A Brno Advent dozen

On 1 December, having just returned from an exhilarating weekend seeing two productions by the opera/theatre director I consider one of the most visionary in the world, Jiří Heřman, and steeped in the spirit of a very Czech advent weekend in Brno's centre, I thought I'd mark each December day up to Christmas with an image on LinkedIn from that glorious city. Now that I've reached a dozen, I'll be reverting to London and Dublin, but I thought I might preserve the dozen here. I started above with the big wooden crib outside the New Town Hall. I'll use the original captions for the rest.

2: the people of Czechia's second biggest city love their animals. Dogs everywhere, but in the Zelný trh (which translates inelegantly as 'Vegetable Market', literally 'green', now given over to Xmas stalls) I also saw a gentleman with two cats - a Persian on his back, another in a basket. He eventually set them down to have a stroll around - the crowds parted and looked on in amusement.

This, by the way, was at the start of a very lovely Sunday spent with friend and Opera in Depth Zoom class student Barbara, who came up on the train from Bratislava. I've added one here above she took of my trying to talk to the unbiddable Persian. Another friend, Juliet, will be amused, because this cat was the spit of one looked after in Jerusalem when she and her partner Rory were there, name of Zorah, always addressed with 'so naughty!'

3:  back to the wooden-figure crib in front of the New Town Hall. Walk behind and you'll be rewarded with these splendid goats (?) and storks.

4: more hustle and bustle in Zelný trh, and this time from cats to dogs, which the citizens walk around the centre in large numbers. Note the eyeing up of the wee black creature by the canine on the right.

5: third shot of the wooden Nativity - elephant's eye view, looking across to church of St. Michael.

6: barrel organ player in Zelný trh. I remember being struck by the quaint sounds around the streets on my previous visit - a very characterful fellow used to turn the wheel outside the Jesuit Church.

7: returning to Zelný trh after a walk with Barbara to the Augustinian abbey where Janáček received his schooling - covered in a previous post here -  and Mendel made his discoveries (and excellent duck and cabbage pancakes at Skanseen).

8: the rainbow light shimmer in front of the National (Janáček) Theatre, stunningly renovated, has been temporarily replaced by snowflakes. Walking back after Heřman's sunning production of 'From the House of the Dead/Glagolitic Mass', which I urge you to watch for free on OperaVision.

I can take another diversion from the advent 12 just to show you one stand of the exhibition in the foyer relating to both works, taking in some of the audience looks at the same time.

9:  the beautifully-proportioned Mahen Theatre = 140 years old, recently refurbished and still playing host to smaller-scale National Theatre productions - is where all Janáček's late operas were first performed. Nicky Spence's performance with Julius Drake of The Diary of One Who Disappeared was a highlight of this year's Janáček Festival.

10: expert choral sounds emerged from a small 1931 shopping precinct as I walked towards the National Theatre for a performance of Nabucco. These young people were rehearsing with their choir master - superb. Music is everywhere in Brno.

11: street cleaners taking a break in Náměstí Svobody, Freedom Place, known affectionately as Svoboďák. The Christmas tree here springs from a tradition established by the writer Rudolf Těsnohlídek, of Cunning Little Vixen fame, and a rather extraordinary story of a baby girl he found in the woods which led to the founding of a strikingy designed children's home. Full details here: https://lnkd.in/ecadynam 

I found another edition of Těsnohlídek's novelized Vixen, complete with Stanislav Lolek's charming illustrations in the original newspaper serialisation, in Brno's No. 1 bookshop, Janáček ordered up his music here.

12:  this very short tram which travels the centre is so beautifully lit up for Xmas - I'm afraid I didn't snap it twinkling in the dark, but you get the gist. Images 13-25 will first return us to London, then move on to more shining lights in Dubin. 

Previous posts on Janáček in Brno here, the city's churches here and its amazing functional 1920s and 30s architecture here. My last article on the big city festival is here on theartsdesk. Post on the latest operatic experiences due there soon.

Horror and part-redemption: Ančerl and Haas

The still from an infamous film is not quite what it seems. Conductor, composer taking a bow, orchestra and smartly-dressed audience are all Jewish prisoners in Theresienstadt/Terezin. Two days later - the sickening cynicism of the Nazi propaganda machine! - they'll all be deported to Auschwitz. Few will survive. 

