Jan Novák: Musician and humanist
- Eva Nachmilnerová
To mark the 30th anniversary of the death of the composer Jan Novák, the Prague
Spring festival has organised a concert in his honour featuring selected Novák choral
and chamber works.
Jan Novák (8 April 1921 – 17 November 1984) ranks among the most distinct Czech post-
war composers. The fact that his oeuvre is not overly known is in part related to the course his
life took. At the time when he was at the peak of his creative powers, in August 1968 he left
his homeland and went to live in turn in Denmark, Italy and Germany. For an artist who in
the 1960s was in Czechoslovakia an acknowledged composer with a large group of supporters
and friends, departure meant loss of background, performers and listeners alike. He found
himself amidst the Western artistic milieu, where stylistic trends different to those back at
home prevailed.
LIFE AND WORK
Jan Novák was born on 8 April 1921 in Nová Říše in Moravia. In 1933 he enrolled at the
Jesuit Grammar School in Velehrad, which provided a first-class classical education, with
emphasis being placed on languages (in addition to Latin and Greek, Russian, German and
Esperanto were taught there). Yet owing to his transgressing the strict discipline that reigned
at the institution he was expelled. Novák completed his secondary education at the Classical
Grammar School in Brno and subsequently attended the Brno Conservatory, where he studied
composition (with Vilém Petrželka), the piano and conducting. After spending two and
a half years in Germany as a forced labourer, in 1945 he resumed his studies at the Brno
Conservatory and after graduating in 1946 began attending the Academy of Performing Arts
in Prague, where he studied with Pavel Bořkovec, before returning to Brno to enrol at the
newly founded Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts.
As a recipient of a scholarship from the Jaroslav Ježek Foundation, from June 1947 to
February 1948 he studied in the USA, first participating in the summer composition master
classes at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood (in the class of Aaron Copland) and
subsequently taking private lessons from Bohuslav Martinů in New York. The criticism
Martinů initially levelled against Novák’s work (highlighting the somewhat awkward
treatment of themes and sloppiness in development of motifs), first acted like a “cold shower”
on the fledgling composer. After recovering from the initial shock, however, he experienced
a learning curve he would never forget, with the time spent with Martinů and their friendship
playing a crucial role in his evolution.
Novák returned to Czechoslovakia in February 1948, at the time of the Communist coup. He
settled in Brno, mainly earning his living by composing music for short and puppet films,
radio and theatre plays, and by giving performances in a piano duo with his wife Eliška
Nováková. His works dating from the 1950s, revealing a distinct Martinů influence, were
symbolically ushered in by the Variations on a Bohuslav Martinů Theme for two pianos
(1949) and its arrangement for orchestra (1959). Attention was also gained by his symphonic
and concertante pieces (e.g. the Oboe Concerto written in 1952).
In the 1960s, Novák further extended his range of genres and compositional means; for a
short time he employed elements of dodecaphony and aleatoricism in his compositions,
first applying the twelve-tone technique as a thematic material in the middle section of his
Capriccio for cello and small orchestra (1958), with the chamber piece Passer Catulli (1962)
being considered one of the apices of this phase. In 1963 he co-founded “Creative Group A”,
made up of Brno-based composers and musicologists. From the end of the 1950s, a vital role
in his creation was played by his penchant for Latin. The original use of the Latin meter while
respecting the proportion between long and short syllables would serve as an impulse for his
entire further work.
A liberal-minded composer who always avowed his artistic and civic opinions, Novák ran
into trouble with the official authorities and the dogmatism of the Czechoslovak Union of
Composers, who with great difficulty tolerated his openness and “commotions”; after in
1961 he refused to participate in the election of lay judges, he was briefly expelled from
the organisation, subordinate to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Paradoxically,
however, at that time he received commissions from leading Czech and Slovak film directors
and created music for Karel Kachyňa (Suffering, Coach to Vienna, Night of the Bride, etc.),
Jiří Trnka (The Cybernetic Grandma), Karel Zeman (The Stolen Airship) and Martin Hollý
(Raven’s Road).
