String Quartet No. 1 (Janáček)
String quartet by Leoš Janáček / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Leoš Janáček wrote two string quartets.
String Quartet No. 1, called "The Kreutzer Sonata", was written quickly between 13 and 28 October 1923 at a time of great creative concentration, and then revised, in the autograph, from 30 October to 7 November 1923. It was inspired by Leo Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata, which had itself been inspired by Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, known as the "Kreutzer" after its dedicatee, Rodolphe Kreutzer. The premiere was given on 17 October 1924 by the Czech Quartet at a concert of the Spolek pro moderní hudbu (Contemporary Music Society) at the Mozarteum in Prague. A pocket score was published in April 1925 by Hudební matice.
Janáček had used the Tolstoy novella earlier as well, in 1908–1909, when it inspired him to compose a Piano Trio in three movements. This is lost but surviving fragments of it suggest similarities to the quartet, and reconstructions as a piano trio have been made and performed.