Program Notes
By Kurt Baldwin
String Quartet No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata”
Janacek’s psychologically complex and emotionally super-charged first quartet, the “Kreutzer Sonata”, was composed in just nine days in late 1923. His inspiration for the first quartet comes from the combination of his own complicated personal love life and his passion for Russian literature. Loosely based on the psychological drama of Leo Tolstoy’s 1889 novel “The Kreutzer Sonata”, Janacek melds the ingredients of love, desire, torment, and ultimately murder, to create a four movement emotional tour de force.
Tolstoy’s novel opens with strangers on a train discussing relationships between men and women, marriage and divorce. Eventually one of the strangers, a man called Pozdnyshev, reveals that he has murdered his wife and been acquitted. The rest of the novel depicts the story of his failing marriage, his slide into bitterness towards his wife, his suspicions of her adulterous affair with another man, how he murdered her in a jealous rage, and how he is now forced to live with the horrific reality of his own life. In Tolstoy’s story, Pozdnyshev’s wife, a pianist, and her lover, a violinist, rehearse and perform Beethoven’s Op.47 “Kreutzer” Violin Sonata together, hence the title of the novel.
Janacek’s own personal life also had a profound affect on the music in his first quartet. While on vacation with his wife in 1915, Janacek fell deeply in love with a woman named Kamila Stosslova, who was forty years his junior. Unfortunately for Janacek, she was happily married and never reciprocated his unyielding passion for her. She did, however, respond from time to time to his love letters, of which almost six hundred have survived; this correspondence became the inspiration for Janacek’s second quartet, “Intimate Letters”. He once wrote to Kamila: “You are there in my compositions, wherever there is pure emotion, sincerity, truth, ardent love…”
In Janacek’s “Kreutzer Sonata”, we experience Tolstoy’s novel through the eyes of Pozdnyshev’s wife. Janacek’s stance on the importance of women’s rights and the validity of relationships and marriage was profoundly more sympathetic than Tolstoy’s. About his string quartet, Janacek wrote: “I had in mind the pitiable woman who is maltreated, beaten and murdered…”. In the quartet, Janacek presents the vantage point of the woman, as he interprets it, and he attempts to depict her emotional and psychological torment as she struggles to find a path toward personal fulfillment. Janacek’s interpretation of Tolstoy affords us the opportunity for greater insight into the characters of the story, and creates the opportunity to even find beauty and serenity in an otherwise tragic scenario.
The first movement opens with the rhapsodic beckoning of the woman’s passionate desire for true love. Motivic fragments create a sense of emotional edginess and sectionalize the music into distinct gestures. A rhythmic ostinato, which we believe to be a depiction of the train carrying Tolstoy’s characters, serves as a foundation for the entire quartet.
The second movement features a polka-like dance rhythm built on a disjunct melodic figure. This odd mixture of rhythm and melody evokes a sense of distorted reality and propels the music unpredictably.
The third movement, which is almost operatic, opens with a canon whose thematic material is derived from the second subject from the first movement of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” violin sonata. The familiar rhythmic ostinato from the opening of the quartet returns, accompanied by both dissonances and soothing harmonies (perhaps Janacek’s depiction of the woman’s tormented situation).
The fourth movement draws its material from the preceding movements. The rhythmic ostinato from the opening again returns, driving the music to its psychological denouement, and the quartet abruptly concludes with a sense of resignation and emotional depletion.
String Quartet No.2 “Intimate Letters”
Janacek’s unlikely path to becoming one of Czechoslovakia’s most heralded composers of the early 20th century is a testimony to his professional tenacity and emotional strength. Having endured several early professional setbacks, namely the 1903 rejection of his now famous opera “Jenufa” by the National Theater in Prague, and the death of his second child that same year, Janacek endured to create his finest and most revolutionary works in the final decade of his life. Janacek’s earliest works were influenced by the traditionally romantic style of his friend and mentor, Antonin Dvořák, whom he met in 1874. But during the 1880’s Janáček began what would prove to be an extensive life long study of traditional Slovakian and Moravian folk music and developed a style of integrating the rhythm and contours of the Czech language and regional folk music into his own emerging compositional style. The distinctive sound of Janacek’s writing couples his love for folk music with his expanded view of tonality (unexpected notes in traditional chords), unusual use of modality, and unorthodox chordal spacing; the resulting sound is uniquely expressive.
