Cup & Bridle

To wander alone when the moon, faintly beaming With glimmering lustre, darts thro' the dark shade, Where owls seek for covert, and nightbirds complaining Add sound to the horror that darkens the glade.

'Tis not for the happy; come, daughter of sorrow, 'Tis here thy sad thoughts are embalm'd in thy tears, Where, lost in the past, disregarding tomorrow, There's nothing for hopes and nothing for fears.

In AD 59, Nero ordered the murder of his mother. This was the start of a reign of terror that caused the deaths of many others, including his wife Octavia. In AD 64, a fire destroyed much of Rome and Nero put the blame for the conflagration on the small Christian community of the city. Nero further cemented his reputation as an uncaring despot when he decided that the ruined centre of Rome would be an ideal location to build the Domus Aurea, the “Golden House” that would serve as his palace.

A large group of powerful people in Rome had had enough. In AD 65, the stage was set for a coup. Gaius Calpurnius Piso, handsome and well-liked, intended to have Nero assassinated, leaving the way clear for him to be declared emperor by the Praetorian Guard.

Unfortunately, Piso’s plot was betrayed. Things unravelled quickly. More than forty men were accused of having conspired against Nero. Some of them were banished. Others were executed. Members from the upper echelons of society were, according to ancient Roman custom, ordered to commit suicide, including Piso himself.

Seneca

Tangled up in this web of deceit, somehow, was Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 BC–AD 65), the man who had served as Nero’s leading adviser. Seneca is considered one of the foremost proponents of (Roman) Stoicism, originally an Hellenistic philosophy founded in the third century BC in Athens by Zeno of Citium.

Roman Stoics believed that the gods determined one’s fate: one should simply except that whatever happened was the result of divine will. At the same time, this didn’t mean that one shouldn’t get involved in earthly matters: Stoics believed that one had to uphold the moral order whenever possible. Seneca tried to influence Nero for the better and he embraced the Stoic ideal that the entire world was a community, advocating, for example, the humane treatment of slaves.

Lest we look at the Stoics with too kindly an eye, it should be pointed out that Seneca never advocated slavery be abolished. That would have been inconceivable as regards to the economic realities of the ancient world, which saw no need to develop machines to take over from cheap and plentiful human labour, nor did they have any moral objections to the very idea of slavery. Furthermore, a Stoic would have embraced a division of the human race between masters and slaves as natural: masters would have to be humane, while slaves had to simply endure their fate.

Sadly, Seneca didn’t seem to exert much of an influence on Nero after the first few years of his reign. In AD 62, and again in 64, Seneca tried unsuccessfully to retire, but was forced to stay. When the Pisonian conspiracy had been revealed, Nero decided that Seneca, too, must have been in on the plot, even though he was probably innocent.

Nevertheless, Nero ordered his old adviser to kill himself.

Death

Tacitus, in his Annals (15.60–64), describes the details and circumstances of Seneca’s death. Seneca was at a villa he owned a little outside of Rome. Granius Silvanus, tribune of the Praetorian Guard, arrived with a group of soldiers right when Seneca was at supper with his wife, Pompeia Paulina, and two of his friends.

Silvanus relayed the Emperor’s orders, after which Seneca calmly tried to explain that he had nothing to do with the conspiracy. The tribune returned to Rome, but Nero told him to go back to Seneca and order him to kill himself. Tacitus notes that SIlvanus took the long way back to Seneca’s villa, as he had himself been one of the conspirators. In the end, he resolved to send a centurion in his stead and demand that the philosopher perform the deed.

The centurion arrived back at Seneca’s villa and told him what had to be done. Tacticus continues (Annals 15.61):

Seneca, quite unmoved, asked for tablets on which to inscribe his will, and, on the centurion’s refusal, turned to his friends, protesting that as he was forbidden to requite them, he bequeathed to them the only, but still the noblest possession yet remaining to him, the pattern of his life [imago vitae suae], which, if they remembered, they would win a name for moral worth and steadfast friendship. At the same time he called them back from their tears to manly resolution, now with friendly talk, and now with the sterner language of rebuke. “Where,” he asked again and again, “are your maxims of philosophy, or the preparation of so many years’ study against evils to come? Who knew not Nero’s cruelty? After a mother’s and a brother’s murder, nothing remains but to add the destruction of a guardian and a tutor.”

Seneca then turned and embraced his wife, asking her not too grieve too much. But Paulina told him flatly that she, too, had resolved to die. Together, they cut the veins on their arms. However, Seneca bled only a little, supposedly due to his age and his “frugal diet”, so that he also cut his knees and legs. Seeing his wife suffer, both on account of her own wounds and her seeing him try vainly to kill himself, Seneca ordered his wife to withdraw to another room.

