String Quartet No.2 “Intimate Letters” (1928)

Janácek’s “Intimate Letters” - the title is his own - is the supreme example of the erotic fantasy as high art, inspired by his (unrequited) love for a married woman less than half his age. The first movement, he told her, 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…” Although he was less explicit about the third movement, its gently rocking rhythm clearly identifies it as a lullaby. The finale, he told Kamila, “will finish with great longing and as if with its fulfilment.”

The Czech tradition of autobiographical chamber music is represented at its most intense by Janácek’s Second String Quartet, to which he himself attached the title “Intimate Letters.” The supreme example of the erotic fantasy as high art, it is about the composer’s obsessive (and unrequited) love for Kamila Stösslova, a married woman less than half his age.

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 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, it is the function of the movement to throw the two themes so passionately together in a variety of situations 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. He was less explicit about the inspiration of the Moderato third movement. But the gently rocking rhythm of the first theme clearly identifies it as a lullaby.

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 but consistently meeting with frustration, was evidently not so easy to secure. If it seems to prevail in a double-stopped pizzicato version of the masculine theme on second violin, frustration again intrudes and persists into the final bars.