At the inception of the musical career of Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) figured among other elements his dream to become a piano virtuoso. Brno’s concert venues then witnessed his renditions of difficult scores penned by foremost world composers. He was a diligent student, and simultaneously composed his own small-scale pieces for piano. It was as a student in Leipzig though that came to understand that the career of a concert pianist was not exactly what he was made for, so from then on the piano was to serve him purely as a useful tool in work on orchestral scores, as well as a means by which he would express his most intimate feelings.

The Sonata I.X. 1905, sometimes presented with the subtitle “From the Street”, was inspired by a tragic event which happened in Brno during demonstrations accompanying the establishment of the second Czech university in the Austro-Hungarian empire, in which members of Brno’s German-speaking majority clashed with the Czech-speaking minority. With this technically elaborate three-part piano composition, whose original title actually was From the Street on 1^st October, 1905, Janáček expressed his outrage at the arbitrary killing of a young industrial worker. Ironically, the composition, which Janáček initially discarded in a sudden self-critical bout upon confronting it with compositions of Suk, Foerster and Novák, today ranks among key works of the 20^th-century piano repertoire.

Shostakovich’s series of ten short Aphorisms may evoke the Sarcasms, by Prokofiev, as well as some other piano miniatures. These, however, happen to reach a degree or so higher in terms of radical approach and sheer modernity. These dissonant, virtuosic small-scale compositions project the personality of a youthful composer engaged in breaking his own ground, independent from music of previous eras. The composer himself premiered the series in the autumn of 1927.

The majority of Janáček’s piano compositions (without counting his student works) date from the period between 1899 and 1912. The cycle On an Overgrown Path contains small-scale pieces reminiscent of sketchbook sheets: in quick, precise yet sparing lines the composer produced pictures, either inspired by Moravian folk music, or merely hinting at evanescent impressions.

In the five pieces making up the series’ second book, bearing only tempo indications at the top, musical ideas, or merely their fragments, keep repeating with obsessive urgency, the music’s palette, whose spectrum at places attains a harmony evoking Impressionist patterns, interacts with a characteristically “Moravian” cadence and dance rhythm.

A still further closeness to the palette of Impressionism is evident in the piano cycle In the Mists (1912), ranking alongside Janáček’s mature masterpieces. It was written during a period of inescapably tragic events in the composer’s life, involving the death of his beloved daughter, Olga, still exacerbated by the professional and artistic contempt he was facing from the part of the Prague-based musical establishment.

Text: Dita Hradecká