String Quartet No. 2 Intimate Letters

Janácek's 2nd String Quartet Intimate Letters is regarded as a highlight of the modern string quartet literature. It was written during the composer?s last year of life between 29 January and 19 February 1928 inspired by the ageing Janáèek's exceptional love for Kamila Stösslová. The Moravian Quartet devoted themselves to this impressive work; Janácek attended a total of three of their rehearsals in May and June 1928. This had several consequences including his abandoning his original idea of using a viola d'amore. After Janácek's unexpected death (12 August 1928) the uncertain genesis of the work became the greatest problem of the IntimateLetters : the surviving copies were not definitively authorised. The editors of this new edition have reverted to Janácek's autograph sketches as the main most reliable source and using these as a basis have reconstructed the work as it stood at the point of Janácek's death. The musical text taken from the Critical Complete Edition of the Works of Leo? Janácek (Vol. E/4) therefore contains clear differences in comparison with older editions.

for string quartet-Leo? Janá ek's passionate and inspiring emotions towards the 38-years-younger also married Kamila Stösslová produced more than 700 letters and his 2nd string quartet Intimate Letters. In the last two years of the composer's life beyond the ordinary letters they used an 'album' a little hand-written book into which he entered his impressions of meetings with Kamila. The album contains not only text entries but some short musical sketches between the lines. Sometimes few bars of a melody sometimes just a chord. These fragments did not become parts of any terminated work by him and had the role of actual ephemeral messages more than compositional drafts. ''In Weitere intimeBriefe I used some fragments of fragments found in Janá ek's album and put them in a musical context which is quite different from the original one or from Janá ek's own string quartet (which is otherwise one of my favourites of the genre). (Péter Tornyai) The work has been commissioned by the Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen: it was premiered on December 16 2019 by the Asasello Quartet in Neuss.