Leoš Janáček - String Quartet No. 1 "Kreutzer Sonata"

Composer: Leoš Janáček (3 July 1854 -- 12 August 1928) Performers: The Janáček Quartet Year of recording: 1966 String Quartet No. 1, Kreutzer Sonata , JW 7/8, written in 1923. 00:00 - I. Adagio - Con moto 04:47 - II. Con moto 08:58 - III. Con moto - Vivo - Andante 12:51 - IV. Con moto - (Adagio) - Più mosso The composition was inspired by Leo Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata. (The novella was in turn inspired by Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, known as the Kreutzer Sonata from the name of its dedicatee, Rodolphe Kreutzer.) Janáček also used the Tolstoy novel in 1908-1909 when it inspired him to compose a Piano Trio in three movements, now lost. Surviving fragments of the Trio suggest that it was quite similar to the surviving quartet, and reconstructions as a piano trio have been performed. "I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, just like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata", Janáček confided in one of his letters to his young friend Kamila Stösslová. In the music of the quartet is depicted psychological drama containing moments of conflict as well as emotional outbursts, passionate work rush towards catharsis and to final climax. The thematic idea central to the whole work is very similar to the theme of the composer's Danube Symphony (1923--25). Using a principle of thematic montage, the quartet almost abandons the fields of traditional harmony, homophony and counterpoint and instead makes free with the varied sonic factors typical of Janáček, including his characteristic modal inflections. The première of the Quartet was given on 17 October 1924 by the Czech Quartet at a concert of the 'Spolek pro moderní hudbu' (Contemporary Music Society) at the Mozarteum in Prague. A pocket score of the work was published in April 1925 by Hudební matice.