Cyclical Structures in the Late Music of Leoš Janáček

Abstract

Cyclical procedures involve the recurrence (often varied) of musical themes or motives, harmonies or keys, and related coloristic, figural, or rhythmic patterns. These repetitions may occur between sections, movements, or even acts of a larger composition and often feature a developmental, climactic treatment of earlier material. Composers have employed such large-scale formal mechanisms since the cyclical masses of the Renaissance and the dramatic works of Monteverdi. In the eighteenth century, cyclical structures were occasionally introduced into instrumental music, as in Mozart's String Quintet in G Minor, K. 516 (1787), and his Jupiter Symphony, K. 551 (1788). In the nineteenth century, cyclical processes were increasingly permeated by poetic and programmatic stimuli. Here the principal, germinal ideas were subjected to elaborate transformational metamorphoses, as with Berlioz's idge fixe or Wagner's Leitmotiv technique. As a result, entire dramatic scenes were often recapitulated in varied climactic guises in order to insure both musicodramatic relationships and the sense of a culminating denouement. A convenient example is the death scene in Berlioz's dramatic symphony Romeo et Juliette (1839), which paraphrases--and ultimately disintegrates--the main thematic gestures of the earlier love scene, all the while preserving the latter's tonal matrix around A major and C-sharp minor. A similar cyclical transformation process may be observed in Wagner's Ring tetralogy between act 3 of Siegfried and act 1 (with introductory pro-