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Leos Janáček composed his First String Quartet in 1923, a year before Schulhoff
wrote his.
Janáček was not as precocious as Schulhoff: it was not until the last decade of his
life that he achieved fame and international recognition as a composer. This was
largely due to the triumph in Prague of his opera
Jenufa
. Henceforth he experienced
an amazing creative upsurge that gave rise to works including
Katia Kabanova
, the
two String Quartets,
The Cunning LittleVixen
, the
Glagolitic Mass
and
From the House
of the Dead
– a constant flow of masterpieces that was encouraged by his long
awaited success, but also by an amorous passion for Kamila Stösslová that was to
last until the end of his days.
Two years after the first performance of
Katia Kabanova
, the Bohemian Quartet
asked Janacek to write a string quartet for them. He had not yet seriously
approached the genre, or at least, not since his years of training in Vienna, around
1880. It was his memories of Tolstoy’s famous short novel The
Kreutzer Sonata
that
inspired the composition; fifteen years earlier, very impressed by this work, he had
written a Piano Trio entitled ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ (now lost).
14 JANÁČEK / SCHULHOFF