CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Škampa String Quartet
Iva Bittová

Zankel Hall
Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 6:30 PM in Zankel Hall: Škampa Quartet in conversation with Michael Beckerman, Professor of Music, New York University.

Škampa Quartet
·· Pavel Fischer, Violin
·· Jana Lukášová, Violin
·· Radim Sedmidubský, Viola
·· Lukáš Polák, Cello
Iva Bittová, Violin/Vocals

JANÁČEK String Quartet No. 1, "Kreutzer Sonata"
JANÁČEK Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs (transcribed for voice and string quartet by Vladimír Godár, arranged by Iva Bittová and Škampa Quartet)
IVA BITTOVÁ Solo improvisation
PAVEL FISCHER Morava
IVA BITTOVÁ Hopáhop Tálita
IVA BITTOVÁ Rain
IVA BITTOVÁ Two Movements from Quatuor pour Cora

Encore:
VLADIMÍR GODÁR Luspávanky (Lullabies)

Program Notes:

by Derek Katz

LEOŠ JANÁÈEK String Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata”
Born July 3, 1954 in Hukvaldy, Moravia; died August 12, 1928, in Moravská Ostrava, Czech Republic.

Composed in 1923, the String Quartet No. 1 received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 16, 1958 in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) with the Janáèek Quartet; Jirí Trávnícek and Adolf Sýkora, violins; Jirí Kratochvíl, viola; and Karel Krafka, cello.

The canonical classical genres seem to have held little appeal for Janáèek, who—despite his substantial output of dramatic, vocal, and instrumental music—left neither a symphony nor a concerto (and only the torso of a piano sonata). This seems to reflect both a lack of interest in exploring form for form’s sake, and a near inability to compose in the absence of biographical or programmatic stimuli. Typically, his most notable forays into the classical forms, the two string quartets, have strong personal and literary associations.

The immediate impetus to compose his first string quartet came from the Czech Quartet, whom Janáèek had met in Prague in October of 1923. The Czech Quartet, whose members included Josef Suk, was not only the leading chamber ensemble in the Czech Republic, but one of the most successful touring quartets in Europe at the time. Although Janáèek was eager to begin work on The Makropulos Case, when the quartet asked him “to write something for them” it was an offer that he felt he couldn’t refuse. Janáèek wrote the quartet exceptionally quickly, finishing a complete draft barely two weeks after receiving the informal commission.

The first string quartet has the subtitle “after Tolstoy’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata.’” The quartet, though, was not the first of Janáèek’s compositions to be prompted by Tolstoy’s sordid tale of jealously, murder, and chamber music. Janáèek had already composed a piano trio in 1908, intended for a concert belatedly celebrating the author’s 80th birthday; the trio was both inspired by Tostoy’s novella and, like the later quartet, included a musical quotation from Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata.

Never published and no longer extant, the trio‘s exact relationship with the string quartet is impossible to ascertain. It is tempting to assume that Janáèek was capable of composing the quartet so rapidly because he was merely rearranging previously composed music, and Janáèek did tell Max Brod that “the quartet arose from some ideas” from the trio; but the surviving sketches suggest that any musical ideas that may have been shared between the two pieces were reworked so thoroughly as to be unrecognizable.

The connection between the quartet and Tolstoy’s 1889 novella is hardly clearer than that between the quartet and the piano trio. The novella is an impassioned polemic, arguing that sexual love is a pernicous social force, a point clarified in an epilogue published a year later advocating abstinence as a moral goal. The novella is narrated by a man who has killed his wife in a jealous rage after finding her with a violinist, with whom she had previously performed Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata. Janáèek may have been attracted to the central role that music plays in the story, or to Tolstoy’s description of music as something that is capable of transporting the listener into the condition of the composer’s soul; but he would presumably have had little use for the protagonist’s assertion that music is a terrible and dangerous thing that would best be kept under state control. Nor, based on Janáèek’s own affairs of both body and soul, can it be possible that he sympathized with Tolstoy’s moral proscriptions. Instead, counterintuitively, he seems to have viewed the quartet as a musical defense of the murdered wife, writing to the muse and would-be mistress of his last decade, Kamila Stösslová, that he was thinking of “a poor woman, tormented, beaten, battered to death.”

