I. Allegro (Capriccio 'Vzdor', JW 7/12)

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Musical Terms (3)

• Capriccio for piano left hand English
  Janáček's work for piano left hand and wind ensemble (1926), subtitled 'Vzdor' (Defiance), written for the Czech one-armed pianist Otakar Hollmann who lost his right arm in World War I. The title carries a double meaning: the defiance of physical limitation and Janáček's own characteristic defiance of convention. The work is technically demanding for the left hand alone, requiring the same breadth of expression across the full keyboard as a two-handed pianist would employ.
  The Capriccio demands that the left hand completely own the keyboard without the right ever entering the listener's imagination as 'missing'. Choose fingering and redistribution of the accompaniment and melody that allows the line to sing naturally. Avoid practising the same passage in the right hand — the left must develop its own independence and authority.
• Moravian music English
  The folk musical tradition of Moravia, the eastern region of the Czech Republic where Janáček was born, lived, and worked throughout his life. Janáček spent decades collecting and transcribing Moravian folk songs and dances, and their influence permeates every aspect of his musical language: the short asymmetric phrases, the modal harmonies, the abrupt rhythmic shifts, the oscillating figures between two adjacent notes. Unlike Bartók or Kodály, Janáček did not quote folk tunes directly in his art music but absorbed their spirit so thoroughly that his own language became indistinguishable from it.
  Recognising the folk roots of Janáček's piano style helps explain what might otherwise seem like quirks: the irregular phrase lengths (folk song does not fall into neat four-bar groups), the tendency to circle around a single pitch (a characteristic of Moravian melody), and the modal rather than functional harmonic progressions. These are not idiosyncrasies to be corrected but essential features of the style.
• speech melody English
  Janáček's term (in Czech: nápěvky mluvy — 'speech tunes') for the musical motives he claimed to derive from the natural melodic contours of Czech speech and everyday sounds. He notated these motives obsessively throughout his life — the cadence of a greeting, the rhythm of a vendor's cry, the shape of a birdsong. He believed these speech melodies were the direct expression of a person's inner emotional state, and should form the basis of a natural musical language. The theory underpins the vocal writing in all his operas and the piano music's characteristic short, repeated motivic cells.
  Janáček's piano motives behave like speech: they arrive without preparation, repeat insistently, and cut off suddenly. Rather than long melodic lines, you'll find short gestures — a falling third, a turning figure, a two-bar phrase repeated at different registers. Play them as utterances with their own internal logic, not as fragments of a larger melody waiting to arrive.