String Quartet No.2 (Intimate Letters)

Janacek, on the other hand, had not the slightest inhibition about investing his innermost feelings in his art. Indeed, he could scarcely do otherwise. His Second String Quartet, to which he himself attached the “Intimate Letters” title, is about his obsessive (and unrequited) love for Kamila Stösslova, a married woman less than half his age. An extraordinarily passionate work, not just for a man in his seventies but for any composer, it is the supreme example of the erotic fantasy as high art. The first movement, he told Kamila, is based on “my impression when I saw you for the first time.” Of the second movement he said, “Today I wrote in musical tones my sweetest desire. I struggle with it. It prevails. You are giving birth. What would be the destiny of that new-born son?” Although he was less explicit about the third movement, the gently rocking rhythm of the first theme clearly identifies it as a lullaby. The finale, he told Kamila, “will finish with great longing and as if with its fulfilment.”

Luhacovice was good for Janacek’s rheumatism and, attractively situated on the southern slopes of the Beskydy Mountains, it was a place with an atmosphere he found particularly conducive to work. In the summer months, moreover, the spa amenities of the town brought to it what he called “an annual convention of beautiful women.” It was at Luhacovice in 1917 that he met his “honorary wife” Kamila Stösslova and, fourteen years earlier, Kamila Urvalkova, who is intimately associated with his opera Osud. This other Kamila, the wife of a forester, he described as “one of the most beautiful of women. Her voice was like that of the viola d’amore.”

Writing to Kamila Stösslova in February 1928 - she was then 36 and he was more than twice as old - to tell her that he was writing a new quartet inspired by his love for her, he said that “the whole work will be held together by a special instrument: it is called viola d’amore - the viola of love.” Whether Kamila the antique dealer’s wife also had a voice like a viola d’amore, or whether that was an attribute peculiar to Kamila the forester’s wife, the ancient instrument - the sound of which colours the love scenes in Kata Kabanova and The Makropulos Case - clearly had erotic significance for the composer. As it turned out, a viola d’amore in a string quartet was not a practical proposition and, after rehearsing the new score with the Moravian Quartet, he was persuaded to confide in the modern viola instead. Even so, and even though he changed the title of the work from Love Letters to what he considered the more discreet Intimate Letters, Janacek’s Second String Quartet remains the supreme example of the erotic fantasy as high art.

The first movement, Janacek told Kamila Stösslova, is based on “my impression when I saw you for the first time.” There are two main themes: the first is introduced in virile double-stopped harmonies and vigorously syncopated rhythms on the violins over an excited trill on the cello; the other (not unlike that associated with the seductive gypsy girl in Diary of one who Disappeared) is delicately drawn on the bridge of the viola in imitation of the sound of the viola d’amore. Although at this stage they represent a direct masculine-feminine polarity, they do have certain melodic and rhythmic features in common. Indeed, it is the function of the first movement to throw the two themes so passionately together in a variety of situations - developing them in different metres, widely contrasted tempi, and endlessly changing colours - that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish one from the other.

The second movement is perhaps the most inspired (and perhaps the most eccentric) of the four. “Today I wrote in musical tones my sweetest desire,” Janacek told Kamila. “I struggle with it. It prevails. You are giving birth. What would be the destiny of that new-born son?” In structural terms, the main theme is a version of one of the more lyrical feminine variants in the first movement, affectionately introduced by viola in the opening bars. In emotional terms, the main theme is a quite new variant which emerges - very quietly and slowly on first violin and viola, accompanied by curious little whole-tone whispers on second violin - after the first theme has passed through a mounting crisis and returned to its original form. The new one, which is immediately transformed into a playful dance, takes its place with the rest of the family of themes and stays there in one form or another almost to the end of the movement.

Janacek was less explicit about the inspiration of the third movement. But the gently rocking rhythm of the first theme clearly identifies it as a lullaby, which, together with its extreme contrasts in atmosphere, recalls something he said to Kamila five months after he had completed the work and only a few weeks before he died: “cries of joy but too, strangely enough, cries of horror after the lullaby.” The tender melody in the middle section, introduced by the violins over an ostinato on viola, derives from the masculine theme, but so does the violent material which regularly confronts it.

The last movement, Janacek told Kamila, “will finish with great longing and as if with its fulfilment.” But fulfilment, pursued here in the episodes of a rondo, was evidently not so easy to secure. Even before the folk-dance rondo theme gives way for the first time, the second violin intrudes with an expression of frustration in a theme distorted by trills on every note. That feeling refuses to go away even when, in the next episode, the same instrument introduces in double-stopped pizzicato a broadly fulfilled version of the masculine theme. Fulfilment seems to prevail but frustration intrudes again and, indeed, persists into the final bars. As Janacek had said to Kamila a few months earlier, “Between you and me there is only a world of beauty and all is nothing but fantasy.”