The story behind Janacek’s Quartet No.2, “Intimate Letters”, is a fascinating tale of unrequited love and undying affection. In 1917, while vacationing with his wife, the sixty-three year old Janacek met and fell deeply in love with a beautiful young married woman forty years his junior, named Kamila Stosslova. What followed was an eleven-year platonic relationship in which Ms. Stosslova functioned as Janacek’s muse, helping to inspire him to write four operas, two string quartets, a mass, several orchestral works, and most notably, over 700 love letters to her, which fueled the creation of his Quartet No.2. He once wrote to her: “You are there in my compositions, wherever there is pure emotion, sincerity, truth, ardent love…” When Janacek began work on his second quartet, he wrote to Kamila, saying, “Now I’ve begun to write something nice. Our life will be in it. It will be called ‘Love Letters’. There have already been so many of those dear adventures of ours, haven’t there? They’ll be little fires in my soul and they’ll set it ablaze with the most beautiful melodies.” Janacek wrote his second string quartet, eventually changing the name to “Intimate Letters”, in just three weeks during the winter of 1928 and only heard one private performance; he died just five months later.
Throughout the quartet, Janacek follows a somewhat programmatic storyline that depicts four distinct chapters in his relationship with Kamila, and an array of supercharged emotions. The first movement is a depiction of Janacek meeting Kamila. The movement opens with an unsettling trill in the cello and a rhapsodic theme in the violins. The entrance of the viola, which represents the persona of Kamila throughout the piece, is shocking an eerie, as the theme is played with the bow on the bridge of the instrument. This theme recurs several times throughout the movement in various guises. As the movement progresses, Janacek heightens the emotional intensity by presenting soaring melodies that are accompanied by explosive undercurrents in the other instruments, which Janacek said represented Kamila’s disquieting arrival in his life. The beautiful voice of Kamila, heard in the viola, ushers the movement to its exultant end.
The second movement opens with the viola revealing a searching melody meant to represent, as Janacek described to Kamila, “yearning as there at your place, in that heaven of ours.” The movement is built almost entirely on this opening music, but varied masterfully by Janacek’s innovative orchestration of the instruments and unique tonal colors. Before closing the movement, Janacek briefly revisits the theme from opening of the first movement (a reminder of their first meeting!) and then concludes with a final robust statement of the main theme of the second movement.
The plaintive music of the third movement is meant to represent a “vision of Kamila”. The first violin leads the main theme in a duet with the second violin as the viola and cello play imitative rhythms and supply interesting harmonic colors. Here again, the viola figures prominently in the texture, first answering the violin and then providing an accompanying motive that might represent Kamila’s beating heart. The climax of the movement is obvious, as the first violin plays an irrepressible version of the opening duet theme against tolling chords and jagged arpeggios. The movement ends with two more appearances of Kamila’s beating heart and one final fortissimo outburst.
The final movement is a depiction of Janacek’s “fear” of Kamila, and the role she plays in his life. The music at the opening of the movement sounds like genuine folk music, but is Janacek creation. Throughout the movement, furious trills, sudden tempo changes and unforeseen mood swings fuel the “fear” element in the music. The one emotional respite is found in the middle of the movement as Janacek presents a fleeting memory of a dreamy waltz, and perhaps, his final idyllic moment with lovely Kamila. A shocking tremolo chord shatters the moment, perhaps representing Janacek’s moment of realization that his true love is ultimately unattainable. The concluding bars of the quartet are full of tumult and angst, as the first violin’s stunning trills drive the music to its fantastic finish.