Conductor Karel Ančerl was one who did, though his wife and son were murdered in the gas chambers. Arriving in Auschwitz, he stood in line with his friend, said composer Pavel Haas. Mengele was ushering him on the path to extinction when Haas, weakened, coughed. 'No, that one'. And because of this obscene twist of fortune, the composer was lost to us and the conductor went on to greatness at the helm of the Czech Philharmonic. After the liberation of Auschwitz, he also found the orchestral parts - except the one for double-basses - of the work being performed in the film, Haas's Study for String Orchestra. 

Ančerl features in the film about the film, apparently not downloadable but to be found on YouTube (the title is 'The Führer gives the Jews a city' in capitals). Thankfully it is not the unadulterated propaganda exercise about happy life in Terezin. It's all in German, without subtitles, but an essential watch, if you can bear it. The great man's steely precision about the facts and circumstances is moving in itself. Needless to say several 'students' on my Zoom Czech music course were deeply involved - two had relatives who were in Terezin and/or were murdered in Auschwitz. Pictured below: members of the dressed-up Terezin audience several days before slaughter.

In every class, we've found something profoundly moving or troubling. Just think of the infant mortality and premature deaths which dogged the lives of the great Czech composers. As we moved through the decades, it became such a pattern that I felt I had to ennumerate. Smetana lost three daughters between 1854 and 1855, and his wife, who died of scarlet fever, four years later. Dvořák and his wife lost three children between 1875 and 1877. Janáček wrote in his 1924 autobiography that he would 'bind Jenůfa simply with the black ribbon of the long illness, suffering and laments of my daughter Olga and my little boy Vladimir'. No sooner had Josef Suk begun to mourn the death of Dvořák, his father-in-law, intending a five movement memorial with a triumphant conclusion, than his wife Otilie, Dvořák's daughter, also died. Thus the Asrael Symphony became a monument of almost unrelieved sadness.

Even though Bohuslav Martinů and his wife Charlotte had no children of their own, he had cause to mourn the remarkable young woman who may have been the great love of his life, conductor and composer Vítězslava Kaprálová (pictured above). Like another composer who should have gone on to greater heights, Lili Boulanger, she died at the age of 25. That was in 1940, just as the Martinůs were fleeing the Nazi occupation of Paris and marking the first stages of their difficult journey to the USA.

If, as the late, great Jiří Bělohlávek insisted, we accept Gustav Mahler as a Bohemian - he was born in Kaliště before the family moved to nearby Jihlava - then here's the most devastating chronicle of family loss of all the 'Czech' composers. Apart from the major loss of his life, the death of his four-year-old daughter Maria ('Putzi'), of the 14 children to whom his mother gave birth, six died in infancy, sister Leopoldine of a brain tumour at the age of 26, while 21-year old Otto committed suicide, and the greatest shock of all to the young Gustav, it seems, was the death of his brother Ernst of pericarditis, aged 14. On the manuscript of the work he defined as his official Opus One, the fairytale cantata Das klagende Lied, at the point where one of the two brothers in the forest lies down to rest - his sibling is about to slay him - the composer wrote 'Ernst' in the margin. Below are stanzas written out by Mahler in 1879.

Das klagende Lied got a look-in when I covered fairytales in the sixth Czech music class. Curious how events of great emotional significance have intruded on every instalment. Smetana's Má vlast, the fountainhead in so many ways, could be seen or heard in filmed or recorded concerts of special import: most recently, perhaps, when Rafael Kubelik returned to his newly-liberated country in 1990 (there are Japanese films of all the movements played by a conglomerate orchestra under him in Tyn Square, as wel as the famous sound recording of the Prague Spring Festival concert with the Czech Philharmonic). A thrilling, fast and often rough performance has been preserved from a radio broadcast of Václav Talich conducting the work under German occupation. It's so moving to hear the audience, in the midst of wild applause, break in to the Czech national anthem (which you get at the end of this excerpt - there's a complete performance on YouTube which stops before that point).

