Antonín Dvořák: Mazurkas, Op. 56, B 111
Leoš Janáček: On an Overgrown Path, JW VIII/17
Leoš Janáček: Con moto
Leoš Janáček: Allegro
Leoš Janáček’s friendship with Antonín Dvořák, thirteen years his senior, was marked by admiration and a deep musical understanding.
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) devoted himself to piano music more intensively than Janáček, due in part to the keen interest of music publishers around 1880. In that year he composed a cycle of six piano mazurkas. He was far from the only composer to draw inspiration from the Polish national dance, but unlike Chopin, for example, he stylised them more modestly—though with great melodic richness. The Mazurkas remain among Dvořák’s finest piano works.
The first series of Janáček’s poetic piano cycle On an Overgrown Path took shape gradually in 1900, 1908, and 1911. Five pieces were written in 1900, when the composer was forty-six years old. They first appeared as short works for harmonium in the series Slavonic Melodies, published by the Ivančice teacher Emil Kolář. The expansion of the cycle was encouraged by editor Jan Branberger, who in 1908 arranged for their publication with the Prague publisher Bedřich Kočí. This publishing interest prompted Janáček to compose further pieces, bringing the cycle to ten numbers, each with a poetic title. These short, intimate miniatures—often recalling personal memories—are today among Janáček’s best-known and most frequently performed works. Two early pieces from 1900, Con moto and Allegro, were not included by the composer in the printed edition of the cycle.
Text: Jiří Zahrádka