Novák’s experience with film and incidental music also manifested itself in the extreme
dramatic forcibility of his cantata Dido (1967) for mezzo-soprano, narrator, male chorus and
orchestra to Book 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid, his paramount work prior to emigration.
The composer perceived with hope the gradual unclamping of the social situation in
Czechoslovakia in the second half of the 1960s. When in August 1968 the Warsaw Pact
forces invaded Czechoslovakia, he was on a tour of Italy with the Kühn Mixed Choir.
Novák decided not to return to his homeland and he, his wife and two little daughters left
via Germany for Aarhus, Denmark. He responded to the tragic events back at home with the
choral cantata to his own Latin lyrics Ignis pro Ioanne Palach (1969); another piece with a
clearly political subtext was his cantata Planctus Troadum written in the same year.
Dating from the time he and his family were about to move to Italy is Mimus magicus for
soprano, clarinet and piano to Virgil’s poetry (1969), which Novák composed to commission
for the competition in Rovereto, where his family subsequently moved. During his time
in Italy (1970–77), Novák mainly created vocal and chamber pieces. Whereas he performed
his choruses to Latin texts with his Voces Latinae choir, the bulk of his chamber works were
written for his daughters, the pianist Dora and the flautist Clara.
In the final phase of his career, following Novák’s departure for Germany, where in 1977 he
and his family settled in Neu Ulm, he composed orchestral works (Ludi symphoniaci, Vernalis
Temporis Symphonia for solos, chorus and orchestra, Symphonia Bipartita) and a number of
pieces for chamber ensemble – Sonata da Chiesa I and II, Sonata solis fidibus for violin and
the piano work Hymni Christiani. In addition to a looser fantasy form and a more extended
structure, these pieces are characterised by a more profound musical expression.
In 1982 the conductor Rafael Kubelík and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and
Chorus performed the cantata Dido in Munich. During his lifetime, however, Novák did not
experience great recognition of his work. On 17 November 1984 he died following a serious
illness. In 1996, President Václav Havel awarded him a state honour in memoriam and in
2011 the composer’s remains were relocated from Rovereto to Brno.
Novák’s relatively extensive oeuvre includes orchestral, chamber and vocal pieces, an opera,
ballets, music for theatre, film and radio plays. The fundamental traits of his musical language
are remarkably constant – a lucid form, a bold rhythmic component with frequent use of
syncopated and ostinato rhythms, sophisticated melodic ideas, buoyancy, elegance, humour
and slight provocation, occasionally employing banalities and trivialities. His linkage to
Classicism and inspiration by Bohuslav Martinů’s compositional techniques, as well as the
jazz influence and original application of the Latin meter, form a singular synthesis.
OBSESSION WITH LATIN
Motto:
“Accordingly, with great pleasure I make use of this living language, more immortal than
dead, for composing.” (J. Novák in the preface to Ioci vernales)
Novák’s great fondness for the language of Ancient Rome began in the first half of the 1950s,
when studying Latin became his main hobby and passion. The composer did not perceive
Latin, which he brilliantly mastered in both spoken and written form as a poet, as a dead
language but as a universal means of communication across the centuries.
He systematically cultivated his interest and in the 1950s founded in Brno a Latin club whose
members were only allowed to speak Latin. Novák’s creative approach was also reflected in
his conceiving words, enriching Latin with new expressions (he sought fitting equivalents for
“telephone’ and “refrigerator”, for instance).
His proximity to the spirit of Latin was recalled by the violinist Dušan Pandula: “And there
was always something mythological that he brought back to his everyday encounters with
Latin and antiquity; since Jan scolded his children in Latin, spoke Latin with his friends, and
used the language in telephone conversations with those who were at least a little bit on the
same wave length. He conducted endless discussions with the ‘devotees’ in Latin, and he
translated everything that got into his hands into Latin, The Good Soldier Švejk, for instance.”