The Hussite chorale featured in Má vlast's last two symphonic poems, 'Tábor' and 'Blaník', runs through to Karel Husa's Music for Prague 1968 - I need say no more of the significance of that. Tomorrow we'll be focusing on Martinu in the 1940s but also remembering Haas and other Jewish composers who were murdered under the Nazis. I steel myself once again for a tough time and will try not to blub again. Then, in just over a week's time, it will all be over - the 10 Czech music classes as well as the 10 Opera in Depth surveys of Jenůfa and Julietta (which the students now accept as another of the 20th century's greatest operas). My thanks to visitors Nicky Spence, Mark Wigglesworth, Jana Boušková and Josef Špaček. As for the latest special guest, I can't wait to expound on the three Monday afternoon hours we spent in the company of Gerald Barry, ostensibly covering his latest operatic masterpiece, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, but roving far and wide to embrace, among other things, Miss Marple, Edward and Mrs Simpson, The Power of the Dog and linen napkins daubed with lines from Beethoven's letters. More anon.

Brno's churches

Enter any one of the Catholic churches in the centre of Brno and you feel like you're in Italy. There always seemed to be quite a few folk engaged in quiet prayer, both young and old, when there weren't services at various times of the day during the week. Unquestionably the most fascinating, if not the most harmonious - that distinction belongs to S. Jakub (James), detail from the16th century pulpit of which I've pictured, for obvious seasonal reasons, above - is the doubly holy Minorite Church of St John and Loreto in Minoritska Street.

I mistook the main interior for the Jesuit Church, so rich in baroque decoration is it (by Johan Georg Schauberger and Johan Georg Etgens).

The chief lure, though, is the Loreto Chapel which you might miss if you didn't push at a door on the north side of the main church. It needs to be almost as large to house a replica of the Virgin and Child's flying abode of the Virgin which landed in said Italian town (we visited on a tour of the Marche some years back). There's a reproduction of Loreto's black Madonna on the altar within

and grisaille depictions of the miracle on the outer walls

as well as another depiction of the casa santa held by putti.

I don't know whether the cabinets of crib/presepe scenes and figures only come out before Xmas,

but they're of some curiosity, including handsomely clad Three Kings and entourage.

The east end is even more extraordinary than the reproduction holy house: an emulation of the Scala Santa, the 28 marble stairs in Rome's San Giovanni in Laterano, themselves an emulation of the Jerusalem steps on which Christ stood while being led to Pilate, traditionally ascended by pilgrims on their knees.

Schauberger's statue line this one, with fine crucifixion figures above the arch,

and apart from the old sacristan lady who followed me around, a solitary pilgrim was the only other person I encountered here.

And so back through the door with an elaborate virgin and child above it,

to the west end and organ

while a much smaller mechanical 'instrument' - I thought from Tchaikovsky's descriptions of his childhood it might be an orchestrion - was wielded by a Santa-like gentleman outside

whose wound-up merry tones had kept me company as I wandered around church and Loreto chapel, a nice antidote to the cult of suffering.

Work was being done on the main facade

and St Joseph further down the road was completely under scaffolding. But most other churches were open for business, including the very homely St Mary Magdalene, purportedly on the site of a synagogue in what had been the Jewish quarter. The first church I 'hit' every morning on the walk from my hotel to the north was S.Tomáš, with the spire of S Jakub beyond.

S. Tomáš, on the site of an Augustinian monastery, was closed except on one evening where the skating rink which looked so promising to the side of the church and in front of the Moravian Gallery

took off for action one very lively evening.

This time the very loud pumped music was no help to reflection within, though I liked the interior in semi-darkness, even if that meant I couldn't see its greatest treasure, Henricus Parlerius's Pietà of c.1385. On a sunny morning, though, the Gothic glory of S Jakub shines bright indeed.

The pulpit is on the left. The three stone reliefs - Nativity, Jesus in the Temple and on the Mount of Olives (or appearing on Tabor, according to whom you read) - date from 1526, the wooden transverse canopy from 1684.

There are plenty of other fine treasures - a northern Italian polychrome crucifix from the late 13th century,

lavishly carved pews of 1707, one set on each side of the main altar,

and the tomb (1718-27) of Louis Raduit de Souches, commander of Brno's defence against the overwhelming numerical superiority of Swedish forces in 1645.

