“There did not seem to be anything that Simon could say. He touched Amias’s sound shoulder for an instant, a poor sort of comfort, but it was the best he could do and Amias would understand. Then he turned away. Old Davey Morrison was at work in the next room, and softly whistling his one tune as he cleaned instruments. Passing the open door, Simon caught the slow-falling melody; and it seemed to him that the ‘Flowers of the Forest’ was a lament, not for Flodden alone, but for all lost causes since the world began; for all lost causes, and for all broken men, even for Zeal-for-the-Lord.
Then he went out past the sentries into the wild February night, hunching his shoulders against the driving rain, with only one thought left in him, that soon he would be able to lie down and sleep.”
One of the best things about my current exploration of RAM historical women is just how much extraordinary music I am getting acquainted with for the first time. This month’s CD is a case in point. I knew of Geraldine Mucha – although her scores are shockingly difficult to find – but I had not listened to much. She was a little later than my usual field of research, so went often to the back of the listening queue. My RAM emphasis this year has forced me to listen, and I am so glad it did.
Mucha was clearly an intensely private person, with most of the available information being about either her music or the family into which she married. This is an entirely different subject – I am almost more fascinated by the rhetoric being engaged than the stories themselves – but it does lend an edge to how I find myself listening to her music, especially in the ways she draws on different idioms and national music characteristics for what she wants to say. This writing is about a first listening, because I have rarely had the kind of response to an album as I did to Mucha’s.
My first impression was of a dualistic way of writing. While this feels descriptive of Mucha’s binary Czech-Scottish life, with its two jarringly different ways of being, for me it was much more about the composer-as-composer, and the composer-as-singer, rather in the vein of Goethe’s careful distinction of the komponiert and the singend. In the first, craft mattered just as much as the utterance itself, while in the second, while equally skilled, the “punch” was much more visceral. More about this later. Certainly the Scottish-Czech trajectory of Mucha’s life has underpinned much of what scant writing there is about her music, with attention being drawn to the rhythmic and harmonic influence of the Eastern European tradition, and the ways in which it sits alongside explicitly Scottish content, often in the shape of folk songs. These are indeed different voices in Mucha’s music, but they share an aesthetic that makes the listening a cohesive experience.
The second impression was of the particular skill Mucha has for wind writing. Readers of these pages will remember my previous wariness of the string quartet as a listening experience, and while this has largely dissipated, there are enough tendrils left to attempt to ensnare my ears during the first String Quartet. The folk-song underpinning it (I know Scottish song rather better than Czech, so I’m afraid I can’t name the specific one) drew me into the new-to-me world of Mucha’s sound, and I listened without my usual prejudice to the (chronologically) second string quartet as well; but it wasn’t really until the opening bars of Naše Cesta that I felt a truly magnetic pull to the sound. This is the flute and piano piece written for Jan Machat, who plays the piece here. The 1998 wind quintet that followed was another timbral pleasure, with seven sections of gloriously idiosyncratic writing that gives each instrument a room of their own
The album takes a welcome broad view on the definition of chamber music, including pieces for solo piano. Many of these were written for friends, offering the clear message that Mucha’s composing is an act of direct communication and of belonging. The first piano piece on the album, Variations on an Old Scottish Folk Song (Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes), is the longest, and is a sampler of Mucha’s many styles. The shortest are the two half-minute pieces to the Decandoles, both in the same key and sharing a similar opening, though the first feels more dance-like than the lament of the second.
The final piece on the CD is, fittingly, the 1991 Epitaph to Jiri Mucha; and it is this piece that issued the visceral call that so caught me by surprise. The simplicity in Skye Boat Song, and its emergence from the beautiful web of the preceding six minutes, in the clear tones of the oboe, was a shockingly personal * that paralysed me. I don’t think I moved for minutes beyond the end of the album. Perhaps it was in part my own background, with a family connection to Skye through my Scottish grandmother, and the resulting feeling of belonging that the song engendered in me as a child. Mucha takes from the folksong its directness of communication, its connection between the uniqueness of the story being told, and its universality.
Although there is little in print about Geraldine Mucha herself, the writing about her husband refers at best obliquely to Jiri Mucha’s affair with Plockova, and a “tumultuous” marriage. Yet there is nothing about the impact of Jiri’s affair on Geraldine, or her relationship with the resulting child. How did she feel about her husband’s gift to Jarmila Plockova of the exclusive rights to work with his father’s art, just three years before he died, and thus three years before the composition of this piece? It is all too easy to read biographical detail into music that simply isn’t there, but it certainly lends a poignancy to the emergence of that oboe melody.
There is another fairly recent album (2017), of some of Mucha’s orchestral and vocal works, so more to explore there, as well as a few scattered tracks on YouTube. I really hope that a publisher decides to pick up the scores, currently available through the Geraldine Mucha website. I’m looking forward to getting to know her from the inside out. In the meantime, here’s Emily Beynon playing Naše Cesta.