After completing the first draft of Vixen, Janáček took a break from the opera and composed the chorus The Wandering Madman (Potulný šílenec, November 1922). He based this work on a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali polymath whose Prague lecture had impressed him greatly the previous year. It is a colorful and imaginative work, often considered one of Janáček's finest choruses. This brief chapter looks at the structure of The Wandering Madman, illustrating his mature musical language in a choral setting. We can trace the growth of his choral technique by recalling the other choruses examined earlier in the book: Ploughing, The Fickleness of Love, The Wild Duck, and The 70,000.

Text

The poem depicts one man's search for a magic stone that turns objects into gold, a search that one day takes a bizarre turn: when asked by a village boy about the origins of a gold chain around his waist (“neck” in Janáček's setting) the man realizes that he has indeed found the stone but was unaware of it. And so he continues searching, though now without much strength.

Like Janáček's other late choruses, The Wandering Madman is in the form of a drama, with added characters joining the male chorus: a narrator (sung by a baritone) and the village boy (sung by a soprano). Tyrrell writes:

A translation of the poem appears below; the motives are indicated in square brackets. (They are identified in example 8.1.) Text sung by the narrator appears in bold: he opens the piece—intoning his lines on repeated pitches to create a somewhat ritualistic atmosphere—and then returns three more times, finally remaining for the entire last stanza.