Suite for strings (1877)

1 Moderato 2Adagio 3 Andantino con moto 4 Presto 5 Adagio 6Andante

Janacek was not, unlike Mozart or Mendelssohn, a child prodigy. He made up for it in his prodigious old age, producing masterpieces well into his 70s, but no one could have predicted from the music he was writing in his teens, his 20s and even his 30s that he was to become one of the greatest of all Czech composers. Even so, his first orchestral work, the Suite for strings, was well received on its first performance in Brno in 1877 and – perhaps on the strength of one extraordinary movement – Janacek considered it worthy of publication nearly fifty years later, when he seems to have done little more than revise the movement headings. The generally rather better Idyll for strings, written at much the same time, remained out of sight until 1951.

Although Dvorak’s Serenade in E major was the basic model for both these early works for string orchestra, the Suite betrays the influence of Wagner’s Lohengrin not only in the expressive opening Moderato, originally entitled Prelude, but also in the intimately scored Adagio. The Andante con moto, though originally entitled Sarabande is actually more like a gracious gavotte. Originally and appropriately described as a Scherzo, the Presto effectively offsets lively outer sections with a melodious middle section. What is entirely out of the ordinary in the work is the Adagio fifth movement, originally entitled Air. A deeply elegiac inspiration, it begins in the dark at the bottom of the string-orchestra range and emerges with a melody of almost Mahlerian eloquence to be developed by a grieving solo cello until the darkness descends again at the end. After that, the young composer was evidently unable to provide a conventionally cheerful finale and added a thoughtful Andante with a curiously abrupt ending.