Czech Chamber Music Society • Czech Nonet

Nonet No. 2, H 374

Bohuslav Martinů

A century later, the Czech Nonet was established as an ensemble with permanent members at the Prague Conservatoire at the suggestion of the violinist Emil Leichner, Snr. (1902–1973). Their first official concert took place on 17 January 1924 in Prague, then for four years the ensemble members worked in Lithuania as teachers at the newly founded conservatoire in Klaipėda. After returning to their homeland, overcoming a crisis, and undergoing turnover of personnel, the ensemble acquired a wealth of experience on the concert stage, inspiring numerous Czech and foreign composers to write new works specifically for their instrumentation. The ensemble quickly built an international reputation, greatly helping to enrich the repertoire for this unusual combination of instruments.

The Nonet No. 2 by Bohuslav Martinů was commissioned by the Czech Nonet and was written during the last year of the composer’s life. Martinů had already composed a work for nine instruments in 1924 (Nonet No. 1), but for a combination of strings, winds, and piano, and only a torso has been preserved. The ensemble’s founder, the violinist Emil Leichner, Snr., asked the composer to write a work specifically for the Czech Nonet in 1948, but nothing came of the request. Leichner did not give up, and he approached Martinů again ten years later, when the ensemble was preparing a programme to celebrate the 35th anniversary of its founding. Martinů was recuperating from an operation he had undergone in November 1958, and although he was finishing the opera The Greek Passion, he accepted the commission. The Nonet No. 2 is dated “January 1959”, and the composer sent it to the ensemble in the first week of February. The Czech Nonet scheduled the work’s premiere for its appearance at the Salzburg Festival, at which the ensemble was to be a participant in July 1959. Martinů took a sceptical view of the announcement of the venue for the premiere; in a letter to Miloš Šafránek dated May of that year, he expressed concern that in Salzburg, only dodecaphony can succeed, and whatever does not conform with avant-garde trends is ignored. Before departing for Austria, the Czech Nonet performed the work in June in Polička and also in Prague for a few invited guests. The official premiere in Salzburg took place on 27 July 1959, and it was well received despite the composer’s apprehensions. The Czech premiere of the Nonet had been scheduled for 15 October of that year, but the composer’s death on 28 August hastened the performance, so the Nonet was heard a month earlier in honour of Martinů’s memory. According to Harry Halbreich, author of a Martinů biography and of a catalogue of the composer’s works, in the composition, “like in late Mozart, expression of deep feeling and the wisdom of a lifetime are concealed under the façade of a light divertimento and smiling purity of expression. It is the composer’s ‘most Czech’ work not only because it was intended for Czech musicians, but also because with deep nostalgia, it expresses the unfulfilled desire of the terminally ill musician in exile for his homeland.” In the words of the composer’s biographer Jiří Mihule, “there is no chamber work by Martinů that contains throughout such wealth in the communication of emotion.”

Preludia taneczne (Dance Preludes)

Witold Lutosławski

Witold Lutosławski received instruction in mathematics and the natural sciences while simultaneously studying violin, piano, and music theory. His artistic career was postponed by the Second World War, during which the young musician and his colleague Andrzej Panufnik earned money by performing in cafés as a piano duo. He was already at work on his First Symphony by 1941, which was finished in 1947 and was premiered the following year by Grzegorz Fitelberg in Katowice. Like in Czechoslovakia and other countries of the Eastern Bloc, the aesthetics of Socialist Realism were imposed after the war, and the symphony was harshly criticised based on those criteria. The composer then found himself at a stylistic crossroads, which he overcame with his Concerto for Orchestra (1954). Thereafter, he went his own way. His Preludia taneczne (Dance Preludes) date from that same year. Written at the request of the publisher Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne in Krakow, which was planning an edition of didactic works for violin and piano, Lutosławski instead chose to write for the clarinet. The work, which employs folklore elements from northern Poland in the composer’s stylisation, does not quote any specific songs. It stands out from other didactic music and has become a welcome part of the concert repertoire. The first performance of the Dance Preludes was given on 15 February 1955 by the Polish performers Ludwik Kurkiewicz and Sergiusz Nadgryzowski. In 1955, Lutosławski arranged the composition for clarinet, harp, piano, strings, and percussion (first performed in 1963 by Benjamin Britten with the English Chamber Orchestra). Another arrangement was made in 1959 for the Czech Nonet, which performed it in Warsaw that November. 

Nonet, Op. 147

Josef Bohuslav Foerster

Josef Bohuslav Foerster was one of the first composers to write a work specifically for the Czech Nonet. HIs Nonet was premiered on 19 March 1932 in the Small Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna together with the Nonet, Op. 40, by Alois Hába and the Nonet by Louis Spohr. A Viennese critic gave the following apt description: “The Czech Nonet is a collective of musicians who embody their country’s musical, rhythmic, lively temperament, […] the atmosphere of Bohemia’s forests and meadows makes itself felt in this composition. Foerster’s nonet consists of variations on two themes and makes the overall impression of a rhapsody. A charming, gracefully joyous dance motif takes us to the composer’s homeland, then that is replaced by a yearning, elegiac motif that sings with such romantic warmth that one might speak of a Czech Robert Schumann. We are receiving the spirit of Dvořák from Foerster’s hands. [...] We listen to Foerster’s composition with sheer joy, and we are sorry when the music is over.” The Prague premiere of the Nonet took place on 22 November 1932 at a concert presented by the Society for Modern Chamber Music at the Municipal House’s Smetana Hall. The programme also featured music by Alois Hába, the Lithuanian composer Jeronimas Kačinskas (a pupil of Hába and a friend of Emil Leichner), the Croatian composer Josef (Josip) Mandić, who had settled in Prague, and Miroslav Ponc, another pupil of Hába. On a programme consisting of music by representatives of radical compositional currents, the composition by Josef Bohuslav Foerster represented a work by an authority of Czech music who was respected by the younger generation and who claimed the legacy of Bedřich Smetana.