String Quartet No. 1, ‘Dignitas homini’ (1987)

Sylvie Bodorová is among the most productive Czech composers of the middle

generation.

She studied in Bratislava, Brno, where she

also taught, and in Prague and Italy where she worked with Donatoni.

Established at home and abroad with a number of important commissions, she

was composer in residence at the University of Cincinnati in the mid 1990s.

In 1996, owing to shared ideas on the role of contemporary music, Bodorová

entered into an association with three other prominent Czech composers,

Otmar Macha, Zdenek Lukas and Lubos Fiser, a group known as Quattro. Her

orchestral compositions include a number of concertos, including works for

organ, guitar and violin. She has also experimented with melodrama in

Struggle with the Angel for male voice and strings. Influences include

Hungarian folk music, Roma music, J.S. Bach and the Polish avant garde of

the 1960s. In building her personal style, an important guiding principle

has been the desire to balance a plausible contemporary accent with a clear

recognition of the value of extra-musical inspiration.

   In recent years Bodorová has come to the attention

of British audiences following performances of her Terezin Ghetto Requiem

for baritone and string quartet, commissioned by the Warwick Festival where

its première in 1998 made a profound impression. Her first string quartet,

titled ‘Dignitas homini’, is a single-movement work lasting slightly over

twelve minutes. Composed in 1987 in the fading days of the Communist regime,

the Quartet is a meditation on the interplay between true humanity and

artificial, inhuman constraint.

   A sense of opposing forces is apparent in the opening music which

contrasts modal, almost chorale-like writing with an abrupt rhythmic

fragment. A brusque development of this opening material gives way to more

contemplative music, the opening of which is marked by high string textures

and the gradual introduction of modally-inflected lines for the lower

instruments. This is interrupted by further development of the opening

ideas, before a return to a more meditative, distinctly lyrical tone at the

centre of the work. A more impassioned section, at times reminiscent of

Janác˘ek’s Katya Kabanova, eventually leads to the gentle and thoughtful

conclusion with aspiring, intertwining lines for the two violins.