Gianluigi Daniele - Leoš Janáček: Piano Works (On an Overgrown Path I, in the Mists, 1.X.1905) '2024

Tracks list

Tracklist

01. Po zarostlém chodníčku - Series I: I. Naše večery
02. Po zarostlém chodníčku - Series I: II. Lístek odvanutý
03. Po zarostlém chodníčku - Series I: III. Pojďte s námi!
04. Po zarostlém chodníčku - Series I: IV. Frýdecká panna Maria
05. Po zarostlém chodníčku - Series I: V. Štěbetaly jak
laštovičky
06. Po zarostlém chodníčku - Series I: VI. Nelze domluvit!
07. Po zarostlém chodníčku - Series I: VII. Dobrou noc!
08. Po zarostlém chodníčku - Series I: VIII. Tak neskonale úzko
09. Po zarostlém chodníčku - Series I: IX. V pláči
10. Po zarostlém chodníčku - Series I: X. Sýček neodletěl!
11. V mlhách: I. Andante
12. V mlhách: II. Molto adagio
13. V mlhách: III. Andantino
14. V mlhách: IV. Presto
15. 1.X. 1905 - Piano Sonata: I. Předtucha
16. 1.X. 1905 - Piano Sonata: II. Smrt

The life of composer Leoš Janáček (Hukvaldy, 1854 – Ostrava,
1928) was very tumultuous, and he consistently suffered from a constant
disappointment due to the lack of recognition for his own worth: in the musical
circles of his time, his music was slow to be appreciated before his death and
even then, only partially. Most of his contemporaries, who favoured Smetana,
judged him with disdain, labeling him as a “folklorist” and the
author of frivolous tunes. His opera, Jenůfa, his masterpiece, was rejected
by the National Theatre in Prague for over ten years and was eventually staged
in 1916 only after heavy revisions were imposed. His fame arrived in 1924 with
the revival, in German, of Jenůfa at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; from
there, general interest in his beloved operatic works spread so much that they
are still performed in major theaters worldwide today. Remaining in the shadows,
but equally rich in artistic quality and expressive depth, is his piano works,
which he wrote, laden with autobiographical references, as a sort of diary,
entrusting it with the narrative of the most intimate and personal aspects of
his melancholic existence, deeply marked by profound losses.
Chronologically close to Dvořák, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and
Tchaikovsky, authors with whom he shared a pronounced interest in the folklore
of their own roots, Janáček’s stylistic matrix propels him forward,
aligning him with the music of younger composers like Debussy, Schönberg,
Stravinsky, and Bartók, compositions that stood in antithesis to Romanticism
in the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
As a teacher, theorist, critic, ethnomusicologist, deeply interested in
philosophy and psychology, Janáček integrated himself into the
intellectual and artistic climate of his time with the exceptional nature of his
musical language and the innovative scope of his aesthetics, reflecting the
transversality of his knowledge. Investigating the relationship between speaking
and musical composition, he spent much part of his life in studying the folklore
of Moravia, his homeland, a region in the territory now known as the Czech
Republic but then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The influence of German
culture was strong and considered dominant in this land, while simultaneously,
people felt a growing aspiration towards an independent Czech national identity,
striving for a free homeland with a culture rooted in Slavic tradition.
In the context of his studies on spoken language, Janáček intuited the
potential encapsulated in every slight inflection of words or phrases, revealing
the emotions or psychological moods of the speaker. He began to meticulously
write down the everyday dialogues of people on notebooks, carefully recorded and
classified by every smallest variation. Janáček’s compositional
system thus became a means to analyse the recesses of the human soul, seeking
the most authentic expression of an emotional condition.
«A note has no right to exist except as expression […] every note (not
only every motif, but every note of a motif) must have maximal expressive
clarity. »
(Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1996)
In this sense, Janáček could even be defined as an expressionist composer,
although unlike the expressionism proposed by Schönberg and Berg,
characterized by extreme emotional states musically corresponded to atonal
language. Janáček’s aesthetic is focused on a more contained
dimension, which doesn’t reject tonality but embellishes itself with
modal influences and dissonances due to coloristic purposes.
«Life is sound, modulation of the sound of human language»: in his works,
Janáček’s psychological realism arises from the desire to
«unmask the truth» of humanity, to explore the unknown languages of
consciousness. In his opera works, he adopts a particular flow of vocal lines,
moulded through the inflections and rhythms of spoken language. Grounded in the
idea that the prosody of speech could be incorporated into musical language
(also known as “speech melody”) and transformed within it,
Janáček creates vivid, profoundly human characters.
Essential musical writing, concise forms, lean orchestration, and the quest for
unique timbres as evocative symbols of human emotions are the characteristic
elements that define Janáček’s style. He shapes them through
structures created by intertwining multiple thematic modules, peculiar
representations of distinct emotional circumstances, expressed in a personal and
