Czech Chamber Music Society • Janáček Quartet

As of late 1923, Leoš Janáček was already widely regarded as an extraordinary, successful, and renowned composer. Honours and invitations were pouring in, although the composer himself, who had spent long years struggling to promote his works, was aware of how fickle such things are. “One thing is certain”, he wrote at the time, “you will not convince anyone with artistry. It’s like beating the dust cover of a duvet: it just moves aside. Everything is applauded. And yet even in music there is only one truth, and not everyone possesses it.” He was also aware that he was slowly but surely approaching the age of 70, and he was working feverishly on one composition after another, as if he were trying to pay off all of his musical debts.

Compositions with Czech subject matter alternated with works on Russian topics. Janáček, the organiser and chairman of Brno’s Russian Circle, was a great admirer of Russian culture. Having paid tribute to Gogol (Taras Bulba) and Ostrovsky (Káťa Kabanová), he wished to do the same for the author and thinker Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828‒1910). Already in 1908, Janáček had composed a Piano Trio “under the impression of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata”. We know that the trio was performed successfully several times, but soon it went missing and was never found. Janáček himself did not regret the loss much; he remembered the main musical ideas and was then able to reuse them, developing them differently this time.

Janáček wrote his First String Quartet “after Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata” during a single week, from 30 October to 7 November 1923. Although the work is a true musical drama, Janáček was less interested in an epic treatment of the literary subject matter than in capturing the book’s tense atmosphere. The central theme is a female tragic heroine who, like Káťa Kabanová, suffers and ultimately dies. Both Janáček and Tolstoy created their respective works “under the impression” of another work, a violin sonata by Beethoven, which the heroine is rehearsing at the piano with a young violinist, watched and victimised by her jealous husband, who imagines that his wife has been unfaithful. His cruel jealousy destroys the marriage of a couple who had once been deeply in love.

Janáček dedicated his First String Quartet to the Bohemian Quartet (Karel Hoffmann, Josef Suk, Jiří Herold, Ladislav Zelenka). In rehearsals, the composer Josef Suk, who was playing second violin, made a few interpretive refinements to the work. For this reason, among others, the premiere on 17 October 1924 (exactly 100 years ago) at a concert of the Czech Chamber Music Society in Prague was a huge success. Janáček was deeply flattered when the First Quartet was then published in Suk’s edition.

However, things were different at home in Brno, where the First String Quartet was performed by the newly founded Moravian Quartet (František Kudláček, Josef Jedlička, Josef Trkan, Josef Křenek). Janáček, who had been in attendance in person at the rehearsals, made the absolutely uncompromising demand that they return to his original conception. The resulting interpretation of Janáček’s First Quartet was passed down through a later member of the Moravian Quartet, Prof.  Váša Černý, to his pupils, members of the Janáček Quartet, and the ensemble’s interpretation lives on to this day despite personnel changes over the generations.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets were written alongside his great symphonies, to which they form a more personal, intimate counterpart, perhaps giving a more authentic, truthful reflection of the life and thoughts of the great musician who spent his days under Soviet totalitarianism and Stalin’s dictatorship, sometimes praised to the skies, and at other times silenced. After the premiere of his Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad Symphony”) in August 1942 in the midst of the cruel blockade of the besieged city, Shostakovich became a celebrity because the work was heard around the world as the supreme anti-fascist manifesto. However, as Shostakovich himself attested in his memoirs compiled in Volkov’s book Testimony, all his life he had to disguise his true nature as he balanced precariously between official doctrine and free artistic expression. The composer experienced happy periods of societal recognition alternating with times of uncertainty when he even feared for his life, feeling despair over the banning of his works and helplessness in the face of the ruthless exercise of power. It was for this reason that he also wrote celebratory works entirely in line with official Soviet cultural policy that demanded that the arts be “communicative” and “of the people”. Inwardly, however, he remained someone completely different. His string quartets were among the works in which he expressed his true feelings, often in code. Heard in this way, Shostakovich’s music speaks to us uniquely as the conscience of Russian history of the 20th century.

