Some people are just late bloomers.
Take the Czech master, Leoš Janáček. Janáček started out as a fairly unremarkable, albeit wholly capable composer, essentially following in the footsteps of his pioneering countrymen Bedřich Smetana and Antonin Dvořák. But then two things happened: (1) he discovered a way to distill his folkloric interests into a uniquely personal, modern idiom; and (2) he fell in love.
Yet another overnight success decades in the making, Janáček began churning out masterpiece after masterpiece at an age when most respectable folk were teetering into retirement. His prolific Indian summer is attributable, in part, to his sublimated passion for Kamila Stösslová. Stösslová was a married woman some 38 years the composer’s junior.
On the next “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll hear a string quartet written under the influence of his muse.
The composer’s ardent feelings for Stösslová could be said to color both of his surviving quartets. At the time he undertook the first of these, Janáček was 69. (He composed the second, in the year of his death, at the age of 74.) The String Quartet No. 1 was written at white heat in October of 1923. Janáček revised it the following month.
Subtitled “Kreutzer Sonata,” the work was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s novella – which in turn takes its name from Beethoven’s famous violin sonata, dedicated to Rodolphe Kreutzer. Tolstoy’s story is a study in ungoverned passions – a triangle (real or imagined) between the first-person narrator, his wife (a pianist), and her perceived lover, a violinist, with whom she plays Beethoven’s sonata. The husband returns from a trip, finds the two dining together, and stabs his wife in a fit of jealous rage.
Janáček made no attempt to follow a detailed program in the writing of his quartet. Instead, the music is reflective of the characters’ emotional and psychological states. In particular, he sympathizes with the wife.
The music is heightened by certain “special effects” – harmonics, ostinatos, trills, pizzicatos, and muted passages, with the musicians employing a technique known as “sul ponticello,” playing on the bridges of their instruments, to achieve a kind of eerie quality. In the third movement, there is a veiled allusion to the slow movement of Beethoven’s sonata.
We’ll hear it performed at the 2009 Marlboro Music Festival, by violinists Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu and Arnold Steinhardt, violist Yura Lee, and cellist Susan Babini.
Then Antonin Dvořák demonstrates how it used to be done, with his String Sextet in A major, Op. 48. Dvorak’s sextet was composed largely in May of 1878, making it contemporaneous with his first set of “Slavonic Dances.” In fact, the work’s two inner movements bear overtly Czech nationalist titles: Dumka and Furiant.
In music, dumka (literally, “thought”) signifies a kind of melancholy introspection. A furiant is a rapid and fiery Czech dance.
The sextet holds an important place in Dvořák’s development. Thanks to a government subsidy, Dvořák was able to concentrate solely on composition, and he was determined to confirm his worth.
The work was performed at the 2017 Marlboro Music Festival, by violinists Stephen Tavani and Scott St. John, violists Rosalind Ventris and Rebecca Albers, and cellists Alice Yoo and Judith Serkin.
Happy birthday, Leoš Janáček. We’ll be picking up the Czech this week, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
“Kreutzer Sonata,” René François Xavier Prinet (1901)
