Leoš Janáček: Piano Works (On an Overgrown Path I, In the Mists, 1.X.1905)

Description

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.
Elisabetta Braga © 2024