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.
