Leoš Janáček - String Quartet No. 2 "Intimate Letters"

Composer: Leoš Janáček (3 July 1854 -- 12 August 1928)
Performers: The Janáček Quartet
Year of recording: 1966

String Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters", JW 7/13, written in 1928.

00:00 - I. Andante - Con moto - Allegro
06:16 - II. Adagio - Vivace
12:28 - III. Moderato - Andante - Adagio
18:20 - IV. Allegro - Andante - Adagio

"I consider the last decade of his life: his country independent, his music at last applauded, himself loved by a young woman," Milan Kundera wrote of Janáček, "his works become more and more bold, free, merry. A Picasso-like old age." The woman was Kamila Stösslová, wife of an antiques dealer encountered during the first World War, 38 years his junior. And while she may have loved him in a general way of being flattered, tolerant, amused, uncomprehending, his passion seems to have been largely unrequited (recent research has shown that Janáček's "love" was, in this case actually returned). Thus, a measure of teasing irritant stimulated Janáček's final years, provoking his last and greatest works. One catches glimpses of Kamila in the adulterous heroine of Kát'a Kabanová, the wily wisdom of the The Cunning Little Vixen, and the charismatic but distant allure of the deathless Emilia Marty, heroine of The Makropulos Case, while the virile directness of the Sinfonietta and the barbaric splendors of the Glagolitic Mass are immediate responses to a fascination becoming increasingly obsessive.

Though he may have drawn upon an early, now lost, piano trio, the completion of the String Quartet No. 1 -- inspired by The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy's tale of adultery and jealous murder given wing by music -- in just a little over a week (30 October - 7 November 1923) is testimony to an erotic frenzy. By the time of its composition, Janáček was writing to Kamila nearly every day, and in his last year kept a journal devoted to her. Nevertheless, he seems to have attempted to free himself from the tyranny she held over his imagination with the male-dominated From the House of the Dead -- which Kundera rated, with Berg's Wozzeck, as "the truest, the greatest opera of our dark century" -- though it is indicative that he interrupted that work's composition between 29 January and 19 February 1928, to give voice to the String Quartet No. 2, originally titled "Love Letters" but, for discretion's sake was re-christened "Intimate Letters."

Its four movements are a drama of volatile, fluctuating emotion, from the opening rush of excited expectation through brusque turns of impetuosity, questioning, and caressing tenderness.
The second movement is a passionate meditation veering from doubt to joy, while...
the third expands the mood of questioning to confront it with a passionate declaration.
The final movement is a rondo in which the returns of a frenzied dance enclose shifts from ecstasy to despair, ending with triumphant assertion.

Janáček died the following 12th August.