PT Journal
AU Celkova, M
TI The cantata Osviencim by Ilja Zeljenka - "The Way in the Right Direction"
SO Musicologica Olomucensia
PY 2024
BP 27
EP 57
VL 36
IS 2
DE Ilja Zeljenka; anti-fascist cantata; Osviencim; socialist realism; Arnold Schonberg; Luigi Nono
AB Ilja Zeljenka (1932-2007) set the tragic poem of Mikulas Kovac called Osviencim in cantata in 1960. It was during this period that vocal music in Slovakia was particularly closely connected with socialist realism. As it turned out, the composer stands out from this context, and the cantata Osviencim is, in a way, an expression of defiance against the official mainstream. Zeljenka chose compositional means oscillating between the tradition and the current Western avant-garde to set the work to music, which contradicted Zdanov's doctrine and the principles of the aesthetics of socialist realism. The Czechoslovak premiere of Zeljenka's work could not take place until 1964, when the situation in the country began to loosen up very gradually, and when it was successful at the UNESCO International Composition Competition in Paris. Despite the fact that the cantata Osviencim comes from Zeljenka's early work, it has an extraordinary position in the whole of his compositional activity. In the analysis of the composition, it is possible to state the composer's interconnection of innovative elements with conventional ones. By comparing the work with the fundamental thematically related "anti-fascist" cantata works of the Western avant-garde of the 1950s, Il canto sospeso by Luigi Nono and A Survivor from Warsaw by Arnold Schonberg, certain compositional analogies were found. Between Nono's Il canto sospeso and Osviencim, we notice many similarities in the handling of the vocal component and in the specific use of the color of the human voice. Zeljenka also works with the so-called Sprachkomposition. The composer's inspiration in Schonberg's music was mainly inspired by the instrumental component. However, Ilja Zeljenka did not create an epigonic work. It deliberately does not create a series composition, it often connects impressive timbre areas with traditional principles. Osviencim is the work of a mature composer with his own musical language, which tends to combine stylistically heterogeneous elements, which is why it was later referred to as the "visionary harbinger of postmodernism."
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