VOCAL COMPOSITIONS
Novák’s vocal pieces to Latin texts are settings of works by Ancient Roman poets and prose
writers, medieval, Renaissance, as well as modern, authors, and largely his own texts. He
made proficient use of the possibilities of the given metre’s rhythm and worked with them in
an original manner for the sake of underlining the text’s meaning. The Latin metre also had a
vital impact on his thinking when composing solely instrumental works, in some cases he put
Latin verses ad libitum.
Evidently the very first composition setting Novák’s own Latin text was Exercitia
mythologica for mixed chorus, dating from 1968. The cycle, whose heroes are Antique
mythological figures, consists of eight choruses of a madrigal texture whose metric pulse is
based on quantitative meters.
Novák wrote the highest number of vocal pieces in Italy, where in 1971 he established the
Voces Latinae choir (the cycle Invitatio Pastorum, the song cycle Schola cantans, the opera
Dulcitius, etc.). Under his guidance, the ensemble started to perform almost exclusively non-
liturgical choruses to Latin texts in the classical Latin pronunciation.
In one of his letters to Brno, Novák wrote in this regard: “As I have written to you, at an
advanced age I had to set up a choir, even though I have no conducting ambitions whatsoever,
but necessity is the mother of invention. (…) I am cultivating with them Latin pronunciation,
since Latin phonetics has been neglected for some sixteen centuries. So I attend to the
education of the European people…”
After moving to Germany, Novák composed to Latin texts the ballet Aesopia for four-part
mixed chorus and two pianos or small orchestra (1981), based on “The Fables of Phaedrus”.
The most comprehensive collection of his Latin songs is the Cantica Latina for voice and
piano, published posthumously.
TRIBUTE TO THE COMPOSER
At the 24 May concert within the Prague Spring festival, Martinů Voices with the choir
master Lukáš Vasilek will present two Novák cycles that represent his crowning works in this
genre.
The extremely difficult to perform Fugae Vergilianae (1974) for mixed chorus is probably
Novák’s most notable Virgil-based composition yet has never been sung in its entirety on
a concert stage. Some 40 years after its origination, Prague Spring will be giving its world
premiere. All the piece’s sections play with the meaning of the word “fugue”, which is
derived from the Latin “fuga” (act of fleeing). The contrapuntal tissue of voices is thus
thematically linked by the motif of flight, be it departure from the homeland or the rush of
transient time.
The setting of the satirical last will and testament by Novák’s contemporary, the German
writer and Latin poet Josef Eberle (1901–1986), in the chorus Testamentum (1966) is
characterised by the unusual application of four horns (in Ancient Rome they were the
traditional instruments for mourning music) and imaginative twists of the tempo, rhythm,
expression and dynamics, respecting the satirical nature and development of the text. Pungent
humour gives way to the solemn tone in the poet’s will: “May the world not be as I used to
know it, may a person to a person not be like a wolf to a sheep.”
The selection of Novák’s choral works will be rounded off at the concert by the chamber
piece Sonata super Hoson zes (1981), which quotes the allegedly oldest preserved notation of
Greek music, “The Song of Seikilos”. It is one of the few works in which Novák was inspired
by Ancient Greek music. The sonata will be performed by the composer’s daughters, the
flautist Clara Nováková and the pianist Dora Novák-Wilmington.
The concert will be symbolically supplemented by the Czech Madrigals by Bohuslav Martinů,
who remained one of Jan Novák’s major models throughout his life.
| Composer | Composition | Creation year |
|---|---|---|
| Novák, Jan | Symphonia Bipartita | 1983 |
| Novák, Jan | Mimus magicus | 1969 |
| Novák, Jan | Ludi Symphoniaci | 1978 |
| Novák, Jan | Vernalis Temporis Symphonia | 1982 |
| Novák, Jan | Variations on a Theme of Bohuslav Martinu | 1949 |
| Novák, Jan | Sonata da chiesa II for flute and organ | 1981 |
| Novák, Jan | Sonata super | 1981 |