Written in White Heat

Leoš Janáček’s String Quartets

Gavin Plumley

For many composers, the string quartet has provided a kind of musical confessional. Within the comparative privacy of a score shared between four musicians, figures from Beethoven to Berg have explored key personal and philosophical issues. For Leoš Janáček, however, the intensely private and the palpably dramatic went hand in hand, not least during his last, unbridled decade of creativity. And it was during those last years of his life that Janáček not only wrote his finest operas but also his two surviving contributions to the quartet literature.

There are, however, earlier examples that did not make the cut. Although born in Hukvaldy and educated at first in Brno, his adopted hometown, the Moravian composer also studied at the conservatories of Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna. There, he would have been steeped in traditional compositional techniques, not least the analysis of Viennese Classical string quartets and their replication. While few composers would choose to preserve such derivative student works, there is strong evidence for an original quartet by Janáček from May–June 1880, written while he was in Vienna.

Studying Beethoven’s quartets in the library, he worked quickly on three of his own movements. Sadly, however, he failed the qualifying round of the Conservatory’s annual composition competition and made no reference to the work again. And yet there remains a link to that putative creation in Janáček’s First (official) String Quartet, in that Beethoven is also a presence, albeit interpreted through a literary lens.

In October 1923, while travelling to Prague, Janáček wrote to his beleaguered wife Zdenka in Brno that the esteemed Czech Quartet, including Antonín Dvořák’s son-in-law, the violinist Josef Suk, had requested a new work. A staggering two weeks later, Janáček had completed a draft, which he then revised and signed off on November 7. It was, even for Janáček, a remarkably speedy achievement, though the timescale reveals that some of the material was already in the composer’s mind.

In creating his new work for the Czech Quartet, Janáček was returning to the site of a previous composition, a piano trio from 1908–9 that had the same programmatic basis, namely Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata. Originally published in 1889—Janáček owned an edition from 1900—the story concerns the nature of marriage and a debate as to whether it should be a union of arrangement or of love. The cynical, misogynist Pozdnyshev views it as the former, though he comes to learn the error of his ways when, having wed and had five children, his and his wife’s relationship turns sour.

She takes a liking to a violinist named Troukhatchevsky and, together, the pair perform Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major Op. 47, known as the “Kreutzer” Sonata after its dedicatee. Seemingly impervious to emotional concerns, Pozdnyshev nonetheless acknowledges that music has unspoken powers and, returning from a trip, he discovers Troukhatchevsky and his wife together and stabs her. He is later acquitted of the murder, due to the apparently adulterous nature of her and the violinist’s relationship, yet Pozdnyshev decides to return to the railway, where his story began, to beg forgiveness from fellow passengers.

Janáček, who was an avid pan-Slavist, with an extensive library of Russian volumes, was captivated by the story. In the jaded relationship of Pozdnyshev and his wife, he no doubt saw something of his own miserable marriage, particularly after the death of his and Zdenka’s two children. And the attraction of music as a conduit for passion was understandable enough to someone of Janáček’s occupation and disposition. Responding to Tolstoy’s novella, the composer translated it back into music, including a quotation from Beethoven’s eponymous Sonata. While there is some debate as to how extensively Janáček used the material from his original Trio— the work has since been lost—there is no doubt that its spirit was similar to that of the surviving Quartet. As such, its score provides a kind of opera manqué on the subject of Tolstoy’s story, albeit more as an evocation of mood than a slavish, blow-by-blow account.

The Quartet opens with a pining appeal, recalling the language of Janáček’s similarly Russian-inspired Káťa Kabanová of 1921. Such plangent music is often trailed, both in the first movement and throughout, by more nervous motifs, offering a sense of foreboding and speaking of the tense atmosphere within the Pozdnyshev household. The prominence of the violin voice within the texture likewise recalls the instrument of Beethoven’s Sonata, though the musical narrative here is often broken, typified as much by hiatus and sudden changes in tempo as it is by yearning lyricism.

A juxtaposition of urgency and lethargy likewise characterizes much of the second movement, a fractured minuet and trio, in which ominous silences and scratching tremolos add to the unease. The third movement, whose theme has the most striking resemblance to the original Beethoven, is equally conflicted, with its amorous lyricism constantly undermined. It ends on a note of remorse, as does the finale: full of muted variations on the yearning motif with which this sorry story began.