Precious or not, the work on this door struck me as rather lovely.

Just round the corner is the Jesuit Church, where a service was going on, so I merely stood at the back

but did manage to observe this interesting chapel

with its oriental figures.

More than that I can't say, nor discover on the internet. What I do know is that the Jesuits came here in 1578, had the church completed in four years and the attached college in 50. Both served their purpose until 1773, when Joseph II dissolved the order. The whole college complex was pulled down in 1904, paving the way for some of the grandest apartment blocks in Brno on Dvořákova Street.

The Jesuits are back in control of the church now (they even wear leather jackets these days),

and welcoming the three wise men, in seasonal central European style, on the door.

This time, I didn't get to see the interior of the Cathedral of SS. Petr and Pavl on Petrov hill, though it seems to have had an unimpressive makeover. The steeples make it an attractive landmark, even though they're neo-Gothic, dating from 1901. From the Vegetable Market which was housing one of four major Christmas fairs in the centre

and from below,

as I walked towards the City Cemetery to pay homage at Janáček's grave - a long walk, though if I hadn't undertaken it I would have missed the fine Church of St Leopold across Brno's negligible river,

remarkable not so much for its interior, which I saw only through glass, but for the old pharmacy, still fulfilling its original function.

The cemetery has plenty of interest, but its other most celebrated inhabitant is Joseph Mendel the father of genetics, buried in the plot of the Augustinian monastery where he lived and taught.

The monastery was my main objective on the afternoon of my tour of 'functional' architecture in the north of the city. I arrived at sunset, and as promised the14th century Basilica of the Assumption of Our Lady was the grandest edifice in the city, externally at any rate.

The so-called 'royal' or 'Queen's' monastery was founded as a Cistercian convent in 1323. Joseph II ordered the Augustinians to move here from S. Tomáš in 1783.

At the entrance to the Mendel Museum, I bumped into folk I already know from the Habsburg Tour group (one of them, my student Robin Weiss, thinks his grandfather was taught by Mendel). They'd just had a guided tour of the monastery buildings - the only way to see the old Library and the inside of the Basilica. And as numbers for these tours have to be plentiful, I missed my chance; the first I could join would be after my departure.

How kind, then, of Eva on the desk, pictured above on the right, with her historian colleague, to unlock the church for me. Eva is a genetics student from the city's Masaryk University currently doing her PhD on the bones in the crypt of S. Jakub, and she was such nice company. I think I enthused them both about why they should go and see Janáček's operas; I found myself getting quite emotional in talking about them. Couldn't see a great deal of the Baroquicisation inside the theatreas it was dark with only a few lights to be found, but enough to sense the grandeur of the pillars and the general nobility of the building (no photos).

The public can attend the daily evensongs, but I couldn't stay for the one that day, alas. There are currently only three monks in residence, none of them Czech; what will happen, I wonder? Certainly the monastery was thriving, after its fashion, when Mendel made his experiments with pea-pods grown in the front garden and Janáček was sent here to board, as the musical child of a poor family, in the late 19th century. He had a rather melancholy time here, but did immortalise his time as a scholar in the 'March of the Bluebirds' movement of his Mladi (Youth) Suite for wind sextet (the boys were called 'Bluebirds' because of their uniform). Here it is, followed by the finale of the suite, as played by a top line-up of wind players including my idol as an oboist, Maurice Bourgue.

A plaque on an outside wall of the basilica is the commemoration of the piece and of Janáček's time here.

By the time of my tour and much time spent absorbing the excellent audio-visual displays of the Mendel Museum, which also houses his original, groundbreaking manuscript,

it was dark, the basilica nicely lit up.

My last glimpse of the Monastery was from above, on the bitterly cold (-6) last morning of my stay, when I walked up the Špilberk hill and around the edge of the castle with its grim history. Beyond the walls are the exhibition grounds, the first buildings dating from 1928 - another place I'd like to have had time for.

From the castle gardens, which must be a wonderful asset for citizens in the spring and summer, there's also a fine view of the Cathedral.

Impressive city - I'm waiting, as Janáček's Fox and Vixen put it, 'until next May comes' to return.