Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) was a Czech composer who emerged as one of the most original voices of his generation. There was no one like him before or after. Writer Milan Kundera calls Janáček’s music the “polyphony of emotions.” The title of my album “in tears” comes from the ninth movement of Janáček’s “On an Overgrown Path,” a piano cycle composed in the aftermath of Janáček’s tragic loss: the death of his 21-year-old daughter, Olga.

The artwork for this album is a painting by New York City-based artist Ben Schonzeit entitled “Union Square Roses,” used here by permission from Bridgeman Art Library. The recording took place at the University of Oklahoma’s Pitman Recital Hall in Norman, on a beautiful concert piano, Steinway model D. As with other records on my label, I have engineered, produced, and performed this album from start to finish on my own. Most uniquely, I have not used splicing, editing, or fixing notes in post production: what you hear is exactly how I played this music in the concert hall.

1. X. 1905
Written in memory of a young man, František Pavlík, who died in a violent street protest, Janáček originally composed three movements for what was going to be his new Piano Sonata. Dissatisfied at the dress rehearsal before the work’s premiere in 1906, Janáček cut out the third movement from the pianist’s manuscript and threw the entire autograph into the Vltava River. The piece fell into oblivion until 1924, the year of Janáček’s 70th birthday celebration, when his pupil Ludmila Tučková and the pianist from the 1906 premiere, resurfaced a copy of what had long been considered to be a lost work. The two surviving movements, "The Presentiment" and "The Death," present Janáček’s intensely original and modern language.

On an Overgrown Path
In a letter to his publisher, Janáček revealed that this piano cycle contains distant memories. The death of Janáček’s 21-year-old daughter, Olga, permeates every page of this music. Rudolf Firkušný, Janáček’s most distinguished pupil and interpreter, said that “all of the Overgrown Path is melancholy, and it recalls Janáček's time with Olga (...) When he began to recover from the shock of her death, he began to reminisce in music.” One of the most poignant tributes to his daughter can be found in the penultimate piece, "In tears." The composer wrote that you could sense here a “premonition of certain death.” Janáček used a simple ternary form to explore the idea of past and present: the lyrical outer section portrays an idealized image of the past while the middle section is consumed with the painful present.

Over the years, Janáček collected thousands of fragments of what he called “speech melodies,” melodic transcriptions of human voice. These speech melodies were never cited in Janáček’s compositions per se, but they were born out of the need to realistically capture every aspect of human emotions, e.g. the words “Dobrou noc” (Good night) fit perfectly with the shape of the soprano melody underscored with “espressivo” and “ppp” performance directions. Firkušný commented that “it says ‘good-night,’ but it really means ‘good-bye.’” In the final piece, "The Barn-Owl Has Not Flown Away," Janáček writes that “the ominous motif of the screech owl is heard in the intimate song of life.” In folk tradition, an owl is a symbol of misfortune and death. Janáček used symbolism to express the inevitability of death and to remind us of the tension between life and death that cannot be easily reconciled.

In the Mists
In 1912, Janáček organized a concert for his Organ School in Brno where he heard a pianist Marie Dvořáková perform Debussy’s "Reflets dans l’eau" and "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum." Scholars link these performances and the influence of Debussy’s Impressionism on Janáček’s "In the Mists," yet the work is unmistakably original. Entered as a competition piece organized by the Brno Club of the Friends of Art and originally titled "Mlhy" (Mists), the four-movement work is Janáček’s most sophisticated piece of piano music to date. In a poetic ending to the cycle, Janáček brings back the motif of death from "On an Overgrown Path" in the closing "Presto," creating a moment of earth-shattering proportions, and a musical portrayal mirroring the composer’s life in the face of doubt and rejection.

Igor Lipinski
May 27, 2022