LDV18

23 TALICH QUARTET How do you view the quartets of Dvořák in the history of the genre? What place would you assign to them? The quartets of Dvořák are among the pillars of the repertory of all Czech quartets. Theymean a lot to us; they are essential to us. If Smetanawas the founder of Czech national music, Dvořák went further, taking his inspiration from other sources: music from Moravia, Slovakia, Poland, Russia helped him to create a typically Slavonic sound-world, but still in his own language, so intimate, so delicate. When we play Dvořák, we know that we’re on home ground, in our own musical idiom. The melodies, the harmonic profusion, the magic of the rhythms have that irrepressibly Slavonic feel to them. I’m sure a quartet fromBudapest feels the same sense of familiarity when it plays Bartók. Dvořák wanted to break away from the Beethovenian model. Would you agree that the main way he succeeded in doing so was in giving his quartets a resolutely Czech tone? Dvořák was curious about all kinds of music, and of course he looked for sources of inspiration in the new German Romantic music, particularly in Wagner and Liszt. But in the late 1870s he reverted to a more Classical form, to Beethoven, but also to Schubert.