Dvořák / Janáček / Suk: Works for Violin and Piano

CHAN 10827 – CZECH MUSIC

Dvořák / Janáček / Suk: Works for Violin and Piano

Dvořák: Romantic Pieces, Op. 75, B 150

Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904) wrote four pieces for violin and piano in January 1887, finishing them on the 25th of the month. They were an arrangement of hisMiniatures (Drobnosti), Op. 75a, B 149 for two violins and viola, which he had completed on 18January. This original trio in C had been written for a chemistry student, Josef Kruis, who was a sub-tenant in the house of Dvořák’s mother-in-law in Žitná ulice, central Prague, to play with his violin teacher, Jan Pelikán, whom Dvořák knew as a fellow member of the National Theatre Orchestra, as well as with Dvořák himself, on the viola.When Dvořák realised that the student could not manage his violin part, he wrote a simpler trio in four movements with the titlesCavatina, Capriccio, Romance, and Elegy (Ballad). Pleased with these new pieces, he reworked them for violin and piano,removing the movement titles, and replacing them with just tempo markings.(Dvořák’s original tempo marking for the second piece had beenPoco allegro and for the third, Allegro.)He called the resulting work Romantic Pieces (Romantické kusy). Differences from the original trio version were minor – harmonic in the first piece and the addition of four extra bars to close the third. The violin is given the trio’s first violin part, while the second violin and viola parts are distributed respectively to the right and left hands of the piano part.

The first public performance was given in Prague on 30March 1887 at a concert of the arts societies Umělecká besedaand Měsťanská beseda although there had been a private performance on 27 January, also by the Umělecká beseda, in Prague. The violinist was Karel Ondříček, then leader of the National Theatre Orchestra and the younger brother of the famous violinist František Ondříček, with Dvořák himself playing the piano part. The work was published in Berlin by Simrock later that year, such being its popularity that it has remained in print ever since. The original trio version was not published until the 1940s.

Dvořák: Nocturne in B, Op. 40, B 48a

In January 1875 Dvořák produced a Nocturne (Nokturno) in B major, B 47 for string orchestra, which may or may not be one of the Three Nocturnes, B 31which he is known to have written in 1872 and of which only the string parts of the second, ‘May Night’(Májová noc),survive. In 1875 Dvořák would arrange the Nocturne for violin and piano, as well as for piano duet, revising these versions finally between 1882 and 1883. That this Nocturne is unlikely to belong to the 1872 set is suggested by the fact that it is a reworking and lengthening of a discarded movement, Andante religioso, fromString Quartet No. 4 in E minor, B 19of 1870, whichDvořákalsoadaptedas the first of two slow movements written for the String Quintet in G, Op. 77, B 49, the final version of which was completed in March 1875 but without this movement. A printed copy of the violin and piano version of the Nocturne was found in Turnov, carrying a later inscription by Dvořák:

Svému milému přitelí Aloisi Göblovi vSychrově... (To my dear friend Alois Göbl at Sychrov...)

Janáček:Violin Sonata, JW VII/ 7

In the comparatively limited chamber music output ofLeoš Janáček (1854 – 1928), the Violin Sonataholds a place of importance, being the first work he wrote in his truly settled, highly individual style, which began to emerge in the opera Jenůfa(Její pastorkyňa) in 1904. Now we clearly hear his originality in so successfully building whole movements from melodic fragments, giving each piece a cohesive inner strength from these highly charged motifs. Here is a truly unique voice in Western music, creating intense drama and spirituality from the condensation of his musical ideas. Such an achievement was not without struggle and a long gestation period. On 21.January 1922 Janáček wrote to the musicologist Otakar Nebuška:

I wrote the Violin Sonata in 1914 at the beginning of the war when we were expecting the Russians in Moravia.

While the work was probably largely completed in its final basic form by the summer of that year, it is one of a very few compositions upon which he worked over many years – in this case, seven. (The operas Jenůfa and The Cunning Little Vixen[Příhody Lišky Bystroušky] took him nine years each).

Of the works for violin and piano that Janáček is known to have written, one Romance out of seven composed in 1879 survives, as does a Dumka from the following year, the year of his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory. He had attempted two violin sonatas before this one, one of which he started in Leipzig in January 1880; the other – which may have used material from the first – was written in Vienna in April and May of that year for Franz Krenn, in whose class he had enrolled at the Conservatory. This second attempt was performed in Brno on 6January 1881 but the subsequent fate of the two works is unknown.

The one mature surviving Sonata passed through several forms and reordering of the movements between 1914 and the final version of 1922. In 1915 Janáček completely revised the first movement; later, the second movement,Adagio, became the finale of the final version, replaced by the ‘Ballada’which had been the original third movement. This was in turn replaced by the Allegrettowhich in its original form, marked Con motolike the first movement, had been intended for the finale. That concluding movement was initially replaced by anAllegro, subsequently discarded,before the decision to place the Adagio last was taken.It seems probable that all this was caused by reservations that had been voiced about the original form of the Sonata by Jaroslav Kocián, the distinguished violinist whom Janáček had invited to give the first performance of the work in Prague.Further revisions were made some months before the eventual first performance and during final rehearsals. The work was first published in Prague in 1922.

The circumstances in which Janáček wrote this Violin Sonata are those of the worries and uncertainties of the state of Europe in the period leading up to the outbreak of the Great War. Although he made some changes in 1921, Janáček claimed that the original ideas stemmed from the impending but unrealised invasion of his native Moravia by Russian troops. As a confirmed Russophile at this period (later a certain disillusionment set in) he held such an event in excited anticipation. Of the heroic element in the work he wrote:

In Pohádka for ’cello and piano a gleam of sharp steel flashed through my mind; in the Sonata for violin and piano of 1914 I almost heard its clanging in my troubled mind.

