of the People

This is the fifth in a series of posts I’ve written as part of the Emerging Voices project which is happening at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society the next two weeks. Specially, it is in relation to the Found Voices concert. For more information about the project, please visit: https://www.pcmsconcerts.org/projects/emerging-voices/

The waves of nationalism that had surged throughout Europe during the years of the Belle Époque, and reached a peak of ferocity in World War I, came to a pivotal point with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. 

The division of Eastern Europe was one of the major topics of the treaty negotiations, as the three empires – Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian -- that comprised much of the region had collapsed. In these lands occupied by these empires, diverse melting pots of ethnicities and religions, many had been working towards the goal of sovereign statehood for years. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the boundaries of these new nations were drawn, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

The “Polish question”, or the debate surrounding the existence of Poland as a sovereign state, was one of the trickier points of negotiation. One of the reasons this was up for discussion at all was the fierce advocacy of the celebrated Polish pianist, composer, and statesman Ignacy Jan Paderewski. Paderewski, one of the most famous performers of the Belle Époque as well as a noted philanthropist and orator, was so devoted to the cause of a sovereign Poland that he stopped concertizing in 1917 to lobby political support for his country. By the time of the peace talks, Paderewksi was both Poland’s Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and he represented the new nation diplomatically at the conference.

Paderewksi was devoted to his country and its people: he viewed much of his musical work through the lens of serving his landless compatriots, using his profile and fortune in support of the cause. Many of his compositions have nationalistic themes, including his sole symphony, Polonia, as well as his six songs to words by Adam Mickiewicz, a famous Polish poet who strongly advocated for the reestablishment of a sovereign Poland. The set of songs is dedicated to Mickiewicz’s son, Wladyslaw, one of Paderewski’s fellow expatriates and the publisher of the journal L’Espérance, a periodical that chronicled the struggles of conquered nations.

With the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, post-war Hungary passionately debated nationalism, partly in reaction to the country’s greatly diminished borders following its withdrawal from the dual monarchy. Before World War I, Hungary was a relatively diverse and cosmopolitan country made up of a mix ofSlovakians, Croats, Serbs, Germans, Romanians, Jews, Ruthenians, Gypsies and, of course, Hungarians. As the empire faded, the question of who and what was Hungarian became a hot topic of debate. Complicating things was Hungary’s socioeconomic class structure; even after the abolition of feudalism in the middle of the 19th century, the belief persisted that only the vestiges of the Hungarian aristocracy were “true” Hungarians. By the turn of the century, this meant that the gentry forming the middle and upper classes of Hungarian society were considered the “folk” while the working classes and poor (descendants of former serfs) had no designation and were some sort of “other”.

Musically speaking, this meant that the popular gypsy tunes that had been co-opted over the years by composers such as Franz Liszt came to be thought of as what constituted Hungarian folk music. But Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók, who went to the villages and countryside to collect music from the peasants, came to believe that the folk music of Hungary was actually much more diverse.

Bartók and Kodály discovered that there were many aspects of peasant music that were unique to its culture and unrepresented elsewhere in Hungarian music. The songs Bartok collected from within Hungary’s borders included Romanian, Slovakian, Serbian, and Arabic tunes in addition to the songs from ethnically Hungarian peasants. When they published their first set of folk song arrangements in 1906, the collection was quite controversial – Bartók and Kodály’s assertions stood in direct opposition to the prevailing ideas of Hungarian national identity. 

Much like Bartók and Kodály, the Czech composer Leos Janácek spent the last years of the 19th century and the early 1900s collecting and documenting folk music – he composed nearly 150 arrangements of folk tunes. During the course of his ethnomusicological studies, in addition to familiarizing himself with the tonal modalities unique to each region, he began to notice the ways that the distinctive rhythms and intonations of the Czech language influenced these melodies. This would greatly influence his entire approach to setting text, as well as his general approach to rhythm. The modal tonalities he found in his studies would also influence his approach to tonality. All of this, combined with Janácek’s fierce commitment to Czech subjects for his works, made him a staunchly nationalist composer.

Janácek began The Diary of One Who Disappeared in 1917, a little less than a year before Czechoslovakia would declare independence. He came across the poems for this cycle in the Czech daily newspaper, Lidové noviny – The People’s News. The poems were published anonymously, under the heading “From the writings of a self-taught man.” They relate the first-person tale of a young peasant boy’s sexual awakening as he meets a young Gypsy woman while working in the fields. Throughout the course of the cycle, he struggles with (and eventually succumbs to) the temptation of his passion for her – a passion that is forbidden, due to the crossing of ethnic and class boundaries of the time.

The Czech nationalism which was rising throughout the years of the Belle Époque culminated in the declaration of an independent Czechoslovakia in October 1918. One of the Czech musicians to rise to prominence in the years of the short-lived republic was Vítězslava Kaprálová. Born in 1915 in Brno while it was still part of Austria-Hungary, Kaprálová was a child when Czechoslovakian independence was declared. The daughter of two musicians, she was a prolific composer in all genres. Her career was tragically cut short when she died at age 25, of what may have been typhoid fever misdiagnosed as miliary tuberculosis, while a refugee in France in 1940. Her compositional output included roughly 50 works, including a major contribution to the Czech art song repertoire.