Arete String Quartet

Undoubtedly, the reason is the way Shakespeare’s words cross over into moral and political commentary with a very specific meaning at a time when people were denied freedom and oppressed. The verses “Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry, / As, to behold desert a beggar born, / And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity, / And purest faith unhappily forsworn, / And gilded honour shamefully misplac’d, […] / And simple truth miscall’d simplicity, / And art made tongue-tied by authority, […],” are quite clearly a criticism of the totalitarian regime, which the composer could not express in any way other than through music at the beginning of the 1980s, understandably.

Janáček’s first quartet was inspired by the novella The Kreutzer Sonata by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. The story is a psychological study of pathological jealousy that leads to murder; its trigger is Beethoven’s Sonata for Violin in A major Op. 47, a piece dedicated to violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. In the mind of Tolstoy’s male protagonist the sonata stirs up the obsessive notion that his wife is having an affair with her violinist companion. Another association with Beethoven is the motivic core of the first movement’s main theme, a “speech melody” reminiscent of the well-known question from the final movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F major Op. 135: “Muß es sein?” (“Must it be?”). Tolstoy’s tragic tale of a marital triangle found full expression in Janáček’s terse little motifs and dramatic outbursts, in his neurotic tremolo and his swiftly changing dynamics and expressive devices. The first performance, attended by Janáček himself, was given by the Czech Quartet (Karel Hoffmann, Josef Suk, Jiří Herold and Ladislav Zelenka) on 17 October 1924 in the Mozarteum Hall in Prague at a concert organised by the Society for Modern Music. Three days later the same ensemble presented the work at a public concert in the Smetana Hall of Municipal House, with another concert in Brno on 13 December. The following year, on 4 September 1925, Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1 represented Czech music at a festival held by the International Society for Contemporary Music in Venice; the work was performed on this occasion by the Zika Quartet.

It is as if it were in his chamber music works that Franck was best able to balance his own original, innovate musical language with his fondness for counterpoint and traditional forms. Franck’s only string quartet was the result of detailed study of the late works of Ludwig van Beethoven, in which he found inspiration especially for the handling of themes and motifs. While the composer made many revisions to the first movement (Poco lento. Allegro), which Franck’s pupil Vincent d’Indy called the best instrumental music written since the days of Beethoven’s late quartets, and was constantly changing it, the second movement (Scherzo: Vivace) was finished in just ten days. Franck wrote the poetic Larghetto in his favourite key, B major, and in the Finale: Allegro molto, following the example of Beethoven, he masterfully developed and summarised the material of all of the previous movements with emphasis on the main theme of the first movement. In this way, he created a work that turns towards the past while also speaking in an entirely new, original musical language. It is for this reason that Franck is rightly called a father of more modern French music.