Novák, Vítezslav

Vítezslav Novák – Slovakian Suite for small orchestra, op. 32 (1903)

(b. Kamenice nad Lipou, southern Bohemia, 5 December 1870 – d. Skutec, eastern Bohemia, 28 July 1949)

Preface
In 1896 Vítezslav Novák took a holiday trip to the remote region of Valassko in the border area between Bohemia and Moravia. For Novák, a 25-year-old firebrand whom his teacher Dvorák had called «that dishevelled philosopher with his cravat askew,» the trip was a turning point in his career. He was enchanted by the countryside, and the folk music he heard there struck him with the force of revelation. When he returned to Prague he was no longer a gifted young imitator of Brahms and Richard Strauss but a changed man. Carefully analyzing the folk songs he had collected, he discovered, as Bartók was to do later, that they could serve as the basis of a fresh and highly personal musical idiom. He immediately set about the task of reinventing himself as a composer.

The discovery of rural Moravia, Slovakia, and Wallachia brought about what has later been called the second period of Novák’s career, a period that lasted roughly from 1900 to 1911. Jagged rhythms, antiquated modes, quartal and quintal melodic intervals, and the sounds of the domestic cimbalom began to fill his music, reaching an initial apogee in his tone poems In the Tatras (1902) and Of Eternal Longing (1904). Between these two masterly works came what is today still considered his most popular and characteristic piece of music: Slovácká svita, or the Slovakian Suite, op. 32, a loving evocation of country life in the village of Javorník, nestled in the borderlands between eastern Moravia and western Slovakia.

The Slovakian Suite falls into five sections, each with a distinctive rural image. The first, In Church, depicts a local Protestant service, complete with a parlando sermon from the pastor and a Protestant hymn beginning in bar 11. (Moravia did not resist Habsburg rule to the same extent as neighboring Bohemia, and its Protestant subculture was able to survive the Thirty Years’ War.) The second movement, Among Children, exults in the uninhibited high-spirits of local peasant boys and girls. The third, entitled The Lovers, is a love song from a Slovak youth, complete with jocular teasing and tender reconciliation. Movement 4, At the Dance, portrays an exuberant scene in a Slovakian tavern. Here we can listen to the musicians tuning their instruments, the lead violinist flaunting his technique, an increasingly pell-mell dance that ends, after a sostenuto passage in imitation of a bagpipe, with all the couples swirling in a grand galop. The fifth section, At Night, is a lovely nocturne, replete with reminiscences from The Lovers, in which the double basses discreetly fall silent.

The Slovakian Suite was given its première by the Czech Philharmonic on 4 February 1903, conducted by Vilém Zemánek. Its success was instantaneous, and it was immediately issued in piano reduction by Urbánek (Prague, 1903), followed a few years later by the full score (Prague, 1911). Novák soon found himself regarded as the leading Czech composer of his age, and his career immediately took flight with his induction into the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts (1906) and his appointment as professor of composition at Prague Conservatory (1909-1939). If Novák’s later career was somewhat overshadowed by that of his elder contemporary Janácek and the post-war avantgarde, he cannot be said to have lacked for international recognition, and by the time of his death, in 1949, he was an honorary member of the Institut de France, the Académie des Beaux Arts, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, and the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Bratislava University. The Slovakian Suite has never left the Czech orchestral repertoire, and can be heard to excellent effect on recordings by Jirí Belohlávek and especially Václav Talich, to whom Novák was «the greatest landscape painter in Czech music.”
Bradford Robinson, 2006

Reprint of a copy from the music Department archives of the Leipzig Municipal Libraries.

Deutsches Vorwort leseen  > HERE