Brian Friel's 'Performances' weaves the music of Leos Janácek and the love triangle involving his wife and Kamila Stösslová, writes Arminta Wallace.
In the winter of 1928 the Czech composer Leos Janácek produced a masterpiece in three weeks. Nothing unusual in that; composers do it all the time. But the story behind the composition of the string quartet known as Intimate Letters is - even to our somewhat jaded 21st-century eyes - something of an eye-opener. The piece is the embodiment, in music, of the 74-year-old composer's obsession with Kamila Stösslová, a married woman half his age.
A love story, certainly; but one shot through with enough allegations and contradictions to keep any self-respecting soap opera running for years. The relationship was passionate and devoted, but - officially, at any rate - unconsummated. It was "intimate", yet neither Janácek nor Stösslová made any attempt to hide it. Stösslová inspired some of Janácek's greatest work, yet she was totally uninterested in music. And for a muse she was, it must be said, somewhat unprepossessing in appearance; photographs reveal a stout woman with short legs, thick ankles and an apparently endless supply of hideously unflattering outfits.
Between the first, stiffly formal "Dear Madam", dashed off after he met her at an upmarket spa in 1917, to the hurried note written about a fortnight before his death and signed "Yours for ever", Janácek clocked up an impressive 700 letters to Kamila - and those are just the ones that have survived.
In a particularly rhapsodic outpouring in February 1928 he declared the second string quartet to be "their" quartet. "In that work," he wrote, "I'll be always only with you! No third person beside us. Full of that yearning as there at your place, in that heaven of ours! I'll love doing it! You know, don't you, that I know no world other than you!"
By the time he had reached the third movement the music was to "dissolve into a vision which would resemble your image, transparent, as if in the mist . . ." Elsewhere, the tone of the letters shifts from that of petulant suitor to fussy mother hen via an almost silky sleaze. Add in an indifferent husband (hers) and a distraught wife (his) and it's clear that the story of Janácek's second string quartet is the stuff of high drama.
Hardly surprising, then, that it has become the raw material for a new play. Brian Friel's Performances, which will be given its world première at the Gate Theatre this week as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, weaves the music of Intimate Letters - played live on stage by the Alba String Quartet - into the story of its composition, using Janácek's fabulous artistic creation as a springboard for asking questions about the nature of artistic creativity.
But if music is so central to the play, does that beg a further question: play, or performance? "It's essentially a piece of theatre," says the artistic director of the Gate, Michael Colgan, "although there is music in it - and we don't want to fall between the two stools." Besides, as he points out, it's not the first time music has been a central theme in a Brian Friel play.
"Music runs through many of his plays, whether it's the dance in Dancing at Lughnasa or the fact that the entire action of Aristocrats is underscored by Chopin, as the piano is being played offstage." For the Romanian actor Ion Caramitru, who plays the role of Janácek, this very ambiguity, this playful examination of what is "normal" for a man and for an artist, is what gives Performances its dramatic identity. There is, he says, a wonderful line where his character notes - with some asperity - that his works were never properly catalogued until years after his death. "The play is so unusual, so surprising - so charming, in a way, with this mixture of life, characters and music. And the music is so vivid; it becomes a character in the play, finally."
The word in Dublin is that Colgan, a self-confessed chamber music addict, played a major part in the conception of Performances. But although he has certainly coaxed works from Friel's pen in the past, he pooh-poohs the idea that he played the role of muse on this occasion. "Brian and I are friends - I send him things on a regular basis, and he turns them down on a regular basis," he says. But he admits that there was, at one stage, a plan to stage a sort of dramatised lecture on Janácek at the Gate with music by the Stampa Quartet, narration by John Hurt and Kamila appearing on stage at the end. "It was a very coarse, naff idea of mine," says Colgan.
But somewhere along the line, he sent Friel the score of Intimate Letters - and the letters. "I didn't inspire him, but I might have acted as a - what's the word? A prod, or a trigger, or something. Essentially my bad idea was replaced, as usual, by his good idea. As long as the maestro is writing," he adds, "we should all be happy."
In an ideal world, says Colgan, audiences would also be familiar with Janácek's score before coming to see Performances. "It's difficult music. It took me a long, long time to get into it. But it's like Bartók's string quartets. The more difficult you find them at the beginning, and the more you invest in them, the greater the reward. I mean, some of those bars - you know the first bars of that third movement? The moderato? When you haven't heard it for a while and then you hear it again, it's like being on a beach at night and then someone gives you a sweater. It's just - right. It's simple and it's easy, but it's right. You feel at one with it."
The story of Janácek and Kamila, however, is another matter. "The more you read about it, the more you think you should crack it. But it's uncrackable," he says. "What people always want to know is, did they sleep together? I wouldn't like to hazard a guess. I suspect it doesn't matter - but I suspect there was something there, for her to allow it to continue for so long. What is absolutely beyond question is that she did something to his confidence; brought him up to a certain plane which, then, released the works. And throughout the play there's that sense of inspiration. As the character of Janácek says at one point: 'Don't worry about the letters. Just listen to the music; it's very, very good.'."
Is it quite that simple? Is it possible to measure the positive effect on humanity of Janácek's music against the misery caused to his wife Zdenka by his relationship with Kamila, chronicled with lively sympathy by the Czech musicologist Mirka Zemanová in her 2002 biography Janácek: A Composer's Life (John Murray, £25 in UK). Zdenka, whose two children died before her 40th birthday; Zdenka, whose humiliation in the marriage was such that she longed for a "discreet, decent death" by way of escape; Zdenka, who remarked sadly to the friend who informed her of her husband's death - Kamila, not she, had been at his bedside - "what was I supposed to do when he told me that she inspired him, that he needed her?".
Brian Friel is not a man to offer cut-and-dried answers: indeed, Performances is likely to raise a whole new set of questions on the topic of art and the life of the artist. "The play," says Ion Caramitru, "is a fantastic exploration of what creativity is, and what exactly an artist takes from life into his work. Of course there is always a strong connection between the two; but finally, he says in the play, the work is the thing and not the life." As Janácek, though, he would say that.
Performances, directed by Patrick Mason and designed by Joe Vanek with lighting by Paul Keogan, opens at the Gate Theatre tomorrow, September 30th, at 8 p.m. The Alba String Quartet will also give a full performance of Janácek's quartet Intimate Letters on October 19th at 8 p.m.
