Kreutzersonate
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 E Minor »The Kreutzer Sonata«
Alter Saal
»A kind of memory of youth« – That was how Leoš Janáček, then aged 70, described his newly 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 birth town of Hukvaldy, inspired by a strong wish to take inventory of his life on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
Bedřich Smetana's piano trio op. 20 also has autobiographical references. This dramatic work was composed after a family catastrophe: In 1855, his daughter Friederike died of scarlet fever at only four and a half years old, leaving her parents devastated. Smetana wrote the piano trio in G minor after Friederike's death, which became his first masterpiece of larger scale.
Ludwig van Beethoven composed the »Kreutzer Sonata« for violin and piano in 1803; 80 years later, Russian poet Leo Tolstoy would write a tale for which this sonata of Beethoven played a key role. It was entitled: »The Kreutzer Sonata«. Deeply impressed by Tolstoy's tale, Czech composer Leoš Janáček drafted his first string quartet in 1923. In tribute to that, his string quartet has the subtitle »The Kreutzer Sonata«. Great music of the First Viennese School turned into a dramatic tale, turned into a Czech string quartet of early Modernity.