Much of the work carries pre-echoes of Janáček’s later, Russian-based operaKáťa Kabanová(derived fromAlexander Ostrovsky’s play Groza), for example several motifs in the first movement. The second movement, ‘Ballad’, is the one which received least revision; it was originally a separate piece not intended for the Sonata. It contains the most extended theme of the whole work, one which is in the style of the melodies from Valachia. The scherzo-like third movement also shows up motivic links with the later opera. The last movement contrasts a dumka-like figure in the piano with an aggressive rhythmic motive on the violin, which is said to represent the Russian gunfire in the distance. According to Karel Šolc, a pianist who had played the work, Janáček said that the high piano tremolos at the end should be played in a very agitated manner, as they represented the Russian army entering Hungary.

The first performance took place in Brno on 24April 1922 at a concert of the Moravian Composers’ Club, held in the Museum of Applied Arts; the violinist was František Kudláček, leader of the Moravian String Quartet, while the pianist was Janáček’s pupil Jaroslav Kvapil; it is thought that Janáček was present. The first British performance came during the composer’s visit to London in 1926 when, on 6May, Adila Fachiri and Fanny Davies played it before him in an all-Janáček programme at the Wigmore Hall.

Janáček:Allegro

The Allegro was written in 1916 as a substitute for the original last movement of the Violin Sonata, but it was itself replaced by the Adagiothat had originally occupied the place of the second movement.In the final version it had been discarded from the work altogether(vide supra). It is a movement of only some three and a half minutes’ duration but of a character mostly different from the rest of the Sonata.Had it stood, it could have altered the final impression of the whole work.

The first known public performance of the Allegro movement came on 21July 1981 in Bayreuth, and was given by Jan Krejčí with the pianist Helmut Bieler. The piece was first published in 1988 in Prague and Kassel, along with all the material related to the Sonata,edited by Jan Krejčí and Alena Němcová.

Janáček:Romance, JW VII/ 3

While he was a student at the Leipzig Conservatory, his teacher Oscar Paul set Janáček the task of writing three Romances for violin and piano. Between 27October and 17November 1879 he wrote seven such pieces, of which the work recorded here is the sixth – although described by Janáček as the fourth – and the only one to have survived. The autograph, discovered in 1930 at the Teachers’ Institute in Brno, is dated 16November and we know from letters to his future wife, Zdenka Schulzová, that Janáček completed it at 4.30 in the afternoon. Paulliked the six-minute piece but expressed the verdict that it was ‘too massive’ for a Romance. Nothing is known of performances before that given by Rudolf Kratochvíl and Vincenc Šťastný in Ivančice on 5July 1904.

Janáček:Dumka, JW VII/ 4

We cannot be so certain as to the exact origin of the Dumka but it dates from the time which Janáček spent as a student in Leipzig and Vienna, in 1879 – 80. Unlike the Romance, Janáček does not mention this piece as such in his letters to Zdenka but some Czech musicologists have suggested that it could also be one of the missing Romances, retitled by the composer. Of similar length to that of the Romance, it takes the melancholic mood of the Ukrainian duma, a lament, and includes a typically contrasting central section,although not one as marked as we hear later in Dvořák’s Dumky. The autograph of the violin part was discovered by the distinguished Janáček scholar Alena Němcová in Brno,although the work had been published, in 1929, in Prague. The first known public performance was given by one A. Sobotka, with Janáček at the piano, on 8 March 1885 in a concert for the benefit of the Brno Organ School, organised by the Association for the Promotion of Church Music in Moravia.

Suk: Four Pieces, Op. 17, JSkat 42

Josef Suk was born in Křečovice, in Bohemia, on 4 January 1874, the son of the village schoolmaster, organist, and choirmaster. Like the majority of Bohemian and Moravian musicians, he studied at the Prague Conservatory, where his main instrument was the violin. In 1888 he turned his hand to serious composition, eventually studying with Dvořák who was later to become his father-in-law. In addition to building an increasingly significant career as a composer, he became the second violin of the famous České (Bohemian) String Quartet and was an accomplished pianist. With Zdeněk Fibich, Otakar Ostrčil, Vítězslav Novák, and Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Suk became part of that important group of Czech composers which built upon the national foundations of Smetana and Dvořák. Later he taught at the Prague Conservatory, where for a while he numbered Martinů among his pupils, but composition, mainly in the orchestral and instrumental fields, occupied much of his time, even when he was on tour with the Quartet, affording solace for the loss of both his father-in-law, in 1904, and young wife, Otilka, in 1905, right up until his death at Benešov, near Prague, on 29May 1935.

Suk wrote the Four Pieces (Čtyři skladby), Op. 17for violin and piano in Křečovice and Prague between 19April and 5May 1900, while on a break at home duringa tour with the České Quartet in Western Europe and Russia, so no doubt some of the music was conceived ‘on the hoof’. These relatively short pieces with a rather self-effacing title are considered to be something of a turning point in his compositional output– widening his range of mood, expression, and harmonic treatment both within each piece and among pieces – as well as in his handling of both instruments. The music passes from the gentle but rather serious and dark dumka qualities of the opening piece, with its contrasting mood of agitation – it was originally titled Dumka–, through the restless and disturbedAppassionato which gives a hint of the fine Fantasie in G minor for violin and orchestra, Op.24,to come some three years later. The lyrical beauty, yet meditative melancholy, of the third piece then stands in contrast to the jolly high spirits of the concluding scherzando‘Burleska’. The Four Pieces were given their first performance on 19January 1901,in a concert of the Czech Association for Chamber Musicin the Rudolfinum, Prague, by their dedicatee, Karel Hoffmann, leader of the České Quartet, with the composer at the piano.