Kreutzersonate

In the organizer's words:

2nd Chamber Concert / Leoš Janáček: "Mládi" (Youth) Suite for Wind Sextet / Bedřich Smetana: Piano Trio in G minor op. 15 / Leoš Janáček: String Quartet No. 1 in E minor "Kreutzer Sonata"

"A kind of memory of youth": this is how the almost seventy-year-old Leoš Janáček describes the recently completed wind sextet in a letter to his muse Kamila Stösslová. The suite "Mládi" (Youth) was composed in the summer of 1924 during a three-week stay in Janáček's birthplace of Hukvaldy, inspired by Janáček's urgent need to look back on his life on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

Bedřich Smetana's Piano Trio op. 20 also has autobiographical references. The dramatic work was written after a family catastrophe: in 1855, his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter Friederike died of scarlet fever. Her death brought a world crashing down on her parents. He wrote the Piano Trio in G minor after Friederike's death, and it became Smetana's first masterpiece in a larger form.

In 1803, Ludwig van Beethoven composed the "Kreutzer Sonata" for violin and piano; around 80 years later, the Russian poet Lev Tolstoy wrote a story in which this Beethoven sonata plays a key role, entitled "The Kreutzer Sonata". In 1923, the Czech composer Leoš Janáček wrote his first string quartet, deeply impressed by Tolstoy's story. This is why the string quartet bears the subtitle "Kreutzer Sonata". Great music from the Viennese classical period is thus first turned into a dramatic narrative and then into an early modern string quartet from the Czech Republic.