By the time that Janáček’s First String Quartet saw the light of day, performed by the Czech Quartet at the Mozarteum in Prague on October 17, 1924, the composer had at least found hope of a happier domestic situation within his own life. Seven years earlier, aged 63, he had fallen in love with a woman half his age, called Kamila Stösslová. The pair had met in the Moravian spa town of Luhačovice, a place to which Janáček often escaped. He had first visited the town following his daughter Olga’s death in 1903. In spite of the “warm little spark of rapprochement” with his wife Zdenka, Janáček sought solace in the person of Camilla Urválková, prompting him to write his most patently autobiographical opera: Osud

The relationship with Urválková failed, but Janáček decided not to return to his wife anyway but move on to an affair with another operatic figure, the soprano Gabriela Horvátová, cast as the

All this feeling as if it were piled up on itself—as if it had lifted you and me from the earth, as if everything around was joyfully, longingly hovering; and in that feverish mood these Intimate Letters were born.

—Leoš Janáček to Kamila Stösslová, March 8, 1928

Kostelnička in the first Prague production of Jenůfa in 1916. As a result, the Janáčeks decided to separate legally in January 1917, although they continued to share the same house in Brno. Six months later, Janáček was on holiday again in Luhačovice and there met Kamila Stösslová, who was married to a Písek antiques dealer, though that did not stop the composer. Indeed, the fact that she was married only inspired Janáček further, as he explained in a letter of July 16, 1917: “Accept these few roses as a token of my unbounded esteem for you. You are so lovely in character and appearance that in your company one’s spirits are lifted; you breathe warm-heartedness, you look on the world with such kindness that one wants to do only good and pleasant things for you in return. You will not believe how glad I am that I have met you. Happy you! All the more painfully I feel my own desolation and bitter fate.”

With this, the composer embarked on what would become a vast correspondence. Over the next 11 years, he would chart both his feelings for Stösslová and the development of various musical projects, sometimes writing several letters a day—Stösslová’s responses were largely destroyed—until his last missive, sent from a cottage in the village of his birth, on July 26, 1928, just days before Stösslová joined him in Hukvaldy.

Her visit came five months after Janáček had completed what is arguably his most passionate epistle: the Second String Quartet. It was intended as both a tribute to their friendship and a romanticized prospectus for the life he imagined they could or might have led. And rather than Tolstoy, Janáček himself provided the program. Writing to Stösslová, he named the new Quartet “Love Letters,” but eventually settled on the subtitle of “Intimate Letters.” The idea of furtive communication, witnessed in the near thousand letters the pair exchanged over a decade, was central to Janáček’s conception. Instead of a traditional viola, he wanted the third instrument within the line-up to be a viola d’amore, already a potent musical symbol in Káťa Kabanová, The Makropulos Case and his Sinfonietta. Eventually, as with those scores, the instrument proved impractical, but the sense of private messages delivered by musical means remained in a score that, like the First String Quartet, was completed in just three weeks.

Each movement or “letter” represents a landmark in Janáček’s (real or imagined) relationship with Stösslová. “I think that it will sound delightful,” he wrote. “There have already been so many of those dear adventures of ours, haven’t there? They’ll be little fires in my soul and they’ll set it ablaze with the most beautiful melodies.” The second movement, he said, “will flare up in the Luhačovice heat,” in music that recalls the balmy, estival atmosphere of the spa town where they met in 1917.

About the Moderato, the third movement, Janáček wrote, “today I was successful with that movement ‘When the earth trembled.’ It will be the best. Ah, that was an amazingly beautiful time! And it was true. Only the most beautiful melodies can find a place in it. I just hope I can bring off the last movement.” Describing that finale later in February 1928, he said that it “doesn’t sound fearful about my nice little weasel, but with a great longing—and as if it were fulfilled. I’m curious about what effect it will have.”

As in the First String Quartet, the language of “Intimate Letters” is often intensely lyrical and full of aching harmonies, though it too has a coarse grain. Such contrasts engender commotion and even the viola’s folk-like melody in the second movement is undermined by a nervous trill (another recurrent motif). The third movement imitates a dance form, but has a surprisingly petulant streak, indicative of the doubts and introspection that threaten the cheerful impressions of the last movement.

Although Janáček said that it should sound as if his desires for Kamila had been satisfied, consummated even, the music surely indicates that the hoped-for embrace would always remain just out of reach. For a composer who was born just six kilometers away and two years before Freud, it is hardly surprising that Janáček’s music would inhabit a dream world. And yet, as Milan Kundera once wrote about his musical compatriot, the essence of Janáček’s imagination lies in “capturing unknown, never expressed emotions, and capturing them in all their immediacy.”

Gavin Plumley is a writer and broadcaster specializing in the music and culture of Central Europe. His writing appears in newspapers and magazines as well as concert and opera programs worldwide. His first book, A Home for All Seasons, was published in June 2022.