Czech Chamber Music Society • Talich Quartet

String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, subtitled “From My Life”, was composed by Bedřich Smetana at the end of 1876, two years after he lost his hearing. As the subtitle of the work suggests, it has autobiographical features and is considered to be the composer’s confession of a lifetime and artistic statement. Smetana’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15 from 1855, composed after the death of his first-born daughter Bedřiška, also had an intimate subtext. Smetana was inherently a programmatic composer and dramatist, and these qualities gave shape to his first string quartet. It was to be premiered on 19 February 1877 by the Bennewitz Quartet. However, its members found the piece too symphonic and refused to perform it. The public premiere took place as late as 29 March 1879 at a concert of the Art Society, performed by Ferdinand Lachner, Jan Pelikán, Josef Kerhan and Alois Neruda. Before that, however, the composer’s friend Josef Srb-Debrnov, who organized musical afternoons in his apartment, presented Smetana’s quartet to a closer circle of listeners in mid-April 1878. Smetana wrote to Srb on that occasion: “As regards my Quartet, I gladly leave others to judge its style, and I shall not be in the least angry if this style does not find favor or is considered contrary to what was hitherto regarded as quartet style. I did not intend to write a quartet according to recipe or custom in the usual forms. As a young beginner I worked sufficiently hard to acquire thorough knowledge and mastery of musical theory. [...] For me the form of every composition is dictated by the subject itself.” The established forms served Smetana as a starting point and he transformed their laws to suit his needs.

The work is indisputably autobiographical, and the composer himself made it known. The first movement expresses his youthful leanings toward art, a romantic atmosphere and “the inexpressible yearning for something I could neither express nor define, and also a kind of warning of my future misfortune.” The polka of the second movement is a reminiscence of the joyful days of Smetana’s youth; its middle section, he writes, is “the one which, in the opinion of the gentlemen who play this quartet, is unperformable. The purity of the chords is said to be impossible to achieve; I remind myself that I am painting in the tones of this movement my recollections of the aristocratic circles in which I lived for many years.” The third movement “brings to mind the happiness of my first love for the girl who later on became my faithful wife,” i.e., for Kateřina Kolářová. In the final movement, Smetana describes “discovery of how to make use of the elements of national music, joy at the success of this course up to the time it was interrupted by the catastrophe of the onset of my deafness,” as announced by a piercing high E fatefully ringing in his ears. “Roughly this is the aim of this composition, an almost private one, and therefore purposely written for four instruments which talk to each other in an intimate circle of friends of what has so momentously affected me.” 

Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev was born into a family with an artistic background; his father, a clerk, had many friends among musicians and played the violin and piano himself. At the age of ten, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, where his teachers included Nikolai Rubinstein and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In 1895 the young Bohemian Quartet, founded in 1892 at the Prague Conservatory, made its first trip to Russia. “We played all over European parts of Russia,” recalled Karel Hoffmann, the ensemble’s first violin, half a century later. He also mentioned the violinist Jan Hřímalý, who taught at the Moscow Conservatory. Sergei Taneyev, who was a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, dedicated his String Quartet No. 2 in C major, Op. 5, composed in the year of the Bohemian Quartet’s Russian tour, to him. The ensemble had Taneyev’s String Quartet No. 1 in B minor, Op. 4 in its repertoire at that time, and Hřímalý introduced the members of the Bohemian Quartet to him. Taneyev, who was also an acclaimed pianist, visited Prague several times and performed with the members of the Bohemian Quartet on several occasions at concerts of the Czech Chamber Society, as well as in Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig and elsewhere. Taneyev, out of his own interest, studied the works of Renaissance and Baroque composers and perfectly mastered the technique of counterpoint. After Taneyev’s visit to Prague in 1909, the journal Dalibor called him “Max Reger of Russia … but it is not just the automatic mechanism of mathematical counterpoint, as can be found almost exclusively with Reger, but also the power of expression, richness of thought, warmth and color.” This characteristics is also evidenced by the composition to be heard tonight with its extensive fugue of the final movement.

String Quintet in E flat major, Op. 97 came into being between 26 June and 1 August 1893 in the United States as a kind of relaxation after the completion of Symphony in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World” immediately followed by String Quartet in F major, Op. 96. Dvořák spent the summer of 1893 in the township of Spillville (Iowa), inhabited by a large group of Czech compatriots who reminded him of his homeland. At that time, the township hosted a group of the Iroquois, and the echo of their drumming and dancing can be heard especially in the rhythmic accompaniment of the second movement of the quintet. The composition was premiered at a Dvořák Night in New York on 12 January 1894 by the Kneisel Quartet, which included members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. “I have heard them several times and I can say that they can compete with the best quartets in Europe,” Dvořák wrote to his friend Antonín Rus in Písek in December 1893. All the members of the ensemble were from Europe: the first violinist Franz Kneisel was born in Bucharest; the violist Louis Svećenski in Osijek, Croatia; the second violinist Otto Roth was from Austria; and the cellist Alwin Schroeder from Germany; the second viola part was played by Max Zach, originally from Galicia. The Czech premiere of String Quintet in E flat major took place the same year, on 10 October 1894 in Prague, performed by the Bohemian Quartet with Ferdinand Lachner.

The impressiveness of the work lies primarily in its rhythmic component, but Dvořák also embellishes the harmony with new combinations, and in contrast to his earlier period he often presents the melody in a simple form as a separate voice. In the first movement, in sonata form, he works with three themes; in the Scherzo, with its contrasting middle section, our attention is caught by the above-mentioned “drum rhythm”. The theme of the third variation movement was originally intended as a basis for the new American anthem, but it never came to fruition. The exuberant final rondo with its effective coda fully balances the dreamy sections of the preceding movements.