The Seventh String Quartet in F sharp minor, not even a quarter of an hour in length, is the shortest of the composer’s quartets. Shostakovich it dedicated to his first wife Nina Vasilievna, whom he had abandoned 1954 quite insensitively. Shortly afterwards, she was hospitalised with intestinal cancer and died quickly. The composer remarried in 1956. His second wife Margarita Kainova was physically a younger copy of Nina, but that second marriage failed in 1959. Afterwards, Shostakovich’s thoughts returned to his first wife and their life together. To commemorate what would have been Nina’s fiftieth birthday had she lived, he composed his Seventh String Quartet in F sharp minor between May 1959 and March 1960. In this deeply intimate work with movements that follow one after the other without a pause in a continuous flow of music, he creates a musical portrait of his first wife, engages in dialogue with her, and expresses the ups and downs of their marital relations, about which much had been known to them alone. The legendary Beethoven Quartet (Dmitri Tsyganov, Vasily Shirinsky, Vadim Borisovsky, Sergei Shirinsky) gave the premiere on 15 May 1960 in Leningrad.

Dvořák composed his String Quartet No. 9 in D minor, Op. 34, in just twelve days of December 1877 (finishing it on 18 December). In the quartet’s melancholy lyricism, one observes echoes of the mood of his recently composed oratorio Stabat Mater. At age 36, Dvořák was working as the organist at St Adalbert’s Church in Prague, and he was a recipient of a state stipend awarded by a commission to which Johannes Brahms and Eduard Hanslick belonged. He felt encouraged by the recent successes of his compositions and by the warm reception of the premiere of his opera The Cunning Peasant at the Provisional Theatre. It was also at this time that he received the well-known letter from Brahms praising his Moravian Duets and recommending them for publication to Simrock in Berlin. Out of gratitude, Dvořák decided to dedicate his new quartet to Brahms, who in turn felt honoured, but very tactfully suggested that Dvořák subject the work to a revision to correct “certain defects”. Dvořák did so, saying that he had “seen the need to change much, suddenly finding a number of wrong notes, and replacing them with better ones” (15 October 1879).

The premiere was supposed to have been given by a quartet led by the famous violinist Joseph Joachim, but he had many other obligations. Having written politely several times to urge things to move along, Dvořák visited Joachim in person in October 1881 in Berlin. The violinist is said to have received him very cordially. “They were just then rehearsing quartets by Mendelssohn and Brahms, and that was very instructive. Joachim is never satisfied with anything. Just like with my violin concerto, which he has been keeping for revisions for a whole year. He wouldn’t have even remembered the matter had I not asked him about it. And he immediately began saying he wants to play my Quartet in D minor this year. Is that going to turn out just like the concerto?”, Dvořák wrote on 19 October 1881. In the end, Joachim premiered neither Dvořák’s Violin Concerto nor the Quartet in D minor. The quartet’s premiere was given in 1881, but instead by the Quartetto Heller (Giulio Heller, Alberto Castelli, Carlo Coronini, Carlo Piacezzi) on 14 December 1881, probably in the Austro-Hungarian port city Trieste.

This quartet is one of Dvořák’s few works that both begins and ends in a minor key. The first movement is in sonata form and exhibits mastery in the treatment of its themes and in its voice leading. The development section is rather brief, but the conclusion is brilliantly conceived. The second movement scherzo is a stylisation of a Czech polka; as its theme, he used the song “Náš pán nemůže” (Our lord cannot) from the Chod region. In the lyrical trio section in 3/4 time, a pastoral melody appears that is very similar to the lullaby “Hajej, můj andílku” (Lie down, my little angel). Rather than being carefree, the music tends towards melancholy. The slow third movement is a dreamily lyrical nocturne, constantly oscillating between D major and B minor. The exciting finale makes a restless, even gloomy impression. The Quartet in D minor is regarded as one of Dvořák’s mature works, and it has been recorded many times, but unfortunately for all of us, it is heard only sporadically on the concert stage.