This November it will have been ninety years since the composition of the first of the two string quartets by Leoš Janáček. The composition, which is today a natural part of the international quartet repertoire, has a subtitle which is understood only by a few at first sight: Motivated by the Kreutzer Sonata by L. N. Tolstoy. The name of the Belgian violin virtuoso Rodolphe Kreutzer lives today in the collection of great etudes, which must be mastered by every professional violinist, and then in the said sonata, which however was not written by him, but by Beethoven – he dedicated it to him. Another Kreutzer Sonata was written by Tolstoy, not as a sonata but as a more extensive novel: In that, Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata is the literary motif of one of the characters in a love triangle, a demonic violinist, who charms a young lady, the wife of the narrator, who eventually becomes her murderer.
Janáček wrote his first quartet as a 69-year-old (!); until then, he had not thought of a quartet but when he finally started to become world-famous, the Czech Quartet asked him for a composition which they could add to their Czech repertoire. Janáček felt flattered by this challenge; he started with the quartet immediately and wrote it in an incredible nine days (between 30 October and 7 November 1923). The theme, which was unusual for a composition of this kind (which string quartet is inspired by a foreign literary piece!), was perfectly thought out – he wrote two versions of an (unpreserved) piano trio for it in the years 1908–9. The relationship of this older composition to the new quartet, however, remains a mystery; Janáček himself said only that a quartet arose from a few ideas. The obvious assumption is that in his efforts to meet the request of the Czech Quartet as soon as possible he simply overworked and destroyed the trio – this is supported by the incredibly short period of composition; this is opposed by the fact that the music of the quartet corresponds to Janáček's musical thinking only in the 1920s, after Katya Kabanova, which he refers to with some major elements (main theme!). The fact that Janáček reached after the Tolstoy's famous novel again can be explained by the fact that its theme was heavily updated by Janáček's life situation in the 1920s.
Its issue – a love triangle – was actually experienced by Janáček himself at the time and it substantially interfered (and it allegedly did so with increasing intensity until his death in August 1928) with all his emotional, and to a large extent also civic, life and it fundamentally affected all his works of at least the last eleven years.
Tolstoy's theme opens up the issues experienced by Janáček himself – passionately and continuously – as the character of a foreign musician affecting the destiny of a married couple. Through his eyes, he also sees the story mainly as a tragedy of a loved and fatally loving woman, while Tolstoy presents it through the mouth of a jealous husband-penitent murderer as a criticism of society and its institutions. The heroine of the first quartet is simply one of Janáček's characters who pay the absolute price for their passion.
The listener and the performer do not need to know Tolstoy's novel if they want to understand the meaning of Janáček's song (which conductor of Liszt's symphonic Preludes actually knows Lamartinov's poem); Janáček's reference to it in the title of the composition simply opens (or rather disguises) his own life issues. However, from the very beginning, the music is suggestive, literally magical: the entry motif of the ascending quarter and the major second is Janáček's "life motif" known from a number of other compositions by Janáček; in the quartet it is the main musical idea which, on the one hand, acts as a fateful theme in both extreme parts, and on the other hand, passes through most other thematic material with its intervals – up to the quote of Dvořák's motif of death in two shrieking sounds of the violin which starts the renowned final influx of recurring thoughts.
Once Janáček finished the quartet, he gave the score to his copyist Sedláček to copy and make a dual breakdown of the parts; by the end of the year, he himself corrected and completed the materials, but before he sent them to the Czech Quartet (7 January 1924), he tried to play the composition to the recently constituted Moravian, back then still Kudláček's quartet. He invited the members of the quartet, and gave them the freshly copied parts and expected that they would verify his idea at the first attempt. The members of the starting quartet were not beginners as players – they were well-versed members of the opera orchestra and Kudláček was the orchestra's concert master; however, it is not enough for Janáček's music that each player sat behind their part and played it in an intonation and tempo concert with others, exactly for the reasons that no notation can capture it fully. It showed almost immediately and Janáček's impatience – despite the sincere efforts of all involved – grew rapidly; Kudláček averted the characteristic blast only by exerting all his diplomatic art: he explained to the composer that the players must first get to know their parts each alone and then become familiar with all of them (Janáček did not show them the score) – and promised to do so as soon as possible. Janáček agreed but ordered them for the very next morning! When they came to the conservatory at the appointed hour, they found him – cold and visibly anxious – pacing the pavement in Smetanova street; instead of a thank you, he responded to the greeting by saying So I am walking and I don't know whether I should tear it up or burn it!
The Czech Quartet read and rehearsed the composition as they pleased, it had it published as such in Hudební matice; the Moravians worked on it with Janáček already appeased – and both ensembles decided to perform it. Let it be said that in the 1930s and 1940s this effort was appreciated only by a small part of the audience, the triumphal arrival of Janáček's music onto the world's opera stage and concert halls did not begin to take place until the second half of the century, in parallel with a massive renascence of chamber and especially quartet music. At that time, Janáček's quartets were taken on by new ensembles – Janáček's quartet in Brno and Smetana's quartet in Prague – and right after them a myriad of quartets which made the former Czechoslovakia a quartet superpower. Janáček's quartets began to feel commonplace to the audience in large concert halls, they made their way to closed chamber societies more slowly; however, the Moravian musicians often had a special experience thanks to the secluded places where they went with Janáček's music for the first time ever.
San Giovanni a Piro is a small town in the very south of Campania over the Gulf of Policastro; from Naples you exit the motorway at Padula (none of us know the name anymore but during World War I the Italian branch of the Czechoslovak Legions formed in the local prison camp), you drive through a town called Buonabitacolo (Good Living) and through a mountain pass into a warm valley full of vineyards and gardens – on the opposite ridge, you will see something that would have been the subject of comprehensive conservation in our country for a long time. You can reach it by car; to park, however, you will need a wedge for each wheel, otherwise your car will run away. Only a few people know why it is named after St. John (his chapel apparently once stood there), and nobody knew what Piro with the unusual preposition meant. But they showed us where we would play: a Romanesque church on the steep slopes of the neighbouring mountain – on a small plateau, which ended in a vertical rock rib, the name Santa Maria della Rocca, on a rock, suited it. Last year, they celebrated its millennium. A path was carved out in the rock which rose to it from the village in a big arch; we went by foot, the church turned out to be more spacious than it seemed from a distance, and a few steps behind it, where the path finally ended, a magnificent bird's eye view of the straight line of the coast passing many kilometres to the clear fog, in which the white cap of Etna was more suspected than seen, suddenly opened up...
However, the look back brought up a real chill: a long procession of people in strict black festive clothes was climbing up the rocky path from the village. They are going to the sanctuary to listen to music as a ritual – and we have the love drama of our Janáček for them which would not be allowed inside a church by any priest in our country. They behaved like an inexperienced but attentive audience; already during Boccherini they learnt not to applaud between sentences. Between Janáček's, they were so quiet that we did not even dare to quietly retune. But it remained even after the final sentence, after the most amazing finale of all the quartet literature; so we stood up embarrassedly – they also got up and stood quietly. And when we summoned up the courage to look them in the eye, we saw that they were full of tears...
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