unprecedented manner. In these compositions, different emotional states coexist
simultaneously, almost as if different actors were performing expressing various
moods at the same time on the same stage.
The result is an aesthetic shaped by the rules of memory, particularly the
psychological interiority that prevails on objective description and absolute
chronological time. This trait becomes distinctive of the music of
Janáček. Employing a sort of “montage technique”, he
contrapuntally overlays different rhythms, forming layers of sound that give
rise to slight metric discrepancies and sections of varying thickness and
harmonic texture. According to the composer’s musical and psychological
thought, each of these sections becomes the equivalent of a psychological
condition.
The perception one has while listening to the different metamorphoses of the
knotted motivic elements throughout the composition is elaborated and indicated
by Janáček using the term spletna (from the verb “intertwine”
or “weave”). This characteristic essentially defines the dramatic
nature of his music, a «contradictory polyphony of emotions», positioning
him in opposition to Romanticism and nineteenth century symphonism.
Milan Kundera wrote that Janáček’s essential and truthful language
demands an execution without embellishments, one that does justice to each
melodic line in the Czech composer’s polyphonic writing. This execution
must respect the contrasts that alternate the most intimate delicacy with the
deepest and sorrowful despair, always contained and never shouted. Notably,
there’s a folkloric component evident in the rhythmic patterns inspired
by dances and the rhapsodic character of certain episodes.
Initially conceived for the harmonium, the collection for piano titled On an
Overgrown Path consisted of a core of five small pieces written between
1901-1902, coinciding with the composition of the opera Jenůfa. During this
period, Janáček grappled with the agonizing pain of losing his beloved
daughter Olga, which led him to seek solace by immersing himself in memories of
his youth. After a few years, the collection expanded to include fifteen pieces.
In these delicately written compositions, emotions fade into the subdued sounds
of a pure and innocent nature, viewed through the eyes of a child. Pieces are
titled: A Leaf Blown Away, The Owl Has Not Flown Away, The Madonna of Frydek,
Good Night, and so on. The music recalls the faded emotional memory of life in
Hukvaldy, his birthplace, like an overgrown pathway that, left untraveled for a
long time, is now covered with grass.
The misfortune of losing all his children and the continual rejections by the
Prague Opera in staging Jenůfa left Janáček in a state of great
emotional instability. In this frame of mind, he composed the enigmatic
collection In the Mists. Unlike On an Overgrown Path, these pieces, first
performed in 1914, do not have explanatory titles. The sparse writing of
episodes in free form, rhapsodically succeeding one another, expresses a complex
and intentionally non-showy pianism. The arrangement of chords for timbral
purposes seems to evoke Debussy’s impressionism, although the melody and
rhythm maintain a strong Moravian folk connotation. The use of overlapping
harmonies leads the listener through a continuous succession of contrasting
soundscapes, both sweet and distressing.
In October 1905, in an occupied Brno, students and workers demanded the
establishment of a Czech university. A young man of barely twenty was killed by
an Austrian soldier on the street, in front of the concert hall. In protest,
Janáček wrote Sonata 1.X.1905, expressing all the pain for the atrocities
committed in his occupied homeland. The sonata, summarizing the Czech
composer’s writing style, currently consists of two movements (the
composer himself destroyed the third, a funeral march, because he was
particularly dissatisfied with it). The first, Presentiment, dialectically
hovers between cantabile passages and drama, creating a highly effective
emotional tension. The atmosphere of general instability coexists with a sense
of immutability due to the obsessive repetition of the same themes presented
continuously in a new guise through transposition. Death, the second movement,
is an anguish-laden Adagio, characterized by punctuated rhythms that sustain
music seemingly unwilling to develop, as if despair were now incapable of any
consolation.
In the European cultural landscape of those years, Janáček’s
artistic experience is part of a process of transformation that rethinks the
common perception of reality. For instance, Albert Einstein was revolutionizing
the understanding of space and time with his theory of relativity;
simultaneously, Sigmund Freud was exploring unconscious processes that shape our
personality and our relationship with the world through psychoanalysis.
Likewise, in literature, James Joyce was experimenting with the stream of
consciousness technique to provide an authentic and intricate representation of
the human psyche through his characters. In the visual arts, Pablo Picasso was
exploring the perception of the subject by simultaneously superimposing various
points of observation on the canvas, giving rise to the artistic movement of
Cubism. An era of continuous change and evolution started to unveil new horizons
in the interpretation of reality and human experiences.

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