CROATIAN MUSIC – IVAN BRKANOVIĆ

Ivan Brkanović (27th of December 1906, Škaljari near Kotor, Montenegro – 20th of February 1987, Zagreb) is the only composer among the great men of the 20th century Croatian music born in 1906 – along with Milo Cipra and Boris Papandopulo – who is an authentic southerner, so that the southern horizons will in a specific way outline an emotional sketch of his creative handwriting. Inquisitive, hard-working and resolute, he had always built his fate and his life course alone, by his own will and decision, and not by chance. This stubbornness and curiosity led his from his native Škaljari to Zagreb – where he graduated in composition from the Zagreb Music Academy in 1935 (he studied under B. Bersa, F. Dugan and F. Lhotka). Afterwards he spent a short time in Paris, but the threat of war interrupted the continuation of his enhancement at the eminent Schola cantorum. “I knew my place was in my country” he said once, remembering this period of his life. After his return to Zagreb he performed a range of musical, professional and social obligations: first as choir-master and teacher, then he was in charge of dramaturgy of the Opera of the Croatian National Theatre (1951 – 1954), director of the Zagreb Philharmony (1954 – 1957) and finally professor at the Music Academy in Sarajevo from which post he retired in 1961. In the meantime (1953 and 1954) he was very active as president of the Croatian Association of Composers. Under his leadership, this composers’ association developed a great number of activities that would in the years to follow prove as being exceptionally important for the fate of the Croatian music production. One of these activities was also the subscribers’ cycle “Performances of our music works” that was organized in 1953 by composers themselves as an attempt of attracting some new audiences, and they also initiated the establishment of the Society of Friends of Music that would later grow into the organisation of the Musical Youth. However, no social activity, no matter how intense it was, could separate Brkanović from music, not even for a moment. His respectable opus of some 130 works rests on some remarkably supportive points. Brkanović’s first successful achievements are linked to choir music production (Bokeljsko kolo [Reel from Boka Kotorska], 1932, Konavosko pirovanje [Wedding feast in Konavle], 1933). The choir had been and remained one of the fundamental starting points of Brkanović’s inspiration, and this also goes for works where the choir is but a part of a greater vocal-instrumental whole. What should be emphasized is the fact that importance does not emerge from the sound component of the vocal idiom, though this aspect is very important indeed, but from the permanent authentic need of the composer to make the extra-musical themes to be the contents of the music and that these should be artistically articulated. This is the area of extra-musical strata on which the ideas of the composer, creator, continued linking and mutually intertwining with the ideas of the man of expressive emotionality, clearly aware of the political and social context of the world he lived in. What should also be said is that the choice of themes was chiefly governed by the author’s expressed, almost touching feeling of national affiliation. This is particularly obvious in themes of ritualistic significance, as for instance in the Triptych, the folklore ritual accompanying death for soli, choir and orchestra from the year 1936, but neither would other symphonic compositions be deprived of these feelings (chiefly his Second Symphony from the year 1946 – from the total of five symphonies Brkanović had written). This is also true of his work he composed for the stage, first of all Ekvinocij [Equinox] from the year 1945 and Zlato Zadra [Gold of Zadar] from the year 1954. This feeling is closely bound to the stylistic features of the author’s characteristic composition that unites the folklore background as one of the signs of national identity with the individual composition expression, and this is based on the wide-lined melodies, epic coordinates and rhapsodic dimensions, free, nor infrequently daring though determined by the harmonious gesture in terms of their tonality. Academician L. Županović wrote the following about Ivan Brkanović: “He was a veritable author of works of great dimensions and wide architectural arches, in which, however, segments can be clearly observed which, like the blood-flow, develop from a single tonal and dimensionally modest kernel” (Ivan Brkanović, Zagreb, JAZU [Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts] 1989). The mentioned blood-flow is the composer himself who by identifying with his own artistic act embraces the life processes of questions and answers, fear and hope, doubt and faith and finds harmony between his own being and the being of the people he whole-heartedly belonged to. Erika Krpan