The quartet follows the standard four-movement outline familiar from classical and romantic models, at least in terms of character. The first movement is an embryonic sonata-allegro. The opening group alternates between a slow sighing motive that looks back to the moaning of the Volga in Kát’a Kabanová and anticipates the climactic release of the eagle in From the House of the Dead. The second theme, announced by an abrupt pizzicato chord, is flowing and lyrical, over stubborn ostinatos in the lower strings. After a vestigial development, all of this material returns. In the second movement, the viola and first violin repeatedly attempt to establish a jaunty polka (perhaps under the influence of the polkas in Smetana’s quartets), an effort which is consistently undermined by the intrusion of other types of music, including glassy tremolos played over the bridge and a swelling five-note figure over more ostinatos.

The third movement is the one place where Beethoven, Tolstoy, and Janáèek obviously meet. The first violin and cello open the movement with a canon, playing a theme derived from the first movement of Beethoven’s sonata (the movement discussed most extensively by Tolstoy). The final movement is the one in which emotion seems to most fully take precedence over form. After a reference to the very opening of the quartet, the first violin plays a solo marked “like in tears.” Later passages are marked “like a lament” and “desperate.” The final section of the movement has the lower strings playing a chords “festively, like an organ.”

LEOŠ JANÁÈEK Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs, Part I
Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs was composed between 1892 and 1901; this arrangement receives its Carnegie Hall premiere tonight.

Although Béla Bartók is probably the best-known composer-ethnographer of the 20th century, in many ways Leoš Janáèek anticipated Bartók’s activities about two decades earlier. Janáèek’s interest in Moravian folk song arose at a time of personal and musical difficulties. Upon his 1880 return to Brno from his prematurely abandoned and unsatisfactory composition studies at the Vienna Conservatory, Janáèek was pressed for time and money, and unsure of his artistic future. His activities as founder and director of the Brno Organ School, as conductor of a choral society, and (beginning in 1884) as editor of a music journal left little time for composition; neither his Dvoøák-influenced works of the 1870s nor his studies in Leipzig and Vienna seemed to offer a way forward.

Janáèek’s involvement with folk music was spurred by the scholar and folksong collector František Bartoš, with whom Janáèek worked at the Brno Teachers’ Institute. By 1885, Janáèek was returning to his native region in northern Moravia to collect folksongs and dances. These folk dances became the basis for a number of Janáèek’s orchestral works from the late 1880s and early 1890s. Janáèek’s first folksong collection was the Bouquet of Moravian folksongs, published with Bartoš in 1890. The Bouquet was very popular, selling out its first edition and requiring a reprint in 1892 and and an enlarged edition in 1901. Janáèek and Bartoš’s most substantial collaboration was the massive Moravian folksongs newly collected, (originally intended to be completed for the 1895 Prague Ethnographic Exhibition, and finally published in 1901), containing 2,057 songs and dances. Janáèek’s dual roles as collector and composer merged around 1892, when he began providing piano accompaniments for the songs that he and Bartoš had compiled. The first volume of this collection that would eventually be known as Moravian folk poetry in songs was published around 1892, containing 15 songs. Janáèek seems to have steadily continued to arrange songs for about the next decade, publishing a second volume of 38 songs in 1901.

Although generalizing about regional differences in folk music is perilous, Moravian folk music is rhythmically freer, and more partial to minor modes, or modal scales, than Bohemian folk music. As Milan Kundera wrote in The Joke, “Moravian songs are, in terms of tonality, unimaginably varied. Their musical thought is mysterious. They’ll begin in minor and end in major, hesitate among different keys.”

Like a good early modernist, Janáèek mostly collected songs from regions that were musically provocative, and challenged the harmonic and melodic conventions of art music. Janáèek’s settings in Moravian folk poetry in songs are all strophic, with the same music repeated for each verse of poetry. The accompaniments frequently imitate the sounds of folk instruments, especially the rapid repeated notes and darting scales of the cimbalom. Vladimír Godár’s arrangement of Moravian folk poetry in songs does much to remove the songs from the salon and return them to their folk roots. The string quartet plays as well as sings, making the songs an example of communal music making. Also, the string quartet can easily mimic the string band of two violins and cello that is a fixture of the regions around the Tatras Mountains, from Poland to Transylvania, including northern Moravia. Many of Janáèek’s accompaniments are based on pulsing off-beats, derived from this type of string band.

Copyright © 2008 Carnegie Hall Corporation

—Derek Katz is a highly regarded authority on Czech music and a specialist in the operas of Leos Janáèek. He is currently Assistant Professor at Lawrence University.