But Nero had ordered Pompeia Paulina to live. Her slaves and freedmen, by the order of the soldiers, tended to her wounds. Tacitus suggests that she didn’t realize this at the time; perhaps she had fainted on account of the loss of blood. In the meantime, Seneca was dictating his last words to scribes. As bleeding to death was taking too long, he asked one of his friends to prepare a poison, perhaps inspired by the death of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (who had been condemned to drink hemlock).

However, the poison, too, had little effect.

The String Quartet No 1 in C minor, Op 9, was composed in 1856 at the Igeler Hof, a country house—formerly a farm—in the hills near Bergisch Gladbach, where Bruch was a welcome guest from the age of twelve. He knew both the families who owned it in his time, first the Brussels-based Neissen family and then, from 1888, the Zanders family, and much of his music was written during summer stays there. The quartet opens with an Andante introduction, where we initially hear the first violin. The substantial Allegro ma non troppo is based on an energetic first theme and a more flowing, lyrical second theme. The model appears to be Mendelssohn, not so much the early quartets as the Op 44 set, and the working-out is full of fire. The Adagio has a restful, very lovely main theme: a contrasting section is followed by a brief return of the slow tempo. The vigorous scherzo, Allegro molto energico, has a lyrical trio section, based on a folk tune, which Bruch brings back just before the coda. The finale, Molto vivace, begins in stressful mood before relaxing into a merry dance, quite like a tarantella, with two excellent themes. Rather misleadingly, Bruch later attached the year 1858 to this work, as he carried out minor revisions before the quartet was published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1859.

Of Domenico Rainer hardly anything is known beyond his name, which appears many times within a voluminous manuscript, held at the library of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. The manuscript contains guitar music, notated in tablature, from the 17th and 18th centuries. To judge from the style of the fugues and dances left to us – probably a mere fraction of his total output – Rainer worked at the turn of the 18th century.

The dances are mostly grouped in pairs – of allemandes followed by courantes, sarabandes and gigues. The allemandes are particularly impressive, often majestic and serious in mood, while the complementary dances are lighter in character. The title and authorship of several other works here is not easy to establish from the poor condition of the manuscript, but Lex Eisenhardt has assigned them to Rainer after close study of the source.

Rainer seems to have taken inspiration in several cases from the work of Arcangelo Corelli: the gigues in particular demonstrate a distinctly ‘violinistic’ approach, with abundant broken-chord figuration, and a contemporary sense of tonality and chord hierarchy. Rainer adapted Corelli’s language for the guitar with considerable imagination and ingenuity.

Janáček composed his piano music around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, before he found fame late in life with operas such as ‘Jenůfa’, ‘Káťa Kabanová’ and ‘The Makropulos Case’. Epigrammatic but obsessive, these intimate pieces speak of the composer’s passions and frustrations. But like his later works they are loaded with drama and big ideas.

The first book in ‘On An Overgrown Path’ is notable for its poetic titles – such as ‘Our evenings’, ‘They chattered like swallows’, ‘Unutterable anguish’ – which find expression in music of apparent folk-like innocence and sudden passions, which reach a powerful climax in the violent contrasts of the first book’s final piece, ‘The Barn-Owl has not flown away’. This is music of heartbreak and desolation hardly less moving in its way than the great scenes of love and abandonment which Janáček composed for his operatic heroines.

Stripped of such titles, the second book in ‘On An Overgrown Path’ is more elusive in meaning, swinging between a gentle, Czech translation of Debussy’s Impressionist tone-painting and darker, more sinister currents of expression that run raw and angry in the Sonata which Janáček wrote to commemorate the death of a young man at the hands of the police in Prague during political protests in the autumn of 1905. From seven years later, the four-movement cycle of Mists recovers some of the Romantic melancholy of ‘On an Overgrown Path’, though its cathartic finale presents a stiff challenge to any pianist with its torrents of notes.

As the recipient of a prestigious Borletti-Buitoni award, the Hungarian pianist Zoltán Fejérvári is a solo, concerto and chamber-music pianist with several well-received recordings to his credit such as Liszt’s Malédiction and an album of Mozart violin sonatas in partnership with Ernő Kállai.

This new recording contains the main body of piano music by Czech composer Leos Janáček: the Piano Sonata, the complete cycle On an Overgrown Path and the cycle In The Mists. Janáček’s piano music is highly personal, his language immediately recognizable: short, almost aphoristic motives form the basis of a highly dramatic discourse. The Sonata was written after the death of a man during a worker’s demonstration and expresses a deep and bleak despair. The cycle In The Mists and On An Overgrown Path contain miniatures of sometimes violent, sometimes painfully intimate emotions.