Lost in Liverpool

In Karel Ćapek's 1929 story “Historie dirigenta Kaliny” (The Orchestra Conductor’s Story), a Czech orchestra conductor named Kalina finds himself in Liverpool. Although he speaks no English, he is able to communicate with the local orchestra through an international vocabulary of physical gestures. As he explains, “[F]or example, when I do this with my arms, everyone knows that it means a mystical soaring and redemption-from-the-burdens-and-sorrows-of-life sort of thing.”1 When he first arrives in Liverpool, Kalina wanders through the city, finally getting lost at dusk among the dock pilings. There, he overhears a conversation between a man and a woman. Although he cannot make out a word of their discussion, he can tell by the melodic qualities of their voices that one was convincing the other to commit a violent act and that a murder was imminent. Unfortunately, he cannot impart this information to the uniformly non-Czech-speaking policemen he encounters, and he has to wait until the next afternoon's newspapers to see his hunch confirmed by headlines of “MURDER.”

Ćapek's Kalina shares a number of traits with JanáĆek. Ćapek and JanáĆek had been brought together by JanáĆek's opera Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Case), whose libretto was assembled from Ćapek's play of the same title. The two men corresponded about the legal implications of JanáĆek's venture, and Ćapek attended the Brno premiere in December 1926 (Ćapek's brother Josef also designed the sets for two Prague productions of JanáĆek operas—Příhody lišky Bystroušky (The Cunning Little Vixen) in 1926 and The Makropulos Case in 1928). Although JanáĆek's conducting career was long over by that time, he did travel to England in 1926, and, like Kalina, he spoke no English. Aside from this biographical coincidence, though, Kalina's description of the sinister conversation as a musical duet, and his ability to understand the conversation solely through the contours and infl ections of speech, immediately suggest JanáĆek’s many writings about speech melodies (nápěvky mluvy).2 Like Kalina, JanáĆek believed speech not only carried semantic content but also conveyed information about the inner life of the speaker in its speed, register, rhythm, and intonation.