Český spolek pro komorní hudbu • Julia Fischer Quartet

Perhaps never in music history have 22 bars been the topic of so much discussion as has been the case with the introduction to the first movement of the String Quartet in C major (No. 19, KV 465) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In it, the composer set out to go against usual tonal patterns, and the melodic lines of the individual instruments are combined daringly, without avoiding resulting dissonances and cross-relations. For this reason, the quartet has been given the nickname “Dissonance”. The work is the last of a set of six quartets composed from 1782 to 14 January 1785 and dedicated to Josef Haydn. At the time, the two musicians were playing chamber music together, with Haydn on the violin part and Mozart on the viola. Haydn heard the quartets at rehearsals on 15 January and 12 February, when the composer’s father Leopold Mozart was also present. It was then that Haydn expressed his admiration for Wolfgang, whom he regarded as the greatest composer known to him because of his refined taste and perfect compositional artistry.

Mozart’s genius is fully manifest in his String Quartet in C major. In the first movement, after the Adagio introduction discussed above, the Allegro arrives with an overall sonata ground plan. The themes are subjected to sophisticated variations and modulations leading to daring harmonic and structural consequences. The result of this sophisticated organisation of the material is unusual expressiveness. The songful second movement consists of two parts linked by a brief transition. The third movement Menuet is often called the most successful part of the whole series of quartets, and it is full of surprising, passionate accents. The brilliant finale – Allegro molto – is again designed in sonata form, and like the first movement, it thrills listeners with its sophisticated treatment of themes, leading to a magnificent conclusion.

It is worth remembering that one of the rare period copies of the work was preserved in Bohemia and is found in the Lobkowicz collections together with the other quartets from this set. Mozart dedicated the quartets to Josef Haydn on the occasion of their first publication on 1 September 1785. In a text written in Italian, the author symbolically sends his compositions out into the world like children and entrusts them to the protection of the great artist, who is also his friend. He asks that possible errors be viewed benevolently, and he hopes that their friendship, which he values highly, will continue. Haydn did, in fact, assume the role of a protector because he reacted to doubts caused by the introduction to the sixth quartet of the series by saying: “If Mozart wrote it, he must have wanted it like that.”

Dissonant chords appear in other works by Mozart (such as The Marriage of Figaro or his late works for solo piano). At the time when it was written and in the 19th century, the quartet was accepted without reservations only in exceptional cases. It tended to be misunderstood and rejected, like when Italian publishers sent the score back because of supposed errors or when the score was “corrected”. Real enthusiasm over this unusual introduction did not begin to appear until the early 20th century, when the figures who founded the “Second Viennese School” issued theoretical and philosophical proclamations on atonal music and drew attention to this and other examples from the past.

Leoš Janáček composed his most famous works during the first three decades of the 20th century. Although the composer followed contemporary trends in the arts until the end of his life, he never completely trusted atonality, but dissonance is a frequent element in his late works. To put it briefly, in Janáček’s conception of music theory, dissonance strengthens the effect of subsequent consonance and enhances in general the perception of a composition’s content and programmatic aspects by expressing disagreement, misfortune, or sorrowful emotion.

Janáček’s Second String Quartet, subtitled “Intimate Letters” (1928, originally titled “Love Letters”), is dedicated to his friend Kamila Stösslová (1891–1935). Meeting this woman brought more than ten years of illumination to end of the composer’s life, and the Second String Quartet, which was supposed to depict their relationship, is filled not only with lovely melodies, but also with dramatic, even disturbing passages. The original manuscript is dated from 29 January to 19 February 1928. In his last chamber composition, Janáček makes maximum use of technical and expressive resources with an emphasis on content. The number of musical motifs is sparing, but the composer’s treatment of them is extraordinarily variable. There are wide swings of the material’s metrical structure and tempo, the harmony makes frequent use of chords built on the interval of the fourth, and polyphony appears frequently. The sound level and strategic dynamic structure are supported by long trills and figurations. Janáček paid heightened attention to timbre (sul ponticello). He strongly desired to use the viola dʼamore in his composition because of the symbolism of the instrument’s name, but attempts to employ the instrument were not positively received during his lifetime. The musical structure of the individual movements approaches that of a free rondo. While the form is not schematic, it is consistent thanks to the composer’s intuition and inner conviction. The composition was first performed privately by the Moravian Quartet at Janáček’s house in Brno on 18 and 25 May and on 27 June 1928, when the composer was making his final revisions to the score. The Moravian Quartet also played the work’s public premiere in Brno on 7 September 1928 at a gathering held in the recently deceased composer’s memory. 

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.”