The great Czech writer, Milan Kundera, wrote that Janáček’s music is a breathtakingly close confrontation between tenderness and brutality, madness and peacefulness; it condenses the whole of life, with its hell and its paradise. Confusingly Janáček’s First Quartet was inspired more by Tolstoy’s novella Kreutzer Sonata than by Beethoven’s music; it was a story about a desperate woman and a jealous and violent husband that did not end well. In contrast Borodin’s Second Quartet was dedicated to his wife after twenty years of an obviously happy marriage to judge by the justly famous Nocturne with its soaring cello melody. Borodin was also a distinguished Professor of Chemistry and was an ardent advocate of women’s rights and education.
