No 6, for example, went from ‘The bitterness of reproach’ via ‘The bitterness of disappointment’ to its final title, ‘Words fail!’. Yet those proved to be no more than an interim thought: on reflection they shifted further, and sometimes to interesting effect. The earliest five pieces to be composed originally appeared without titles, and it was only at the behest of the music critic Jan Branberger, who liked the pieces and requested some hint as to their inspiration, that Janáček jotted down a sequence of descriptive headings. One of the striking aspects about this cycle is the titles themselves. The title of the overall cycle refers to a Moravian wedding song, the bride lamenting that ‘The path to my mother’s has become overgrown with clover’. Janáček added two more numbers the following year but the remaining five (Nos 3, 5, 6, 8 and 9) weren’t completed until 1908 (Nos 3, 6 and 9) and 1911 (Nos 5 and 8).
However, they had by this point become mood pieces rather than straightforward arrangements of folksongs. And it was as part of the fifth volume of this publication (dating from 1901) that three of the pieces that became parts of On the overgrown path first saw the light of day.
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This, at least, was the starting-point, when in 1897 Janáček was asked to contribute to a series of works for harmonium under the title Slovanské melodie. So it’s striking to think that the impetus behind these pieces was not as piano music at all but as arrangements of Moravian folksongs for harmonium. But the wind now blows several degrees chillier, the subject matter is darker and more oblique and the piano writing is deceptively treacherous, many of the difficulties far from overt. Over half a century separates Schumann’s nature-inspired Waldszenen from the first book of Janáček’s On the overgrown path.
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