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Article Excerpt
This year we mark the 115th anniversary of the founding of the Czech Quartet, an ensemble that represented a breakthrough in the history of Czech chamber music. Of course, chamber music has a much longer history and its roots can be found both in court cappella and in active music making in noble families. The whole 19th century was then characterised by "home" or "salon" music making. It is therefore true to say that alongside choirs, chamber music was the most natural way of making music. A relative long and far from obvious path, however, leads from this tradition to the emergence of genuinely professional groups playing the most difficult pieces at public concerts. And it was in this context that the Czech Quartet represented a breakthrough.
It was in the year 1891 that the professor at the Prague Conservatory, Hanus Wihan, put together a kind of elite ensemble of conservatory students. Here all the founding members of a group that were to be known a few years later came together. They were the violinists Karel Hoffman (1872-1936) and Josef Suk senior (1874-1935), the viola player Oskar Nedbal (1874-1930) and the cellist Otto Berger (1873-1897). On the 2nd of November 1891 they then appeared together, still under the heading of the Czech-German Union for Chamber Music. This was the predecessor of the Czech Society for Chamber Music, formed in 1894, which became as it were the axis of the domestic tradition of chamber music and is today one of the longest-lived still functioning Czech musical institutions. The group did not appear under the name Czech Quartet until 1892, and in the January of the following year they had a triumphal success in Vienna. Instead of just the originally planned one concert on the 19th of January they finally gave four, and in a city where there existed several established and professionally functioning string quartets ... And what is even more incredible is that most of the members of the quartet were not yet twenty years old. Another good sign was that even their Czech programme, especially Bedrich Smetana's String quartet no. 1 in E minor, was a success as well.
The quartet did not remain the same in membership up to its end in 1933. We should note that the place of the outstanding cellist Otto Berger, who died very young of lung disease, was taken by the father founder of the ensemble at the conservatory, Hanus Wihan (1855-1920), who was a generation older. Another change came in 1906, when Oskar Nedbal, who later devoted himself more to conducting and composing, was replaced by the viola player Jiri Herold (1875-1934), up to that time first violin of his own string quartet. The last major change came when Hanus Wihan fell ill and was succeeded in 1914 by the cellist Ladislav Zelenka (1881-1957), himself originally a member of the excellent Sevcik-Lhotsky Quartet.
We name the individual members here because each was an exceptional figure in the history of musical performance, and also because some ensembles active today have been named after them. In relation to the concerts of the Czech Quartet we should mention three features that made them so important an ensemble: first, dozens of concert tours of Europe; second, the systematic building up of repertoire; and third, inspiration for other Czech ensembles. As early as the years 1895-7 the Czech Quartet was giving concerts first in Russia and Italy, then in France, and then on tours in England, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Later they added very successful tours to Switzerland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Turkey and also Spain and Portugal. The ensemble returned to all these countries repeatedly, each time with Czech and international repertoire. Before the First World War they travelled with major thematic cycles: a Beethoven Cycle, Dvorak Cycle, and cycle on the development of chamber music. Also important were the regular concerts given by the Czech Quartet under the aegis of the Czech Society for Chamber Music. In 1922 all the members became teachers at the Prague Conservatory; this was of great importance for the training of other musicians, but was also the reason why the next decade of the quartet's activity was not so dazzling as the pre-war era. Although by the end of its life the quartet was more a symbol than a modern ensemble, its preceding achievements are absolutely undeniable.
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In the field of chamber orchestras--and of course in many other areas--the key role was played by the best Czech conductor ever, the principal conductor of the Czech Philharmonic during the First Republic and the head of the National Theatre opera during the Second World War, Vaclav Talich. After the war when his bitter critic and enemy Zdenek Nejedly made it impossible for him to work in the opera or with orchestras, students at the conservatory founded the Czech Chamber Orchestra for him in 1945. The idea of devoting himself to subtle work with a smaller ensemble had in fact been maturing in Talich for some time before, and he soon achieved quite phenomenal success with the young players. Let us recall their performance at the Prague Spring in 1947 and the admiring words of the world-famous cellist Pierre Fournier, who declared that he had never encountered so good a chamber ensemble before anywhere. After the communist takeover in 1948 the authorities and above all the egregious Zdenek Nejedly banned Talich from all activities, the players naturally stood by him and the orchestra ceased to exist. But the impulse and the tradition lived on, and so the violinist and conductor Josef Vlach, himself one of Talich's pupils, revived the Czech Chamber Orchestra in 1957. The orchestra was later taken over by pupils of Josef Vlach, in the first rank Ondrej Kukal, and the ensemble has flourished under the same name to this day.
Talich was not the only symphonic conductor for whom conducting a chamber ensemble was of great importance. Here we should mention at least two ensembles that no longer exist today. The first was the Prague Chamber Soloists, directed in the mid-1960s by Vaclav Neumann, and the second, particularly remarkable, was the Chamber Harmony, with which Libor Pesek likewise gave concerts in the 1960s. The programmes of the latter group were trail-blazing, including new Czech music, what today are already classic works of 20th-century music, and works of classicism.
In the context of post-war history we must mention at least the four most important string quartets and two piano trios. Let us start with the longest lived quartet, the Smetana Quartet that was formed in 1945 and did not definitively end its concert activities until 1989. Most of the time it was composed of violinists Jiri Novak and Lubomir Kostecky, viola player Milan Skampa and cellist Antonin Kohout, but its founder members had included the violinist Jaroslav Rybensky, whose career was cut short by illness in 1955, and Vaclav Neumann, the conductor mentioned above, who played the viola in the quartet for the first two years. This is one of many instances of the way in which the Czech musical tradition is happily not sharply divided between chamber and symphonic music; it is frequent to encounter outstanding soloists who are also good chamber musicians and the best symphonic conductors know the value of experience with a chamber ensemble. Partly because of the stability of its membership the Smetana Quartet became a fixed point of reference in chamber music. Its broad-ranging discography covering all the basic works of chamber music can be considered truly representative in many respects. This quartet toured literally round the whole world and repeatedly returned...
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