String Quartet No. 15 in D Minor, K. 421

Mozart’s String Quartet K. 421 forms the second of a set of six quartets dedicated to Franz Joseph Haydn in 1785. When Mozart moved permanently to Vienna in 1781, he was in his mid-twenties. Haydn, entering his fifties and by far the greater celebrity, was still living at the relatively remote residence of the Esterházy family; his arrangement allowed him to spend only short periods each year in Vienna, and he was feeling increasingly isolated from the cultural life of the city.

It was on one such visit by Haydn to the capital, sometime in 1783–84, that he and Mozart first had the chance to meet. The exact details of their encounter and ensuing friendship are ambiguous, particularly given the impulse of historians to romanticize their relationship with embellished anecdotes in retrospect. We have already this season heard the story of the two composers jostling for the viola part at a reading of Mozart’s String Quintets, much later, in 1790, although the story is tricky to verify. When Mozart composed these six quartets for Haydn in 1785, he prefaced them with a dedication, addressed warmly to “my dear friend Haydn” – however, he then proceeds to refer to their “friendship” no fewer than eight times in the short paragraph, suggesting (to me) a tone of playful exaggeration. Whatever the case, it is clear that they admired each other professionally, and perhaps even shared a degree of camaraderie that belied their difference in age.

Mozart’s decision to compose a set of quartets for the elder composer is fitting. For one, Haydn was well known for ‘founding’ the string quartet as a stable genre, and Haydn’s quartets served as models for Mozart’s own. Moreover, there are accounts of the two composers playing quartets together at one of Mozart’s “quartet parties” in Vienna, typically with Haydn on the violin, and Mozart on the viola. One final anecdote, for the road: when Mozart premiered some of the new quartets to their dedicatee, Mozart’s father, Leopold, was present. Haydn, gratified, said to the elder Mozart: “Before God, as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by reputation.”

String Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters”

The final decade or so of Janáček’s life – the period beginning shortly after the composition of his Violin Sonata, performed last week– was his most fruitful compositionally. Janáček had sustained a distinguished career as director of the Brno Conservatory since 1881; however, despite his prominence there, success in the Czech capital of Prague long escaped him, and Janáček lamented what he considered his merely provincial rank. Finally, in 1916, after years of refusal, the National Theater finally accepted his opera, Jenůfa; the performance received great acclaim, and at last, at age 62, Janáček was propelled to national renown.

However, an even more important spark to Janáček’s creativity came in 1917. That year, he met Kamila Stösslová, a chance encounter at his annual summer holiday retreat to the spa town of Luhačovice. He fell deeply in love; she became a source of inspiration for the protagonists of three next operas (Katya Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, and The Makropulos Affair), for a song cycle (The Diary of One Who Disappeared), and for several other instrumental works. Stösslová, twenty-six years old and married to a soldier, never really reciprocated Janáček’s obsessive affection. While he poured his heart into a prolific correspondence of over 700 letters over the ensuing decade, her somewhat disinterested replies only further fueled his ardor.

It is with reference to this correspondance that Janáček initially bestowed the subtitle “Love Letters” upon his second string quartet – only later to temper his enthusiasm and settle on the slightly more ambiguous, “Intimate Letters”. He described his plan in a letter to Stösslová: “A special instrument will particularly hold the whole thing together. It’s called the viola d’amore – the viola of love. Oh, how I’m looking forward to it! In that work I’ll always only be with you!” Even so, Janáček eventually resigned to substituting the viola d’amorefor the standard viola, which better suited the quartet texture. The work was completed six months before Janáček’s death, and premiered the month after he died.

String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor, “From My Life”

Czech composer Bedřich Smetana did not compose much chamber music. He is best remembered for his operas: he wrote eight, many of which were nationalist projects, renderings of Czech myths and history set to libretti in the Czech language. The so-called “father of Czech opera” did not write a chamber composition until his Piano Trio (1855), composed in his thirties, following the death of his first daughter. Indeed, Smetana’s few chamber music compositions are tethered to deeply personal moments in his life in a way that his larger-scale compositions are not.

It was over twenty years before Smetana wrote his second chamber work, the String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, subtitled, “Z mého života” (“From my life”). By this point, Smetana had gone profoundly deaf, and had resigned from his position as artistic director of the Czech Theater in Prague. After several disappointing consultations with doctors across Europe, Smetana and his family moved from Prague to the small village of Jabkenice, where his eldest daughter lived with her husband. Despite his deafness, in the following decade Smetana produced some of his most successful works, having devoted himself entirely to composition.

The String Quartet bears an explicitly autobiographical program. Smetana explained his choice of ensemble: “I wanted to depict in music the course of my life … the composition is almost only a private one and so purposely written for four instruments which, as in a small circle of friends, talk among themselves about what has oppressed me so significantly.” Furthermore, in an published introduction to the score, Smetana elaborates movement-by-movement on the relationship between the music and his life. The first movement sets the scene of Smetana’s love of art and romanticism. The second movement, a quasi polka, evokes the composer’s youth, with Smetana describing himself as an enthusiastic dancer. The third is a recollection of his early love for the girl who was to become his wife. The final movement begins as a celebration of Smetana’s success in his art, until, in his words “a terribly sounding high tone starts ringing as warning of my cruel fate, my present deafness that has forever taken away the happiness of hearing and deriving pleasure from the beauties of our art.”